opera in its comic scenes of rehearsal of the so-called “Hanni-
bal” and performance of the so-called “Il Muto.” Scornful of
what the Paris Opera is doing, the Phantom writes his own
opera and insists that his beloved Christine sing the soprano
role while he surreptitiously takes over the role of Don Juan.
The staging of the new “Don Juan Triumphant” as an opera
within the musical is Lloyd Webber’s invention, one of the
ways his many sources are being subjected to a clever recre-
ation in the musical form.^19 At the same time as he is in-
venting the opera-within-the-musical form, Lloyd Webber
is turning his own musical into quasi-operatic realization by
making it virtually through-sung. (Lloyd Webber was thus
paralleling the Phantom as composer, and was in fact writing
for his wife, Sarah Brightman, who played Christine.) Once
the Phantom sings “Point of No Return” with Christine in
the “Don Juan” opera, the musical itself becomes a through-
sung opera, so that the Phantom’s opera opens out into the
Lloyd Webber musical and the aesthetic principles of the two
are joined.
Modern stage technology comes to the fore in Phantom, not
just in the crashing chandelier conclusion to act 1 but also in
the mysterious lake-and-lair lighting effects of the Phantom’s
hideout in the fifth basement of the Paris Opera, in the disap-
pearing acts the Phantom himself can perform, and in count-
less touches of self-generated set changes and alterations. The
modern stage effects could all have been managed in the late
nineteenth-century theatres, certainly at the Paris Opera, but
more arrestingly at Her Majesty’s Theatre in the Haymarket,
where Phantomopened in 1986 and is probably still running
(the Phantom never finally leaves his theatres). The fabulous
staging could not have been managed so well in the old the-
atres, but it could have been managed, and the program for
Phantomeven includes some illustrations of the wooden ma-
chinery at Her Majesty’s, showing how it wouldhave been man-
aged. So the staging comes from nineteenth-century melodrama
166 CHAPTER SEVEN
(^19) The sources are discussed in Perry, The Complete Phantom, which also
gives the Lloyd Webber libretto and many illustrations.