Lloyd Webber was pleased with Elton's treatment and began work on the sequel. Elton's treatment of the story focused more on the original characters of The Phantom of the Opera and omitted new characters that Lloyd Webber and Forsyth had developed. Finally, in early 2007, Lloyd Webber approached Ben Elton (who had served as the librettist for Lloyd Webber's The Beautiful Game) to help shape a synopsis for a sequel, based on Lloyd Webber's initial ideas. However, he still did not feel the ideas he had were adaptable into a piece of musical theatre. Lloyd Webber returned to the project in 2006, collaborating with a number of writers and directors.
Forsyth went on to publish some of the ideas he had worked on with Lloyd Webber in 1999 as a novel entitled The Phantom of Manhattan. Lloyd Webber began collaborating with author Frederick Forsyth on the project, but it soon fell apart as Lloyd Webber felt the ideas they were developing would be difficult to adapt for a stage musical.
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One of his ideas was to have the Phantom live above ground in Manhattan's first penthouse, but he rejected this when he saw a TV documentary about the Coney Island fairground. Following a conversation with Maria Björnson, the designer of The Phantom of the Opera, Lloyd Webber decided that, were a sequel to come about, it would be set in New York City at the turn of the 20th century. But I hope if you see them together, if you wanted to see them back-to-back, that what you would get from them – from both of them – is the extension of where the story goes.Īndrew Lloyd Webber first began plans for a sequel to his 1986 hit musical, The Phantom of the Opera, in 1990. I really do not believe that you have to have seen Phantom of the Opera to understand Love Never Dies. A planned Broadway production, which was to have opened simultaneously with the West End run, was cancelled, the amount of negative press having deterred potential backers. The original London production received mostly negative reviews, but a subsequent Australian production featuring an entirely new design team and heavy revisions was generally better received, although the show finally closed with heavy discounting to tickets.
Set and costume designs were by Bob Crowley. It was originally directed by Jack O'Brien and choreographed by Jerry Mitchell, but the show closed for four days in November 2010 for substantial re-writes, which were overseen by Lloyd Webber, and it re-opened with new direction from Bill Kenwright. The show opened at the Adelphi Theatre in London's West End on 9 March 2010, with previews from 22 February 2010. Īlthough Lloyd Webber began working on Love Never Dies in 1990, it was not until 2007 that he began writing the music. With her husband Raoul and son Gustave in tow, she journeys to Brooklyn, unaware that it is actually the Phantom who has arranged her appearance in the popular beach resort. In the show, Christine Daaé is invited by Oscar Hammerstein I for her American debut, until an anonymous impresario contracts her to perform at Phantasma, a new attraction on Coney Island. The musical is set in 1907, which Lloyd Webber states is "ten years roughly after the end of the original Phantom", although the events of the original actually took place in 1881. Lloyd Webber stated, "I don't regard this as a sequel-it's a stand-alone piece." He later clarified, "Clearly, it is a sequel, but I really do not believe that you have to have seen Phantom of the Opera to understand Love Never Dies." Glenn Slater subsequently explained that Lloyd Webber "didn’t view it as a sequel as much as 'a second story with these characters'". The plot is not based on the storyline in the original 1910 novel by Gaston Leroux. It is a sequel to the long-running 1986 musical The Phantom of the Opera and was loosely adapted from Forsyth's 1999 novel The Phantom of Manhattan. Love Never Dies is a romantic musical with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, lyrics by Glenn Slater, and a book by Lloyd Webber, Ben Elton, Frederick Forsyth, and Slater. 2010 musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber Love Never Dies