Love Never Dies DVD Review
Last night I was lucky enough to attend the UK premiere film screening of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Love Never Dies at the Mayfair Hotel in London. The event was attended by Lord Lloyd Webber himself who introduced the screening with a short speech that included information about the piece.
As Phantom and general theatre fans know, Love Never Dies is the musical sequel to the phenomenal The Phantom of the Opera, which premiered at the Adelphi Theatre on the Strand on 9th March 2010 with previews from 22nd February of that year. Andrew explained to the small audience of approximately 200, that the musical did not quite take of in the way that he wanted to as staging and other problems didn’t quite work. The show was closed for four days in November 2010 but the damage was done and the negative reviews had impacted badly on the publicity for the show. Love Never Dies was meant to transfer to Broadway but following its closure in London on 27th August 2011, it never quite happened.
The musical did, however, make a successful transition to Australia, opening in Melbourne in May 2011 – the first production of the show outside of the UK. Featuring a new direction and design, the show was a success, received positive reviews and later transferred to Sydney. During a Melbourne showing on the evening of the 15th September 2011 at the Regent Theatre, a performance of Love Never Dies was filmed and made available on DVD. This is the performance that was aired to us last night.
After Andrew Lloyd Webber’s quick speech, thanking us for supporting the project he was slated for but is proud of, and inviting us to give feedback of the show afterwards, the film started. I did not quite know what to expect because I love The Phantom of the Opera and did feel, like many other Phantom fans, that it should have been left alone without a sequel, but the incredible score by the musical maestro impressed me and I was swiftly swept up in the world of Christine Daaé and the Phantom once more.
Whisking us away from the Paris Opera House to Coney Island and ten years on from the original musical, Love Never Dies sees Christine, by now a celebrated singer with a husband, Raoul, and a son, Gustave. She is set to perform but is unaware that it is the Phantom, who has longed for her for a decade, who has arranged for this performance to happen. As she meets the man once again who was besotted with her, Christine is torn between her husband and the masked enigma, unable to decide what is best for her own sake as well as her son’s. Ben Lewis plays the Phantom and Anna O’Byrne plays Christine. Lewis is a great Phantom with strong vocals and delivers his performance with hunger and emotion, whilst O’Byrne acts as one of the best Christine’s I’ve seen, delivering her difficult struggles with passion and visible anguish.
My main criticism for the story itself is that I feel like Love Never Dies humanised the Phantom – he is not so enigmatic, mysterious and ‘unseen’ as he is in The Phantom of the Opera. In Love Never Dies he is very much ‘there’ and the mystery of the man behind the mask is somewhat lost. I also feel like the original story didn’t really need to have a sequel. Yes, we are left just with the mask and a vanished man at the end of The Phantom of the Opera but I felt that this open ending fitted perfectly with the whole idea of the Phantom as a mystery. I don’t think that the mystery needed to be explained further. Saying that, the musical score was incredible, all performances were delivered brilliantly and the set designs were very impressive, making the performance very hard to dislike.
Andrew Lloyd Webber hopes to eventually get Love Never Dies onto Broadway, and wishes that this filmed version of the Australian production will persuade New York executives to give it a place in one of the theatres there. Love Never Dies is powerful, but time will only tell if it will eventually die or not. To buy a copy of the DVD yourself, check out the official show website.
