"Half your cast disappears but the crowd still cheers"

If John Williams wrote the two scariest notes in movie music history when he wrote the theme for Jaws, Andrew Lloyd-Weber wrote the five scariest notes known to the stage when he wrote the theme for Phantom of the Opera. What is it about half steps that makes our skin crawl?

It opens with an auction. In a dusty, ruined old theater. A few uninteresting oddments, posters, a figure of a monkey... And a broken chandelier... the blast of an organ, a few notes of a descending chromatic scale and we are taken into the world of the Opera Popular.
It's a pretty classic story; Beauty and the Beast essentially. A Paris opera house is haunted by a mysterious genius in a mask, who is known throughout the story as The Phantom. (I know his real name from reading the book but I'm not going to tell you. Ha!) He is in love with one of the chorus girls, Christine Daaé and has convinced her that he is the "Angel of Music" her dead father promised to send her. He has been giving her voice lessons. She gets her chance to shine one night when the prima donna has a hissy fit and refuses to sing. (I might mention that the hissy fit was provoked by certain unfortunate and unexplainable accidents. *coughPhantomcough*) In the audience that night is the young Vicomte de Chagny, Raoul. He remembers having met Christine when they were children. This is a musical after all so he has to fall in love with her. (she gets to sing a lovely song called "Think of Me" which has nothing whatever to do with the Phantom story but it's supposed to be part of an opera and it's so pretty, I don't mind) This makes Phantom really jealous. The rest of the plot revolves around various complications with this rivalry. Phantom is the most elaborate of brilliant practical jokers gone terribly wrong. They took the basics and the best ideas of a pretty good book (I liked it anyway) and put it to the music of Andrew Lloyd-Weber, one of the biggest names in musical theater on both sides of the Atlantic.

That five note theme haunts and terrifies us through the whole show. What makes it even more terrifying is that the theme plays most often after Phantom has committed some dastardly deed and you realize that while you thought everything was finally safe and happy, He was there all the time... Watching...

"Beware the Phantom of the opera! He's there, the Phantom of the opera!"

There is never a moment of rest or escape. Even in the most romantic scene in the show; when Raoul sings (All I Ask of You) to Christine on the roof of the theater,

"...you're safe, no one will find you. Your fears are far behind you..."

Phantom is there, a sinister shadow, unseen by the lovers. He turns their own love theme against them, adding, of course, his dreadful five note theme. And Christine thinks he is an Angel! Ha!

Phantom of the Opera is an operetta, which means that many of the songs are named for the first line of lyric so you get really long titles like "Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again" (which I have nicknamed "The Postcard Song" very inappropriately considering Christine sings it to her dead father while walking through a cemetery) and all the big tunes get used over and over and almost everything is sung. So the music had better drive the plot or you end up with a glorified concert (or Cats =D ).

You'd never get away
With all this in a play,
But is it's loudly sung
And in a foreign tongue
It's just the sort of story
Audiences adore,
In fact a perfect opera!

(From Prima Donna)
Phantom has a wicked sense of humor, as a show if not as a person. I love the characters of the managers. They start out clueless and end pretty much the same. They have recently taken up show business after they got rich selling "Scrap metal". They're junk dealers trying to run a theater. No wonder Phantom tells them to stay in their office. But they try So hard. Even groveling for the 'Prima Donna'. The Notes scene in one of my favorites. We have had the big opening scenes and Christine has been a star and was then promptly abducted and taken down to Phantom's hideout under the theater. Notes sets up the plot to move on to it's next stage; Phantom tells us exactly what he wants and we know he will spend the next part of the show getting it.
We have already seen that Phantom is a very goal oriented person. When he sees his hold over Christine slipping with the arrival of Raoul, he immediately endeavors to win her back. He makes up for whatever he lacks in personal appearance with atmosphere. Christine gets a fabulous tour of the watery vaults of the theater while the two of them sing an equally spectacular duet which is "The Phantom of the Opera". In the midst of all the wonder and romance of his candle lit palace he sings "Music of the Night" painting an appealing picture of the life he imagines for the two of them. It also shows off his voice rather nicely. The next morning (Christine fainted at some point and Phantom kindly carries her to the big nest he has made for her. The guy should go into interior design, seriously!) his facade falters a bit when she gets his mask off him and we glimpse the maniac but also his vulnerability in "Stranger Than You Dreamt It". He starts out swearing at her and fades slowly to quiet sobbing. When you think about it, if only he wasn't so controlling and possessive not to mention bipolar, he might be a very tolerable person and Raoul wouldn't stand a chance. Raoul is just very lucky he has kept his sanity.

This Phantom is a great lover of beauty but is himself dreadfully deformed both in character and physically. He will stop at nothing to obtain the object of his obsession and the worlds recognition of her superiority to all other women. Since Raoul isn't making life size wax replicas of Christine, nor trying to kidnap her like Phantom is, we may assume that his affection for her is considerably healthier. At first she is willing to accept Phantom's "love" but between Raoul's much less possessive and more protective offer and Phantom's increasingly disturbing behavior, she can feel only pity and fear for him. But the pity is the key. This compassion for the mad genius combined with her love for Raoul saves them all in the end. Every one gets so excited about Phantom himself that they forget that Christine is the main character and hero of the story. She comes off as empty headed sometimes but there is some depth to her after all. She shows him a love that sacrifices itself and he recognizes that it is far above his own lust. Then he is able to do the honorable thing and let her go. He shows some good signs of being redeemable.

The whole show is a feast for the eyes and ears. Setting a story in a theater gives costumers the excuse to make really elaborate, beautiful costumes and the set makers also. Of course the music is the main attraction. Masquerade, The Point Of No Return, a sword fight in a cemetery, a crashing chandelier, romance, dancing, singing, danger, masks, mystery, an utterly humiliated diva... what more could you ask for in a musical?