The Phantom of the Opera

I hate musicals. I have always have hated musicals. For a short period, I thought that perhaps musicals can’t get much done because the action keeps being interrupted by, well, music. Turns out the music is the point, but mostly I don’t like the music, so I just went back to hating them.

They do not make me want to dance or sing. They do not excite my sympathy for their wholesome heroines. They leave my sympathetic heart cold. The entire cast could be wiped out in a freak Oklahoma flood or slaughtered by a deranged butcher in the first act and I would feel only relief. I feel about music in the theater the way I feel about sleep: keep it to the absolute minimum required. Everything else is just dawdling.

Understandably, these feelings have limited the number of musicals I have seen. In fact, it had been so long since I had seen a musical that I had begun to doubt my historical distaste. Absence made me weak and the corrective smackdown was painful. The Phantom of the Opera is the worst musical I have ever seen. It was awful. It was horrendous. It was barely bearable. One more time: it is just an awful, awful musical. It is so awful that I am almost scared of musicals now.

Why did I go?

Reason: I heard it wasn’t that bad.
Reality: It was.

Reason: In every theater conservatory I attended, there was always one beefy, lion-haired guy who lived for that Lloyd Weber high tenor line. Having heard it so often and always out of context, I developed a dangerous curiosity about the plot. I assumed there must be more to it than just the wail.
Reality: There isn’t.

Reason: It was our anniversary and I was feeling generous.
Reality: Not anymore.

There is a German phrase, “Gott straft so vort!” It translates roughly to “God punishes immediately!” and is often used in an absurdly retributive sentence, as in the following situation:

You sneak up on your sibling. You hit him over the head with a board. Coincidentally, your beloved treehouse tumbles to the earth, crushing you beneath it. Your injured sibling says happily, “Gott straft so vort!”

Two hours and twenty minutes of the most mindnumbing mediocrity I’ve ever seen on the screen (including that appalling Kevin Costner vehicle Revenge) happened to me for abandoning my hard line on musicals.

What is so bad about it? For starters, the music is rotten and unbelievably, totally redundant, so it goes on and on and on. And then it starts all over again like a cheap, punishing music box. As if that weren’t bad enough, there is a total of about ten minutes of plot, which is also mindlessly redundant, so there’s nothing to distract you from the music. All in all, The Phantom of the Opera bears a striking resemblance to Meatloaf’s rock classic, “I Would Do Anything for Love.” If you thought this song was a.) wonderful, or b.) comprehensible, you should definitely go see this movie. For my part, I got out of bed at 1AM to hunt down that very track because I thought it was the only thing that could cleanse my brain of the whining music of the night that was stuck on repeat, like some halucinogenic bad dream that won’t end even after you’ve been fully punished for your illegal, hippie ways. “Fire with fire!” I thought, stumbling through My Music in the middle of the night. It did the trick. The music is gone from my mind. The terror of musicals remains.

Post script: The only remotely redeeming thing about the movie is Minnie Driver’s Italian diva. In fact, she is on-screen for most of the first fifteen minutes of the film which leads you to believe that perhaps the movie will be an entertaining spoof instead of the self-absorbed drivel that it turns out to be. Alas, even Minnie’s over-acting is no match for the massive banality that is the rest of the movie.

Post post script: The author would also like to add that she is fine with music on its own and has been a musician for the better part of her life.

Post post post script: The author would also like to note that she is fine with some music in the theater. It’s fine if used for manipulative plot support. Or interludes. Or opera. Well, some opera anyway.