Love Never Dies, Failure of a Sequel (Blog #7)

My Part of the Creative Projects

Our project revolved around the famous musical, The Phantom of the Opera, written by Andrew Llyod Webber. The Phantom of the Opera was originally a novel by Gaston Leurox, being a tale about a urban ghost who haunts an opera and also happens to be a musical genius. Our goals for this project were to clearly be able to tell the summary, have research about the history of the play/musical, details regarding the visuals of the play, and the summary, information, and response to the sequel, called Love Never Dies.

The original The Phantom of the Opera, 2004 film version

My part of this project was to watch both musicals, create a response to the sequel, and research information about why the sequel wasn't as successful as the original. The reason for my part being so important is because Love Never Dies was a failure of a musical compared to The Phantom of the Opera, which is the oldest and most popular production in Broadway. One of the biggest reasons for its failure is because Webber was recovering from cancer, and could not make it to the debut of his sequel to arguably the most popular musical in Broadway.

The phantom (Eric) and Christine, from the re-edited and revised Australian version of Love Never Dies. This is also the version I watched.

One of the biggest problems in my part of the project was the fact that I had loved and enjoyed Love Never Dies, despite all the negative reviews and critiques that I had heard about. With some research I realized that the play that I liked so much, was actually the revised and re-edited version of the original "failure" sequel. I also found out the main reasons that this sequel couldn't live up to the success of its prequel. One of them was the fact that the song writer, Andrew Llyod Webber was diagnosed with cancer and couldn't make Love Never Die's initial opening, due to his recovery period.

Also, the Creative Projects gave me an opportunity to watch different versions of The Phantom of the Opera, and helped be get a better understanding of the musical and its sequel. I highly enjoyed listening to the opera singers and enjoyed the music written by Webber.