seldnei | (no subject)

The other night, I caught the last half of a documentary about Phantom of the Opera, so I DVRed it and watched the whole thing yesterday.

First off, it was really interesting to see how it evolved and was put together, and I really enjoyed the footage from the rehearsals with Sarah Brightman and Michael Crawford. And the stories about the remote-controlled gondola and how on one occasion Michael Crawford had to pull this two-ton boat onto its spot after they got off it, and then had to sing "Music of the Night" was pretty hilarious.

Anyway, I realized as I watched it that I haven;t listened to that soundtrack in probably fifteen years. I did see the movie version, but those weren't the same actors. (I remember seeing the movie and being highly amused at the fact that I knew all the lyrics, still.) I have the CDs, but I don't have the soundtrack on the iPod. So I dug around and found them at the bottom of the CD Qbit, and today when I went to Target for taco chips I played it.

Now, I was obsessed with this musical in high school. Junior and senior year, which was also when it was out originally on Broadway. I had the soundtrack on tape, and wore it out, read the original book (dear god), had a porcelain Phantom mask on the wall, had the big glossy book (I still have it, actually, and there's something else I haven't actually looked at in fifteen or twenty years), and on my senior trip to France, I and my similarly-obsessed best girlfriend ditched our lazy-ass, not-obsessed group of friends and went to the Paris Opera house.

I have never seen the show on stage, but this was an enormous part of my psyche when I was 17/18 years old. I wanted to be Christine, obviously--the supremely talented girl that everyone underestimates until the dark genius recognizes her and gives her the right music to sing, and then the hot, rich guy falls for her, too, and ... yeah.*

So today I put the CDs in, and listen, and have these thoughts:

1. Holy crap, I really still do remember every damned thing on this soundtrack. Dialogue, inflections, lyrics, all of it.

2. Sir Andrew, step away from the synthesizer. Seriously. I know, I know, the Phantom plays an organ. Whatever. Find another instrument. We're suspending our disbelief in many areas, we can get around the lack of an organ.

3. Oh my god, Christine, could you be any more of a girl? I seriously want to rewrite this musical so that Christine is poor, talented, and determined to be an opera star--and instead of this whole thing where he's been teaching her to sing and after her debut he takes her down to the basement lake, he actually takes her down there before all of this and tells her he wants to train her. She's skeptical, and demands he take the mask off before she agrees to anything, then yanks it off when he refuses. He freaks, but she just looks him over, says she understands why he needs her to sing his music now, hands him back the mask and agrees. Then they're partners, and she sort of likes Raul--but when he starts getting clingy and wanting to protect her from the Phantom, she gets all "where the hell were you before I was a giant success?"

And I can't decide if I want to have a clingy, insecure Phantom, and then have Christine ditch both the guys at the end of the show, or if I want them to have a kind of Henry Higgins/Eliza Doolittle thing going on, and once he's found out they leave Paris and go off to Venice or somewhere and start over.

*And this is why I'm not that worried about the girls who like Twilight.