Music, Melodrama, and Masks:The Astronomical Success of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of

the Opera

I hate musicals. I’ve never liked them. I never will.

They are the clichéd locus of homophobic assault against

theatre in the twentieth century, and as risible as any art

venture that takes itself too seriously. The use of music

in melodrama to underscore the drama and heighten the

emotional response of audience members was a brilliant

theatrical innovation, but when good melodrama is

interrupted by some horribly contrived musical interjection,

the magic of suspended disbelief is completely lost for me.

My efforts to appreciate ‘The Musical’ aesthetically have

resulted in mere tolerance at best, gag reflex at worst. I

humbly admit that I was so bored with West-Side Story that I

fell asleep watching it. As a theatre historian, therefore,

I am a perfect heretic. How then, was I so mesmerized by

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera? What

characteristics set it apart that appealed to me so much

that I was nothing less than riveted? Considering its

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effect on me, it is no surprise that theatre-going

populations who are not quite as openly blasphemous as I am,

have made it the number one financial theatrical musical

success of all time, bar none. Phantom participates with a

number of contemporary musicals that redefined Broadway and

set new standards for revenue maximums, as well as for

production expenditures. Nevertheless, Phantom stands alone

as the number one theatrical success of all time. The

success of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera owes to

an innovative integration of opera, rock, narrative and

melodramatic conventions, the most important of which is the

psychological appeal of an iconic gothic anti-hero in a

mask.

‘The Musical’ effaces its own risibility with roaring

success. But in the 1970s, the American Musical had become

worn. Broadway was ready for something new and imports from

Britain emerged as the unexpected source for the flamboyancy

stereotypical of the previously all-American trope (Gerard).

On October 12, 1971 Andrew Lloyd Webber experienced his

first blockbuster success on Broadway with Jesus Christ Superstar

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(ibdb). Following was a sequence of similarly successful

blockbusters including Evita and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor

Dreamcoat. Webber’s Cats opened on October 7, 1982. The

show remained on Broadway for a record breaking eighteen-

year run that saw a box office gross of over $400 million

(USD). It appeared that Broadway had finally outdone

itself, and that no other production would ever come close

to such astronomical success. In the meantime, however,

Webber had opened another production of even greater

innovation. The Phantom of the Opera opened on January 26, 1988

at the Majestic Theatre on Broadway and as of September 16,

2009 has generated some $740 million (USD) in Broadway box

office receipts alone. The box office including its

international performances puts the overall revenues into

the billions of dollars, a sum that dwarfs even the loftiest

Hollywood film successes, and the largest revenues generated

by any theatrical production in history (9000).

With his earlier Broadway productions, Webber

participated with the rising avant-garde on Broadway of the

‘Rock Musical’ that had come into popular demand following

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the success of Hair, which originally ran from 1968 until

1972. Webber did the same with Cats but exchanged the

religious myths surrounding Jesus and Joseph for gothic

felines. Webber boldly adapted T. S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book

of Practical Cats and moved his musical away from traditional

Broadway narratives (with predominantly human characters).

Cats filled the stage with spectacle never before seen. A

cast of giant cats prance and dance across the stage

mesmerizing audiences with costume, circus theatrics, and

groovy, upbeat rock compositions. The underlying text was

pivotal. T. S. Eliot’s lovable but gruff characters have

even names that are enchanting and phonetically allude to

aspects of feline life such as Jellicle, Munkustrap, and

Jennyandots. These characters immediately suffuse the

staging with the warm familiarity of a beloved text. No

single characteristic of the production was exclusively

responsible for the success of the production, but arguable

highlights include the high energy choreography and

innovations include the fantastic spectacle, Webber’s

particular flavour of Broadway rock, the costuming and make-

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up of gothic cats, and the charming source from whence they

were drawn.

Webber wisely used the same formula for his next

production. Webber based his production on the compelling

original text for Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux, rather

than the myriad campy versions that had all but lost the

original’s appeal. Much as with Cats, the foundational

power of the text would dictate the tenor of the production

and the direction his compositions would take. There is

very little in Cats that comes close to the feel of the

operatic music that is titular in Phantom.

The British rock opera had become hugely popular. Pink

Floyd’s 1979 psychedelic rock opera The Wall was successful

enough to be transferred to feature film in 1982 (imdb.com).

The Who’s 1969 Tommy lent itself to the stage very well and

has seen numerous stagings globally since that date, finally

reaching Broadway in 1995. While the music of Cats

participated more closely with Hair, the book for Phantom

dictated and provided the opportunity to capitalize on the

popular notion of rock opera, and to capitalize on the

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commercial power of opera that was beginning to show signs

of popularity in the traditionally Broadway-classed

demographic.

Both rock opera and opera use almost continuous music

in their staging. The dramatic suspension of disbelief is

not forced to vacillate between two conflicting modalities:

the realism of dialogue and its antithesis in singing.

While continuous singing is no more realistic, it does not

strain the imagination of the listener to move between the

two modes, an unnecessary interruption that abruptly

amplifies the transparency of contrivance. The tension

between music and drama is one that opera has been working

out for hundreds of years (compared to the relatively

younger genre of the Broadway musical). Continuous music

in operatic fashion requires much less mental energy to

engage the melodramatic narrative that underscores it.

Webber expertly weaves the conventions of opera, rock,

and narrative together. The operatic lyrics interplay with

the integrated dialogue of the characters. For example,

during Christine’s debut she sings, “Think of me” on the

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opera stage within the Broadway stage. Raoul joins the song

as a spectator in soliloquy, changing neither tempo nor

rhythm and rhyming with the last audible line of Christine’s

operatic performance within the play. “Can it be? Can it

be Christine?” (Phantom). Webber moves seamlessly between

the operatic spectacle and the romantic narrative within a

single song. By doing so, the melodrama borrows from the

opera and heightens the emotion of the narrative on both

fronts. Moreover, the audience directly participates in the

performance, bringing the emotion even closer to the viewer.

Using the Broadway stage as the operatic stage within the

narrative, the Broadway audience becomes the Opera audience

within the story, and move between participation within the

play and observation of it at regular intervals, marked by

emotional peaks. Christine is simultaneously the Opera and

Musical performer, Raoul is simultaneously the Musical

performer and part of the Opera audience, and the actual

audience is simultaneous to both Musical and Opera.

Audience members participate with the thrill of the

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heroine’s debut and are literally swept away into the

audience of her operatic performance within the narrative.

Another of Webber’s techniques was the implementation

of iconography. In Superstar and Joseph, the narratives

revolve around easily recognizable Christian mythology,

centred by two of the most prominent characters within the

biblical text. In Evita, Webber moved away from biblical

material and into the strictly historical with a female icon

(Citron 223). In Cats he followed a different tack. The

ensemble was the icon rather than an individual character.

The title itself reveals as much. The three previous

blockbusters were named after singular individuals already

established as iconic, whereas the title of Cats is plural.

One of the only weaknesses of the production was the absence

of a central character. As such, the sympathies within the

narrative with which audiences are expected to identify are

vague. There was no obviously central character around which

to anchor an iconography, but the advertising campaign

brilliantly depicted the image of a cat’s eyes with dancers

for pupils. The ubiquitous icon invoked a visualization of

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the entire dancing production, particularly the uniquely

costumed and made-up cats.

With Phantom, Webber seems to have harvested all of the

best characteristics of his previous icons, not the least of

which was the advertising imagery. Phantom embodies the

historical iconography of Superstar, Joseph, and Evita by placing

in the title role a singular, central icon, harvested from a

well-known historical text. In her essay Bringing It All Back

Home: Family Economy and Generic Exchange, Vivian Sobchack

discusses iconography in the twentieth century science-

fiction. “The virginal astronaut presents an opportunity to

free associate around a dominant and significant presence

[which is] simultaneously icon, index, and symbol" (Sobchack

107). Like biblical icons, the phantom’s historical

existence remains shrouded in myth and largely apocryphal.

Like Evita, the phantom is a corrupted villain, and even

more than Cats, he is mired in gothic convention. Webber

combined these facets of iconography in Phantom and then

went even further. Deploying the powerful iconography of

theatrical masks, he centred his advertising campaign around

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a single, recognizable object. The mask of the phantom is a

copious icon that graced t-shirts, loomed on billboards, and

surfaced in magazine ads, buses, and all variety of

advertising media. The phantom’s mask is universally

recognized.

The Columbia University Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th

Edition outlines the history of masks and their uses. The

use of masks in human culture evidently predates recorded

history. The encyclopedia simply states that they “have

been worn from time immemorial throughout the world”

(Masks). It identifies the most common historical uses: in

rituals of death, as a form of protection from germs or

dangerous projectiles, but most commonly in theatrical

performances. Masks have long been believed to invest the

wearer with magic powers, especially in the ability to

influence large populations of people (Lehman). “The many

masks used in ancient Greek drama represented the character

being portrayed by the actor and were constructed to portray

a fixed emotion such as grief or rage” (Masks). These

particular emotions are the only ones listed. More recent

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depictions of the masks of both Spider-man and Batman have

been moulded to look more angry, ominous, intimidating, and

threatening, specifically regarding the shape of eyes or

furrowed brows. These masks elicit an immediate emotional

response in the same way that music does in drama and are

remarkably theatrical.

Adding to the already powerful appeal of Webber’s

production was the immeasurable power in the icon of a

masked anti-hero. In the late twentieth century, the most

ubiquitous icons from melodrama, horror, pop music, and

comic books all participate in the astounding popularity of

the masked gothic anti-hero. Certain masks became so iconic

that their images represented an entire body of art and

connected society with communal recognition of various

particular icons. Have a look at the following images.

Even if you have never seen any of the productions with

which they are associated, you are probably able to identify

the character or franchise immediately.

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For the sake of posterity, and in case you’ve been living on

Mars for the past four decades, they are, from left to

right, the masks of Erik from Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera,

Darth Vader from the Star Wars franchise, Jason Voorhees from

the Friday the 13th franchise, Batman from the franchise of the

same name, and likewise for Spider-man. Other masks from

the horror genre that are quickly recognizable include those

of Leatherface from the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and

Michael Myers from the Halloween franchise. Particularly

interesting is the hockey mask of Jason Voorhees. It is the

only mask that is not originally or exclusively associated

with the character. But when you view the image of a hockey

mask, its gothic iconography has such a strong hegemony over

the psyche that we are first reminded of Jason, then of

hockey (if of hockey at all) even in Canada! In any case, a

survey of the broad spectrum of entertainment that has

popularly employed masks, from Broadway musicals to sports,

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reveals a universal appeal. The use of masks may well have

heightened the popularity of Phantom by extending its appeal

to a wider range of patrons than the traditional Broadway

Musical demographic.

In American culture it appears that the masked icon

took on special power in the late twentieth century. In a

culture predicated on ‘appearances’, it is no surprise.

Many cultures commonly deploy costuming as a method of

constructing identity. The delineation of social station

based on garments is most visible in Europe’s historical

sumptuary laws. Many European countries implemented

regulations that placed restrictions on the consumer goods

that citizens were permitted to purchase and use. In the

seventeenth century, England aimed the laws specifically at

clothing and dictated the appropriate dress permitted to

people from different levels of the social hierarchy

(Baldwin). In the nineteenth century, the fallacy still

holds true. In 1964, Rene Magritte unveiled his surrealist

painting, The Son of Man, which depicts a generically dressed

British business man with a bowler hat and a face masked by

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a green apple (Magritte Son). Amongst the various

interpretations of the painting is the theory that the man’s

face is irrelevant because his social station is already

determined by his garments.

The rise of Hollywood was concurrent with an increase

in what was viewed as glamorous, and by 1988, the cosmetics

industry was internationally corporate (Peiss). A

competitive insecurity inherent to American culture is

evident in the rise of physical alteration. Beginning with

mere make-up (a form of mask), the eighties saw a rise in

popularity in more permanent changes to appearance. For the

first time, young women (and some men) were having eyeliner

tattooed on their faces rather than suffer the inconvenience

of daily application. Eventually the need for permanent

changes in appearance saw the commercialization of plastic

surgery, originally practised for reconstructive or

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therapeutic reasons to assist individuals mutilated by the

increasingly destructive weaponry of war (History). With

rising affluence in America, the medical nature of plastic

surgery evolved into the commercial industry of cosmetic

surgery (Davis) which brought with it the inevitable self-

destruction of ego and physical health in the name of beauty

(Lemma).

Members of the populace inevitably exhibited a self-

destructive nihilism - a communal anxiety complex left over

from the nuclear scare of the eighties, followed closely by

economic emasculation by the Japanese automotive industry

(which threatened the very affluence upon which the

cosmetics industry depends) then by The World Trade Centre

Attacks in 2001, and finally the population is confronted

with imminent catastrophic environmental change. By the new

millennium, plastic surgery had become recognized as a

viable social disorder. Increasing numbers of newspaper

articles and academic papers examined the practice,

including a 2005 headline in the Straits Times that read “More

Teens Turn to Nip and Tuck for Better Looks” (Liaw).

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Television shows such as Nip Tuck, or ostensible “reality” in

Extreme Makeover or The Swan were highly popular. Nip Tuck won

an Emmy in 2004 and a Golden Globe in 2005 and at least

began to explore the negative aspects of the increasingly

common procedures (imdb.com).

In A. Lemma’s PSYCHODYNAMICS OF COSMETIC SURGERY she

outlines three psychological fantasies that underlie the

motives for plastic surgery. The first is the fantasy that

the individual can construct a perfect or ideal self

(Lemma). The second is that the individual can acquire and

fulfill the perfect-mate fantasy in which physical/sexual

attraction plays the primary role (Lemma). The third is

what she refers to as the “reclaiming fantasy”, whereby the

individual purges an undesirable characteristic viewed as

“alien” and re-establishes control over the creation of

their visual identity (Lemma). In Cressida Heyes 2009

article, Diagnosing Culture: Body Dysmorphic Disorder and Cosmetic

Surgery, she describes the psychological underpinnings as “a

cultural trend that threatens to relocate ‘normalcy’ to a

place of tremendous suffering” (Heyes 91). Fantasy and

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suffering are closely related to ideas of mutilation and

disfigurement under the banner of cosmetic surgery.

The most iconic pop singer of the late twentieth

century is also the paradigm example of the horrors of

cosmetic surgery gone awry. Michael Jackson’s displeasure

with his appearance caused him to become obsessive and

irrational about his surgical choices. The media was

overwhelmed with articles exhausting theories about his

particular obsessions with whitening his skin and altering

his nose. In a 2004 Calgary Herald article entitled Michael

Jackson's mask: Documentary examines King of Pop's surgery obsession,

Jamie Portman puts a Freudian twist on Jackson’s motives.

He ascribes the relentless changes to a desire to look less

like his father whom he publicly accused of abuse.

Jackson’s psychological state was clearly troubled.

Allegations of child molestation and the publicity of his

extremely eccentric private life were concomitant with his

descent into physical deviance. Ironically, the extensive

surgery on his nose damaged his face so badly that he

eventually chose to wear an actual mask to hide the

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collapsed bridge where his nose once had been. Michael

Jackson was an icon obsessed with plastic surgery. The

media has connected him to damaged psychology, severe

insecurity that lead to substantial over-achieving, deviant

sexuality, mutilation, and masks.

All of the iconic gothic anti-heroes have many of these

characteristics in common. They are all thwarted in their

romantic pursuits, often because of what is hidden behind

the mask - a shame they cannot show in public; most have had

a traumatic childhood – murdered parents, slavery, public

humiliation; they are all anti-heroes who oppose the moral

vein for what they deem a better good; they are associated

with gothic sublimity or architecture: Wayne Manor (in the

not-subtly-named Gotham City), the Death Star, the Paris

Opera House, the sublime dark forest next to Crystal Lake,

Spider-man's New York high-rise perches; they are all more

active in darkened night-like settings from dark space to

caves full of bats; and lastly and most obviously, they are

all male.  “[L]ike so many psychologically wounded

narcissistic characters” they are a bunch of shame-faced

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males hiding behind gothic masks (Kavaler-Adler). And they

fascinate us.

In recent years, the most popular comic book heroes are

the ones with gothic and anti-heroic characteristics. Batman

is the most obvious example, but even Spider-man fits the

trope, especially in his recent dawning of a symbiotic black

suit that stimulated his darker personality characteristics.

Even in his original conception, however, Spider-man’s

antisocial tendencies are exactly what made him appealing.

In his book Comic book nation: the transformation of youth culture in

America, Bradford Wright surveys the history of the comic

book since its popular inception in the early twentieth

century. He delineates a deep history of cultural

literature, commonly enjoyed by youth or children on a

generational level (like slang) in which the social

development of our culture has been participant for a

hundred years. We are all steeped in comic book lore.

“Peter Parker furnished readers with an instant point of

identification. All but the most emotionally secure

adolescents could relate to Peter Parker’s self-absorbed

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obsessions with rejection, inadequacy, and loneliness”

(Wright 210). “Peter escapes the taunts of his peers by

losing himself in science” and “he designs a […] mask to

conceal his identity” (Wright 210). Spider-man broke with

the tradition of all-American heroism in characters such as

Superman. Originally he “makes no pledge” to aid others or

fight crime (Wright 210). Like Batman, who gave birth to

the traumatically driven gothic hero in 1939 (Kane), in

1962, Spider-man realized the beginning of the anti-hero –

the hero motivated by personal designs and vengeance (Lee).

And in 1988, poor Erik, our beloved phantom, emerges

as the paradigm example of all gothic masked anti-heroes.

He suffers a horrible facial deformity with which he is

apparently born, and his father beats him into submission,

forcing him to take part in the humiliating ritual of freak-

show spectatorship behind the Paris Opera House. He is

displayed as the “Devil’s Child” while other children laugh

and gawk (Phantom). He then cowers in humiliation and

covers his head with a burlap sack. The scene is filled

with pathos until he murders his father. Madam Giry says,

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“I hid him from the world and its cruelties. He has known

nothing else of life since then, except this opera house […]

He’s a geniu,” to which Raoul responds, “Clearly, Madam

Giry, genius has turned to madness” (Phantom). Erik’s

madness, concomitant with his relationship with his father,

is an archetype that runs deep in the human psyche and

manifests itself in many forms of art (Freud).

In her essay entitled, The Stepfather: The Father as Monster in

the Contemporary Horror Film, Patricia Erens focuses on the

theories of Lacan and Freud relating to infancy.  She

describes the oedipal stage as one where a child wishes only

"to bond with her mother" (Erens 358).  The oedipal phase is

one characterized by the "young male child's mandate to

separate from the mother and to assume the physio-

psychological aspects of the father [… A]t a later stage the

male can reinvest his desire in a new female partner.  The

female child, however, equally encouraged to separate from

the mother, is expected to shift her sexual attraction to

the opposite sex" (Erens 358).  Erens polarizes the pre-

oedipal desire of the daughter to bond with her mother

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against the post-oedipal desire of the male to mate with

her. 

The post-oedipal desire for both female and male is

enacted in Phantom. For Christine Daae, her desire to follow

the musical teachings of an imaginary “angel of music”

(predicted by her deceased father) fulfills her lust for her

father in a disembodied voice that does not require her to

requite sexually (Phantom).  When the prospect of mating

presents itself in the form of a horribly scarred freak, she

is torn and the fantasy of her paternal angel of music is

shattered.  The romantic aspects of her paternal lust are

then transferred to Raoul, the bodily perfect male specimen

and benefactor. The phantom is frustrated in his post-

oedipal desire to mate with Christine by a horrible

deformity and becomes psychopathic.  The phantom needs to

hide behind a mask to exert male dominance where the

voyeur’s terror would otherwise bar that fantasy from being

fulfilled.  Like Vader, Voorhees, and Batman, a child-borne

trauma robs the hero of their oedipal fulfillment and they

mask their shame. In true Freudian style, they displace

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their repressed sexuality into immoral violence and evil. 

The Freudian underpinnings of the romantic myth within the

narrative are powerful and add to the Phantom's underlying

psychological fascination for viewers of both genders. As

audience members, we can't wait for them to unmask, and to

get a glimpse of the freakish spectacle which fascinates

haunts our imaginations.

But because of our own Freudian impulses, we are not

unsympathetic.  The prospect of such a horrible childhood is

one that generates universal pathos. While we revel in the

phantom’s deformity, and require his evil to justify doing

so, we silently cry for his plight and silently wish for his

romantic fulfillment. When Christine first views his

deformity, he piteously refers to himself as “The man behind

the monster / This repulsive carcass” and appeals to

Christine’s sympathy. “No kind words from anyone. No

compassion anywhere. Christine, why?” (Phantom). The music

changes to soft woodwinds and higher stringed instruments at

slower pace – typical but powerful melodramatic conventions

for moments of pathos. Nevertheless, even with this

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mitigating sympathy that draws us to the character

romantically, and the disfigured face that amplifies the

sympathy, it is the very nature of his ugliness that repels

us. "To a certain extent, of course, all social "monsters"

are defined, or designed, in terms of supposedly

unimpeachable marks of visual difference" (Bellin 169). In

contrast to Christine’s beauty we cannot reconcile his

visual difference in strictly sympathetic terms and we

project on to Christine the horror of repulsion she would be

forced to live out in a sexual union with someone so

horribly disfigured. Erik articulates his awareness of her

repulsion: “Turn around and face your fate. An eternity of

this before your eyes” (Phantom). She responds by likening

a sexual union with him to an act of murder. “Have you

bored yourself at last in your lust for blood? Am I now to

be prey to your lust for flesh?” Regardless of political

correctness and progressive thinking, physical attraction

remains a fundamental part of the mating ritual and sexual

act. In an era when physical beauty has become a fanatical

obsession, disfigurement, shame, and a conflation of the

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primitive psychologies of sex and murder are all present in

popular art. To escape the horror of our own physical

shortcomings, masks of all breed become a locus of security.

The appeal of the phantom’s mask is heightened even

further by the titillation of what it promises to reveal.

In the chapter entitled Seeing Things - The Freak on Film, in his

book The Dread of Difference, Joshua Bellin focuses on the

cultural construction of the "dichotomy of insider/outsider"

to strengthen the existing social strata (Bellin 166). 

Bellin outlines the voyeurism of freaks as a commodity and

the nature of freak spectacle that has been pervasive

throughout history (Bellin 170).  Incidentally, Bellin

touches on the psychological thrill of freak-spectatorship.

He describes "the spectatorial quality of the sideshow

[which] implicates [...] viewers in a similar prurient

voyeurism" (Bellin 166).    In addition to mere freak-

voyeurism, Bellin describes the effect of titillation. 

Bellin quotes the musings of "French Physician Amroise Pare"

in his 1573 work, On Monsters and Marvels (Bellin 170).  Pare

does not describe all of his proclaimed subjects in physical

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detail "due to their great loathsomeness" which he claims

prompted him to forego providing either of their physical

descriptions or pictorial likenesses (Bellin 171).  Bellin

observes that "the doctor's disclaimer titillates as much as

it abstains” complementing the “voyeuristic imperatives of

revelation" (Bellin 171).  In a 1965 radio interview with

Jean Neyens, discussing his panting The Son of Man, Rene

Magritte agrees with the titillating nature of masking and

hidden objects. “We always want to see what is hidden by

what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden

and which the visible does not show us. This interest can

take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of

conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden

and the visible that is present” (Magritte). The mask, and

its inherent promise of unmasking within a narrative, works

in exactly this way, heightening the final revelation with

the addition of suspense towards the viewing "pleasure" with

which the viewer is ultimately satisfied.

Phantom capitalizes on the emotional power of such a

moment twice. First in private, Christine tears the mask

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form Erik’s face and learns how much the exposure enrages

him, either from the memory of his father’s humiliating

abuse, or from despair at the loss of her reverence, or

both. In order to satisfy the audience with the thrill of

his exposure, Christine does it again, as a public spectacle

to expose him as a villain during an opera performance.

Since the audience for the Broadway show doubles as an

audience for the opera within the show, they are rewarded

with the experience from two perspectives: first in

sympathetic participation with Christine from behind the

fourth wall, and then as the opera audience within the

narrative, exposed to all of the potential vengeance the

character within the play may visit upon them, and complicit

with Christine’s betrayal. It is thrilling. The viewer

revels in his villainy, the spectacle of his evil motivated

by his horribly scarred face not once, but twice: a double-

climax of the morbid delight of his unmasking.

The melodrama in Star Wars deploys a similar double

unmasking. The original trilogy played out a similar duality

of titillation, showing us only the back of Vader’s

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mutilated head in a scene in The Empire Strikes Back when his

helmet is quickly vacuum-sealed to his armor after he takes

a reprieve in a parabolic chamber. Finally, at the end of

Return of the Jedi, after three years of anticipation, Vader is

fully exposed with all his weakness and disfigurement

visible at the moment of his death and redemption. Phantom

is very much like the Star Wars trilogy in several

melodramatic ways. In both narratives, the masked anti-hero

engages in a sword battle with the noble hero, Luke in Star

Wars, and Raoul in Phantom. Immediately following the

battle the Star Wars trilogy, Vader announces “I am your

father” (Star Wars VI). Just before the sword battle in

Phantom, Raoul announces to Christine, “Whatever you believe

– this man, this thing, is not your father” (Phantom). Both

productions make use of melodramatic underscoring

characterized by cacophonic symphonic crescendos of music at

emotional pivots. In the movie version of Phantom, the

gothic rock-opera music is powerfully introduced with the

use of percussive organ music at the raising of the

chandelier in the same way that Star Wars used percussive

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punctuations of horns to heighten emotional tension during

scenes of high action or celebration. In a his 2009 article

“What Do We Mean by Opera, Anyway?”: Lloyd Webber’s ‘Phantom of the Opera’

and “High-Pop” Theatre, David Chandler makes note of the iconic

similarities of Webber himself and his contemporary

blockbuster film-maker Stephen Spielberg who collaborated

with Star Wars creator George Lucas on the equally

melodramatic Indiana Jones quadrilogy (Chandler 153). Both

Phantom of the Opera on Broadway and Star Wars in motion picture

are the number one grossing artworks of all time within

their respective genres in adjusted dollars. The

melodramatic structure and music, Freudian underpinnings of

fatherly sins, and masked anti-heroes are common to both and

clearly define the formula for artistic success in the late

twentieth century.

Melodrama is characterized by an appeal to strong

emotion rather than deep characterization. Its appeal is

perhaps the longest standing theatrical undercurrent in

history. The operatic form is necessarily void of deep

characterization by virtue of its format. Webber has

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brilliantly married them to take advantage of the strengths

of both by calling on the emotional response induced by

opera music in conjunction to the emotional response of

moralistic psychology, and with a participatory format for

the audience. Furthermore, Webber deploys the psychological

appeal of a masked anti-hero at a time when their iconic

status was at its popular height. Webber discovered a

unique combination of rock, opera, audience participation,

melodrama, and iconography, integrated into an artistic

whole never before seen – an entirely theatrical experience

from beginning to end – simultaneously appealing to the most

archetypal icons within our psyche and the most contemporary

tastes, leaving audiences dazzled, drained, and delighted.

One might be inclined to think that his integration of

an iconic mask into his already successful musical formula

was mere coincidence, an inevitable result of the book he

chose. However, the centre-piece of the entire performance

is a masquerade ball in which all the characters

participate. Even if the use of masks was unconscious, it

was clearly an active part of Webber’s imagination. While

30

much credit is due to Webber’s integration of rock and opera

in the musical composition and narrative, they are not the

defining characteristic of the social underpinnings at the

time of Phantom’s peak popularity. At that time, the

phantom was one amongst several iconic masked anti-heroes

that captured the imaginations of audience members as

psychologically fallible as the very villain they couldn’t

wait to expose. So where the music and romance are

fundamental to the success of Phantom, they are not the

characteristic that has set it apart from other blockbuster

musicals. The singular characteristic that launched Andrew

Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera to the pinnacle of success

is safely stowed in a mask. I love masks.

31

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