An overblown, overhyped, overscored musical adaptation of Gaston Leroux' 1911 novel. Music by Andrew
Lloyd Webber, who has
ripped his tunes and style from Puccini and then
beat them into the ground with an enormous sledgehammer.
Reduces the original novel, a satirical Gothic pastiche, to a simplified would-be meaningful, actually-is crap melodrama.
Includes such pathetic lyrics as rhyming "succumb to me" with "succumb to me," completely eviscerates the character of
Raoul, and makes the 19th-century operatic genius the Phantom sound like a 1980s rock star.