How To Fix Love Never Dies, And A Bit About The Series I'm Working On Now!
I forgot to finish the title yesterday, so here's how to fix the sequel to the Phantom of the Opera.
This is a followup to the post that was too long for the last one, so here’s just the links and we’ll get going. There’s actually well over 200 books between the first two links - looks like plenty got added!
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Now, time to finish the post from yesterday:
What They Missed
First off, the introduction of Gustave to the narrative was a terrible misstep. (The actual kid who played Gustave was great, I mean in the story. Just to be clear.)
In the original Phantom of the Opera, while Raoul was boring, he was also unmistakably an honestly aggrieved third corner in the plot’s love triangle. Love Never Dies seeks to make him the villain by highlighting his sins of drunkenness and gambling addiction, but completely glosses over Christine’s infidelity, her deceit over Gustave’s paternity, and heaven knows what else she’s hidden in the closet over the last ten years if those are the things we do know about.
Mommy, how come I don’t look anything like Daddy and have an uncontrollable urge to live underground?
Gustave’s presence and lineage undermine the character of Christine in ways the original never could have. Indeed, if this Christine was the first Christine Daaé we'd been introduced to, she’d have been a forgotten footnote in musical theater history—because nobody would have liked this version of her.
Instead of a sweet, earnest ingénue with hidden talents unearthed by a reclusive and sinful musical genius, now she’s a famous and still-beautiful star of the opera, married to a loser… and she still can’t get over her fling with a casual murderer. It’s impossible to empathize or sympathize with the Christine in Love Never Dies, and I sure hope you're not identifying with her.
So… That Song?
Beyond all that—as I mentioned—the song The Beauty Underneath doesn’t fit the relationship dynamic between Gustave and the Phantom. The song is riddled with calls to passion, sensations, taste, and feel and—ugh. Wrong vibe.
The original version was so byzantine that it actually required a rewrite, which did make it better from a musical perspective. (The red album cover features the new version, while the Ben Lewis movie version features the old one.) But it didn’t address the fundamental problems introduced by the narrative or the character. And since the story was essentially based on the 1999 novel The Phantom of Manhattan, which Webber essentially commissioned to use as source material for Love Never Dies, there was no getting around the addition of the kid.
It Didn’t Have to Be This Way
Fixing the narrative would have been simple. It made enough sense that the Phantom would possibly have fled Europe after everything that happened in The Phantom of the Opera. It didn't make perfect sense—because that's a long way to go in the 19th century—but at least it was plausible. And it was certainly plausible that Madame Giry and Meg would go with him if Madame Giry had been skimming money along with the Phantom all this time. After all, why abandon your scabby meal ticket even if he did kill a couple of stagehands?
And once they found a measure of success in the New World, why wouldn’t the Phantom—for old times’ sake, or other mysterious reasons—invite Christine to perform for him again?
Look, I know we’ve kinda grown apart and everything, but, I’m gonna need that child support that’s been piling up for like a decade.
But instead of portraying Christine as a wayward lover, Raoul as a hopeless and abusive loser, and Meg as a burned-out strumpet… why not try something else?
Shift The Beauty Underneath to early on in the show rather than being the de facto climax of Act I. The Phantom, with Christine having been married off to Raoul and now a continent and an ocean away, has at length accepted that she’s gone, and has somewhat reluctantly turned his attentions—both creative and somewhat romantic—to the somewhat less talented Meg.
Now, rather than being a duet between the Phantom and the son he’s just met, it’s a duet between the Phantom and Meg, who’s been both horrified and fascinated by Christine’s stories of the Phantom back in the opera house in Paris. But she knew back then that Christine was the real target of his affections. But now…?
Yeah, I was just kidding about you ‘disappearing’, sorry about that.
Rather than being gross and off-putting in several dimensions when the song was between the Phantom and his son, you can drop the song into a Meg/Phantom dynamic without changing a single word of the lyrics other than “he” to “she.” Suddenly, it’s kind of hot. Gustave’s stomach-churning shouts of “Yes!” suddenly once again reflect the supernatural seductive powers the Phantom wielded in the original—when it’s Meg belting them out instead of a ten-year-old boy.
Unlike Gustave, Meg is a character who could taste and feel the sensuality of a masked killer, being drawn into the story that she’d only ever listened to from the outside. When the Phantom asks if she’s “felt your senses surge and surrendered to the urge,” it suddenly fits a new dynamic of the Phantom at last entertaining the idea of moving on past Christine.
But Meg’s shriek at finally seeing the Phantom’s face up close shatters that—just when Christine finds her way into the Phantom’s life again, and old feelings resurface, leading to tragedy.
Suddenly…
Suddenly, the catty bitchiness of Dear Old Friends fits. Meg was repulsed by the Phantom’s physical appearance, but his aura and his talent kept her still drawn to him somehow—and Christine’s inadvertent resurfacing in the Phantom’s affairs threatens that nascent discovery Meg has made, one made fragile by her terror in the moment.
Suddenly, Meg’s angst at having devoted years to the Phantom’s service in the New World, slowly coming to an understanding of the Phantom only to have that relationship upstaged the moment Christine threatens to unhinge those fragile and tenuous bonds she’s presently working herself through accepting right now—suddenly that makes sense.
Suddenly, her desperation about becoming an aging, single, bitter showgirl in the middle of a street carnival has context where it didn’t before. If she doesn’t find love after all these years—even with the reclusive and alienated Phantom—when will it come?
Trust me, I’m stable, alright?
Now you don’t need to make Christine a cheat, or Raoul a villain, or even lean on the negative aspects of Meg’s character “development.” Christine can be the innocent and loyal wife to the lover she chose at the end of both acts of the original—once in All I Ask of You, where she pledged her love to Raoul, and once in Final Lair (“Pitiful creature of darkness…”), where she sacrificed her dignity to show empathy to a tormented soul who had hurt her and her childhood sweetheart.
Raoul can carry on being the devoted would-be hero, this time older and wiser than the doe-eyed Vicomte de Chagny of the first, and more capable of being the hero Christine needs in her vulnerable moments.
Meg’s downfall now has immediate context in the narrative, with real stakes tied to her relationships with the characters, rather than simply being explained by Madame Giry’s dull and forgettable exposition dumps.
There Wasn’t Any Need
There wasn’t any need to so fundamentally change every single character, or introduce new ones of any consequence. There wasn’t any need to wreck what audiences liked about the previous iterations of the main cast. And there certainly wasn’t any need for the weird dynamic between Gustave and the Phantom, that’s for sure.
All of this would have been completely avoidable. People don’t really like cheats and vagabonds. They sure don’t like negligent fathers. And they don’t like radical off-screen shifts in character that only lamely get explained by telling rather than showing.
Phantom of the Opera is still being played in multiple languages all over the world—there’s even a Polish version coming here in a few months. (Upiór w Operze! And no, that’s not a typo!) Love Never Dies remains a cautionary tale—but as a stage show, it’s finished. Even some of Webber’s lesser works continue to find theatres willing to host them.
But Love Never Dies… well, it didn’t have any love, I suppose. And thankfully, it died.
The New Series!
Dirk Dinsmore (he prefers the surname ‘Starcrash’, but nobody ever uses it), an intergalactic pizza delivery pilot, trying to scrape enough money from his intermittent jobs to keep the S.S. Deliverance from turning into an orbiting slag heap. Along with GLYSSA and Mub, a worrisome android navigation assistant and a mute, amorphous blob of a ship’s engineer, he receives a surprise order to a nearby star system for six crates of Antarean Meat Lover’s pizza—a windfall of an order!
It turns out that the delivery is for a hastily assembled interplanetary geoarchaeological symposium, a diverse assembly of aliens from all over the galaxy eager to study a recently discovered sample of ancient human culture. Perfectly preserved in arbonite (11% cheaper than competing preserving materials), the aliens have convened to discuss whether the artifact is a religious icon, a coded message to a superior future civilization, or a doomsday device—and Dirk is the only human being within ten parsecs.
The universe has seen the birth and death of galaxies, the rise and fall of civilizations, and the ebb and flow of nebulae condensing into stars and the tiny grains of planets. But they haven’t seen a t-shirt with three wolves howling at a moon before.
I’m working on it now, and hopefully it comes out well. So far it feels great. I have a feeling I’m going to discover a lot more about the plot as I go forward, which is a good feeling to have!
‘Til next time!