The PHANTOM of the OPERA

~By Andrew Lloyd Webber, September 1986
~Awards (too many to be listed here)
~Cast

~The Story
~Some facts and figures: It is estimated that Phantom has been seen by more than 80 million people worldwide, with total ticket sales of more than $3.2 billion.

(c) Official website

Although we got ripped off with the tickets (balcony seats being in fact the upper circle!), I enjoyed the familiar dramatic musics, I giggled at the comic lines, wowed at the sensational scenography and appreciated the clashing insertion of the opera within the musical.

The voice of the young female protagonist was armonious and in sharp contrast with the acute prima donna's voice. This *oxymoron* was reiterated in the wider structure of the musical. The phantom, a deformed man in flesh and blood, is hiding himself in a sort of limbo separated by the living world by a Caronthian foggy lake, at the border between life and death. His feelings are very alive, but it is not clear whether he is a ghost or a man in flesh and blood and this will remain ambiguous throughout the perfomance. His sensitiveness is in antinomy to the colourful masquerades staged in a spectacular meta-theatre, whose masks could be bizzarrely mistaken for tribal masks; for a licentious Venician carnival; or even as a caricature of Dangerous Liaisons.