“What Do We Mean by Opera, Anyway?”: Lloyd Webber's<i>Phantom of the Opera</i>and “High-Pop” Theatre

Audiences in popular theater are much more prepared to surrender themselves to a composer going down the route of the opera. On 9 January 2006 Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera (1986) became the longest-running theatrical event in Broadway history. Reporting the fact, the BBC characterized The Phantom as the “most successful entertainment venture of all time,” observing that it had earned nearly three times more than the most lucrative film, James Cameron's Titanic (“Phantom musical surpasses record,” BBC News 2006). Lloyd Webber's earlier Cats (1981) ranks as the third most popular theatrical work ever written (behind Les Misérables), and several of his other musicals—Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, Starlight Express—have also enjoyed phenomenal success. But despite unprecedented popular acclaim, or because of it, the development of a significant body of Lloyd Webber criticism has been remarkably slow. As recently as 2006 Jessica Sternfeld could state, with only slight exaggeration, that “Andrew Lloyd Webber … exists in a research vacuum” (5), contrasting that fact, as others had done, with the critical attention given to Lloyd Webber's American rival, Stephen Sondheim. The only serious critical book to appear in the decade of Lloyd Webber's greatest triumphs was Michael Walsh'sAndrew Lloyd Webber: His Life and Works (1989), and when that book—still unique as a full-length critical study—went into a second, expanded edition in 1997, Walsh ruefully noted that he had been “widely taken to task by critics for the effrontery of treating Lloyd Webber and his work seriously” (256). Only in the last few years has Lloyd Webber finally been treated “seriously,” in a manner befitting his amazing prominence in the modern cultural landscape, and several fine studies have emerged: Stephen Citron'sSondheim and Lloyd-Webber[sic]: The New Musical (2001), John Snelson'sAndrew Lloyd Webber (2004), and Sternfeld'sThe Megamusical (2006). These scholars agree that Lloyd Webber's works are much finer than his many detractors have allowed; but also that, qualitative issues aside, the popularity and influence of the musicals make them worthy of study. Lloyd Webber's critical reception has been fraught with contradictions. Like his most obvious British forbears, Henry Bishop (1786–1855) and Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900)—both knighted, incidentally, while Lloyd Webber has been made a Lord—he has been intent on bringing increased artistic respectability to popular theatre. In fact, Andrew Pinnock's astute comment on what Bishop was trying to achieve in the 1810s and 1820s exactly describes Lloyd Webber's career in the 1970s and 1980s: “Bishop understood his audience. He did nothing to shock them; he tried, over time, to widen their range of musical experience and to raise their expectations” (5). But the result of Lloyd Webber's reformist project was a series of works so popular that their artistic agenda was generally overlooked, and he has been repeatedly criticized, often in vituperative terms, for cynically pandering to the supposedly corrupted taste of what Michael Feingold specifies as “[t]he semi-educated middle-class world” (Village Voice, 2 February 1988; quoted in Sternfeld: 267). Of course, there are other ways of assessing such popularity. George Perry, an admirer, finds an “insight into prevailing tastes … met with offerings of impeccable quality,” and in this compares Lloyd Webber to the American filmmaker Steven Spielberg (81). Glancing in a different direction, Keita Asari, who was instrumental in popularizing Lloyd Webber's works in Japan, attributes the latter's “universal” success to the fact that he is a “genius who unfolds melodies through various modes that somewhere reverberate classical music” (quoted in Walsh, “Magician”: 58). From almost any critical point of view, Lloyd Webber's central opus is The Phantom of the Opera. It has proved, by a wide margin, his greatest success, and his ambition to “raise the expectations” of his audience is most clearly displayed here. More than any of his previous musicals, The Phantom came close to winning over the critical establishment, with even hostile critics immediately recognizing it as the key work in his career, the one on which his reputation would ultimately rest. “Mr. Lloyd Webber's esthetic has never been more baldly stated than in this show,” maintained the influential and generally negative Frank Rich, sensing that Lloyd Webber's career to that date had reached a logical conclusion in The Phantom. An artistic trajectory that began with Lloyd Webber hitching his wagon to late 1960s “progressive rock,” with its clear “classical” (for want of a better word) pretensions, that evolved through Evita (1976), boldly described as “an opera,” had now produced the most operatic musical ever heard. Early reviews repeatedly referred to The Phantom's operatic dimension, sometimes questioning whether it might be called an opera. Lloyd Webber himself suggested that it could, perhaps should be: “What do we mean by opera, anyway? And where does that put Phantom? Obviously there is a world of difference between Phantom and something like Sugar Babies. But there is no difference today between opera and serious musical theater” (quoted in Walsh, “Magician”: 60). Jerrold Hogle gets it right, I think, when he defines the Lloyd Webber Phantom as a “popular opera,” a work that embodies “many of the contradictions behind the deeply troubled forms of entertainment in middle-class Western culture” (203). He might, though, have said “world culture,” for The Phantom has fared exceptionally well outside the West: it has, for example, been running in Japan since 1988, and for many young Japanese defines what “theatre” is. Such an international impact sharply raises the questions of where the appeal of the show ultimately resides, and what sort of cultural work The Phantom does. The present article is an engagement with those questions. It would be impossible to write a definition of an opera that, while including all those works defined as such in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, somehow excluded The Phantom of the Opera. It is safe to assume, in fact, that those who reject the notion of The Phantom being an opera do so not because of concern about generic niceties, but on the assumption that a “true” opera could not possibly be so outrageously popular. But a “popular opera” (allowing, for the sake of argument, the possibility of such a thing) must, by definition, be popular; significantly, many of those “semi-educated middle-class” people who have embraced The Phantom understand it to be an opera. In April 2007, for example, a Yahoo! Canada discussion board addressed the question: “What is your favorite opera?” Many of the respondents made fairly predictable choices from the classical repertoire: Mozart's Nozze de Figaro and Don Giovanni, Verdi's La Traviata, and Puccini's La Bohème. But three people chose The Phantom of the Opera (making it the favorite of these favorites), and one chose Les Misérables. Internet searches reveal the same pattern: many bloggers, amateur reviewers, and participants in online discussions, from all around the world, make the claim that The Phantom (and rather less often Les Misérables) is their “favorite opera.”1 There is little to be gained from arguing that all these “ordinary” music lovers are mistaken in their understanding of what opera is, but a good deal to be obtained from the recognition that The Phantom satisfies a craving many people have for the experience of opera, or, more precisely, of liking opera. It is (at the least) a work of popular musical theatre that attempts to be as operatic as possible without, however, repelling an audience who would ordinarily consider the idea of “opera” intimidating. Cathleen Myers has described The Phantom as “an opera lovers' dream musical”: it would be more accurate to call it a musical lovers' dream opera. The suggestively titled collection High-Pop: Making Culture into is in the cultural issues here. The book no of The Phantom of the Opera, or of Lloyd but the a of cultural that this unprecedented success. with the of culture” in the that by the of in the with its to the popular into the world of culture” and as a of that … Culture into which is as in the in the a wide range of from of and to of of and the of with and The book and the to present as cultural experience to that by its are and and it to a of The a of a of with of these contradictions. of the to on opera, and his a for the more operatic of The Phantom of the Opera. 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