Come to me, strange Angel

"Sing once again with me our strange duet / My power over you grow stronger yet / and though you turn from me to glance behind / the Phantom of the Opera is there, inside your mind..."

One of my favourite musicals ever is "The Phantom of the Opera" by Andrew Lloyd Webber, in turn based on Gaston Leroux's homonyme novel, Le Fantôme de l'Opera.

Unfortunately I never had the possibility to go and see the play on stage, only seen the film version directed by Joel Schumacher in 2004, with the absolutely fascinating Gerard Butler (I do love him and his voice) as Eric and the young Emmy Rossum (which I really envy, I would love to sing with him!) as Christine Daée.

I reckon it will never be a musical like the one I'm talking about.

When I saw it I was drawning like Christine in the spell of music created by that strange character who seemed to exist only in my mind, literally: there's no voice like Butler's. His voice is both gentle, warm and wild, rough, a rock voice that best represents -in my opinion- the anger and the despair of Eric, instead of the singers of the stages I heard on YouTube, they can't compare. Her voice is too trilling, but it works to the part of the little lamb captured by the wolf; maybe I'm a little bit mean because I wanted to play that part.

My favourite song is "The Music of the Night", a sweet ballad sang by him to his obsession, the girl with the voice of an angel, to let her convince to abandon the rationality and follow the senses, that are stronger when the night is falling and no one from reality can see her. Thinking twice, I must admit that also the scene of the opera Don Juan and the song "The Point of No Return" are extremely magnetic: you can't stop looking at the Phantom seducing her with words of sensual power, surrounding her in a dance to perdition, playing a perfect Don Juan.

Just this night, the 9th of March 2010, the sequel of The Phantom is going on stage in London, set a decade after all that happened in Paris at the Opera, in Coney Island, with a title that says everything: Love Never Dies. If you go to the site http://www.loveneverdies.com/ you can find a nice web page with a map of Coney Island and other little curiosities.

I wish I could go to see it! Little pearl: the actor who plays Eric is the man in a photo (a kind of cammeo, then) in the first scenes of the movie by Schumacher, the photo of Christine's father.