We start the show out with Christine filling in for Carlotta, who simply didn't show up for tonight's performance as part of a staged illness intended to remind the managers of her power over them as their headliner.Īnother choice that seems to have obvious overtones from Lloyd Webber's musical is the elevation of Meg Giry to a major character, as a friend and confidante to Christine. Where she was simply a well-trained but slightly uninspired singer in the original novel, whose major crime was occupying a space in which the Phantom wished to place Christine, here she is a shrewish, jealous nightmare of a person (though at least the ever-popular cop-out of also making her a bad singer is not present) this makes her much less sympathetic for the audience, which in turn makes bad things happening to her less objectionable, the better to keep the Phantom's sympathetic image intact.
While Kuiper is definitely drawing heavily from Leroux's text, there are still several points that make it clear that he is also influenced by Lloyd Webber's popular musical, and the most obvious of these is the treatment of Carlotta.
Raoul's surname has been elided together into "deChagny", which, while pronounced the same, is a little baffling since Kuiper is ostensibly following Leroux's text and I'm not sure why he would change its spelling.
It also says a great number of other things that look like frothy nonsense, but we'll get to those as they happen within the script itself.Īccording to the cast list, Carlotta is given the new surname Salvador, which fits into her Spanish background well (though it is slightly ironic, considering that it means "savior" and that Carlotta is definitely not the savior character in this story). The synopsis at the beginning asserts that Kuiper wants to focus more primarily on the character of Christine than most versions do since she was pretty much the fulcrum of the entire original story, I have no issue with that. Kind of super weird bizarre things, even, but in an interesting way. Don't let the laughable cover art fool you (I suspect Kuiper, whose play does indeed have its moments of Lloyd Webber influence but which is on the whole more based on Leroux's novel, was not consulted when it came to marketing) this does some really interesting things.
Just when I was worried I would never find a play I liked! Most of the plays I've read for this project so far have hovered around the C- territory, some dipping catastrophically lower, so this was a very pleasant surprise.
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