The story, for those who don’t know it, is loosely based on the novel Le Fântome de l’Opera by Gaston Leroux and concerns events at a Paris opera house in the late 1800s. Fifteen years later, director Joel Schumacher has finally brought this well-loved musical to the cinema screen as a lavish, large-scale costume-drama which looks set to be successful both at the box-office and at awards ceremonies in 2005. It premiered on the London stage with Michael Crawford and Sarah Brightman in the lead roles, and was an immediate smash hit, with its combination of lush romance, Gothic horror and classic themes of love and loss. The film's other singers are adequate but no competition to Crawford, Brightman, and their colleagues, and the initial recording remains the one to buy.One of the most beloved musicals in modern history, The Phantom of the Opera was written by British composer Andrew Lloyd-Webber in collaboration with lyricists Charles Hart and Richard Stilgoe. Minnie Driver, who plays the prima donna Carlotta, had her singing dubbed by Margaret Preece, but she turns up at the end and, over the closing credits, sings "Learn to Be Lonely," an irrelevant and musically out-of-place song clearly composed just to have a new tune that would be Academy Award eligible. Lloyd Webber has written some extra background music here and there, as well as one new song, and that's an oddity, too. This, of course, makes it something of an odd listening experience, especially because there doesn't seem to be any reason why some dialogue is spoken and some is rendered in singsong recitative. The two-hour special edition is that rarity, a soundtrack album that actually contains the complete, unedited film soundtrack, including dialogue, incidental background music, and sound effects.
Even fans of the show and the film may want to stick with the shorter one, however.
Again, Lloyd Webber has opted to issue it in two versions, but this time, the 63-minute single CD is considered the standard release, with the double-disc set billed as the Special Edition version. Although there was also an original Canadian cast album (not to mention foreign-language versions from such countries as Japan and Austria), the movie soundtrack represents the first major re-recording of the score since 1986. alone by 1996, with another four million copies of a single-disc highlights version as well. In line with the success of the show, that album, a double-disc set, was also a hit, selling four million copies in the U.S. Because the same starring performers, Michael Crawford and Sarah Brightman, moved from the West End to Broadway, there was no original Broadway cast recording, the original London cast album serving to represent both stagings. The musical opened in London in October 1986 and in New York in January 1988, and both productions were still running (along with many others around the world) when the film version finally premiered in December 2004. Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical adaptation of Gaston Leroux's 1911 gothic mystery novel The Phantom of the Opera proved to be at least the composer's second most successful project, behind only Cats, and with the potential to outdo even that blockbuster.
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