The Stage

Love Never Dies: Q&A with Andrew Lloyd Webber

Published Thursday 8 October 2009 at 15:45

As opening dates and casting information are released for Love Never Dies, the sequel to Phantom of the Opera, composer Andrew Lloyd Webber answers questions about the show and its inception.

Tell us about the story of Love Never Dies.

I have to be careful about what I say about this story, because it has so many twists and I don’t want to give it away.

But, what I can say is it’s set in America 10 years roughly after the original “Phantom” and is set in Coney Island. Coney Island is a fantastic place - Sigmund Freud once described it as the “only reason to go to the United States.” It was beyond anything that anybody had ever seen - the eighth great wonder of the world. It was the place where all the freaks and oddities went, so of course the Phantom could be absorbed in there.

Now, our story finds him 10 years afterwards and he’s gone to Coney Island. He’s gone with Madame Giry, his old friend and Meg, her daughter, and he’s now the big mogul of Coney and is now running the whole place - and that’s where our story starts.

Why did you decide to follow The Phantom of the Opera and why now?

I’ve often thought that we left the original “Phantom” with a little bit of a cliff hanger and I thought, well, why not to do a sequel to it at one point. It took a very long time coming. I mean quite frankly, I thought about it 15 years ago, perhaps a little bit more. At that time I’d come up with the idea about the “Phantom” going to America and I talked about it with Frederick Forsyth, the novelist who wrote “The Day of the Jackal” - a very, very successful and fine writer.

We talked about it and we came up with a plot which he subsequently published as a little book called “The Phantom of Manhattan”, but it just simply didn’t gel for me. I couldn’t find a way through it and it was left alone. The only one thing that I took away from the book would be this time the “Phantom” would live above everything and he shouldn’t live below like he did underneath the opera house. So, I abandoned it frankly and I forgot about it.

But, about three years ago I thought about it and came back and I thought “you know, there is the germ of an idea here.” I worked on it again with a couple of writers and again it didn’t happen. But, I then worked with Ben Elton on a project and Ben, who is a very, very clever story teller, said, “You know what, this whole thing is really all cuckoo. You’ve got a fantastic basis in the idea of him going to America, the idea of him perhaps going to Coney Island. It’s wonderful, but you’re not developing all of the original characters, you’re not taking them with you, you’re putting in new characters - I’m going to do a plot which comes up with the original characters transported.”

So, we have all of the five: Raoul and Christine, Meg, Madam Giry and The Phantom. They all appear in our piece and there’s only one new character who’s a 10-year old child of Christine and Raoul’s called Gustave and that’s what we came up with.

Now, I’m not going to give the story away, but Ben unlocked it. I’m very story driven, as anybody who writes for musical theatre has to be. I couldn’t write it when the story wasn’t right. But the moment I had this outline, which was about just over 18 months ago, I was away.

And so the first thought was “Who’d be a really great lyricist for this?” Everyone had been telling me about Glenn Slater, who wrote the notes for the Little Mermaid and who’s written “Sister Act” now, and we clicked immediately so we got started.

Tell us about the two leads you have cast

Our lead is the present Phantom in London who’s been playing it for a long time and has been a really popular and very sexy Phantom, I have to say, called Ramin Karimloo. He’s just great.

Our other principal, Sierra Boggess, who played the Little Mermaid in New York, I’ve known for a while. She also played Christine as a young girl - well, she’s very young now - but she was only 21 when she played “Christine” in Vegas for me in the Las Vegas version of Phantom. She’s a terrific actress and having just now recorded the whole thing and finished it, I know they are an incredible fit. The passion that there is between the two of them - it’s almost unbearable at times, it’s so strong.

How will Love Never Dies roll out internationally?

Originally we thought that we’d roll out Love Never Dies internationally very quickly. In fact, we thought about doing three productions at the same time. We drew back from that, because I wasn’t absolutely certain that we could cast it sufficiently well. I thought that we must get the initial cast completely right, which is why we’ve got this unique thing of an album already recorded which contains our original cast. I don’t think that’s ever been done before.

We are going to open in London in March, then in New York in November. All the plans now are pretty advanced for certainly the Far East, Canada is way on slate already and we hope that it will roll out around the world rather quicker than usual. But it all depends on the cast.

Are you more excited or nervous about how Love Never Dies will be received?

Well, of course I’m nervous - I’m following up my own biggest success. The Phantom of the Opera is the biggest thing I’ve ever done, bigger even than Cats which in itself I never thought we’d top.

This is a piece I’m very proud of I have to say. I think it’s maybe more three-dimensional in terms of the characterisation than the original piece, which really is a version of Beauty and the Beast with a bit of a twist.

This one really does develop the characters in a way that I didn’t have the opportunity to do in the old one and therefore it was a very exciting thing for me to write musically. So, yes, of course I’m nervous about it but I’m very proud of it and I’m very, very much looking forward to seeing it on stage.

Did you ever have any idea that Phantom would be so successful?

Well, I must say when Cats became the longest running musical on Broadway, I never thought I’d ever succeed in getting near this one and then nobody thought Phantom was going to be quite what it was.

I remember when it opened in London, it wasn’t the favourite of the season - everyone thought Chess would be the absolute huge musical that year. We came in as the sort of slight underdog, and it just took off.

I mean, I remember the first preview we knew we had something which was special, but we didn’t know that we had anything that would quite do this. We didn’t know that we were going to have people changing their name to Christine Daae by deed poll… It was way before the internet, of course, but we had these fan clubs that grew up all over the world. Every single performance at one point was being reviewed - you begin to wonder what on Earth would have happened if the net had been around.

Anyway, it’s a very tough act to follow. Nobody ever thinks that the work they’re going to do could ever be bigger than the one they do before, especially if you’re lucky enough like I had to have such a huge thing as Phantom was.

What are your plans for the release of the album?

Although the album is completely finished and recorded, we’re only going to issue a couple of songs from it before the show opens. I want to keep the album until the show is finally on and we know exactly what it is. But it will be out and available within days of the opening, which is somewhat unusual, I know. It’s all there, all done and we’re keeping it under wraps at the moment.

Would you like to tell us about the international creative team you have brought together for Love Never Dies?

Well, as I said the story was unlocked by Ben Elton who did a wonderful synopsis which is the reason I’m sitting here.

Glenn Slater is my lyricist who, of the new young lyricists coming along, is the most exciting, I think. In fact, we’re going to be working together again on the ‘Wizard of Oz’ but that’s another story.

Our director is Jack O’Brien, who of course is one of sort of America’s legendary Broadway names. I was incredibly impressed by the fact that he managed to come up with Hairspray, came up with his version of Il trittico by Puccini - one of the most difficult operatic evenings to stage - at the Metropolitan Opera House, and Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia.

In fact, it was through a friend of Tom Stoppard’s that I came to him because Tom was so pleased with what he did. He’s been a fantastic joy, great fun and has been a rock in pulling it all together.

We have Bob Crowley designing who is probably, I suppose, our foremost designer at the moment. One of the sadnesses about whole thing is that Maria Bjornson, who designed the original Phantom, died very strangely and mysteriously very young only a few years ago. Of course, I did talk about the idea of the new “Phantom” with Maria but Bob was a very, very close friend of Maria’s and in fact was a little of a mentor to her. I think that, in a way, we all feel the production is dedicated to her.