phantom of the opera
I’m always going to see the Phantom of the Opera. Once I thought I was going to take a girl so I bought some expensive tickets that put us about 15 rows back, just a little to the left of where the chandelier once malfunctioned and really did drop on top of someone. The girl didn’t wind up going, so I took my brother, who likes the play as much as I do. Sometimes on trips we sing the thing from start to finish. So, I took my brother and we watched the spectacle. I like the Phantom. He seems like a more interesting guy than Raoul. Raoul is clearly the obvious choice for Christine. He’s the type of diehard that will go out and work the 9-5 everyday and then come home and pitch the baseball with Raoul Jr. I guess the thing that I don’t get about Christine is why she chose Raoul. In real life girls don’t often choose Raoul. They choose maniacs. To be honest, I don’t think there are many Raouls. I think most guys are Phantoms. Lingering on the dark chords of the self, blinded by the masks that are best at keeping them from seeing out. Anyway, I think that Andrew Lloyd Webber knew that no one would be sidetracked by Raoul and Christine’s happy ending. You don’t even see them riding away together, you see the Phantom as he hears Raoul singing a song that was obviously plagiarized from ‘The Music of the Night’. I always wind up feeling a delicate kind of sadness for the phantom. It’s good that the theaters are always dark so that no one can see my tears.
