Farewell to "The Phantom of the Opera," which welcomed outcasts

To be a musical theater kid in the days before "The Phantom of the Opera" was a dark time. 

No one was wearing black, off-the-shoulder sweatshirts with artful logos on them. No one was humming Rodgers and Hammerstein in the school hallways or quoting lines from Stephen Sondheim at each other or saving yellow-framed playbills, at least that they admitted to. My school in rural Ohio certainly didn't have the budget — or ticket-buying audience interest — to stage musicals. 

My own love and experience in musical theater started young. I played Amaryllis in "The Music Man" when I was 9 years old, but that was a community theater performance, completely separate from my ordinary life as a kid: my friends, my school. The first rule of loving music theater was that you didn't talk about loving musical theater, not to people who didn't also live, breathe and sleep it. And that was most people. That is, until the Angel of Music rose from the depths of the sewer beneath the Paris Opéra House. 

"Phantom" has taken its last Broadway bow. After 35 years and 13,981 performances, the Andrew Lloyd Webber-composed show closed Sunday at the Majestic Theater. It was the longest run for a show in Broadway history. It also marks the end of an era that began in 1986, when it suddenly became socially acceptable, even celebrated, to love the thing you love  — and to be over-the-top, dramatic and earnestly you. 

"Phantom" premiered in 1986 at Her Majesty's Theatre in London, racking up "every major British theatre award," according to the Broadway League. Its New York premiere opened two years later with an advance of $18 million, a record at the time. The show would go on to win seven Tony Awards, including Best Musical. 

With lyrics by Charles Hart and a libretto by Lloyd Webber and Richard Stilgoe, "Phantom" is adapted from French writer Gaston Leroux's 1910 novel. It tells the story of Christine, a young soprano and the obsession of the masked, musical genius who lives secretly beneath the Paris Opéra House. Christine is an orphan and a mere chorus girl when the show starts but when she takes over a lead role in a performance at the last minute, the Opéra's new patron, Raoul, falls for her. Christine later reveals she has been secretly instructed in music, thanks to an "Angel of Music" mentor who has appeared to her in her dressing room. What could be wrong with that?

Like a soprano Alice, Christine is later lured by her Angel/the Phantom through the mirror and he leads her via gondola to his shadowy sewer kingdom. Christine realizes she's been kidnapped. Raoul saves the day. A chandelier falls down. And that's just the end of the first act!

Broadway musicals in the 1980s and early '90s often seemed to have one of these high-budget spectacle moments: the helicopter in "Miss Saigon," the boat in "Big River." Perhaps this was the way to draw the casual musical theater-goer in: something big that would go boom. 

But with only one very heavy lighting device, and a whole lot of memorable songs and characters – the backbones of any story – "Phantom" managed to become both mainstream and beloved. The themes were universal: love, ambition, acceptance or lack of. The Phantom, a complex figure, was the everyman outcast. Talented, misguided and rejected, he hid his scarred face beneath a mask. Many of us did that, on some level, especially those of us who felt different due to what or who we loved or the way we were. And "Phantom" showed us a different world, the one inside the mirror, the one inside ourselves. People rooted for the terribly mistreated, subterranean-dwelling Phantom, despite his villainous deeds. Nobody was rooting for Raoul.

"Phantom" brought musical theater to the masses. "Cats" had come several years before, but let's be honest, "Cats" is weird and always has been, long before the off-putting CGI movie version with regrettable roles featuring Taylor Swift and Judi Dench. A stray cat that ascends in a kind of feline heaven spaceship may be too far for an audience member who will attend a theatrical performance once a year, if that. So might be "Starlight Express," which had the distinction of being the world's only musical performed entirely on roller skates (musical theater nerd Misty describes the show in "Yellowjackets" as "Cinderella, except every character's a train."). Will it play in Peoria? Perhaps not to a full house.

"Phantom" was different. Its outrageous campiness was socially acceptable. Of course, the music was dark, rich and mysterious – it's an organ performed at an opera house! Of course, the Phantom was dramatic, confusing and volatile – they made him live in the sewers! Of course, everyone parades on stage in outrageous costumes at the start of the second act — they're having a masquerade! The Phantom shows up in a resplendent Red Death costume, very Edgar Allan Poe, and as the New York Times reported in their coverage of the final performance, so did one audience member. You can be brave at "The Phantom of the Opera." You can also be yourself.

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It's OK to cry at "Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again." Everyone does. And it's OK to want, as Christine does, both an artistic career and romance, both to be free of the Phantom but not to harm him. It's OK to want, as the Phantom does, true love and to be true to himself, despite how the world above has hurt him. For more than three decades, Broadway treated him — and by extension, us, the misfits who have always loved and been drawn to the romance, spectacle and heart of musical theater — as stars.