A Modest Proposal: Subversive Phantom of the Opera Casting

When I was about sixteen, I was obsessed with Andrew Lloyd Weber’s hit musical The Phantom of the Opera. I’d seen it on a family trip to London, and to my teenage self, it was the epitome of epic: all the well funded special effects anyone could ask for, dashing romance, emotion in broad brushstrokes, spooky murders, soaring music.

I got my hands on a full cast recording (two whole CDs!) as soon as I could and listened to it over and over.

Looking back, I suspect that part of what I liked about Phantom is one of the things that rubs me the wrong way now: its motifs and metaphors strain to bust right out of the subtext, alluring as Christine’s Angel of Music to high-school me who loved feeling clever enough to notice the mirrors between the structure of classic operas and the musical or the interplay of imagery of angels, devils, heaven, and hell.

And I also didn’t see anything wrong with the love story. The language of all the stories I knew told me who I was supposed to sympathize with: men! The ones with the complex feelings! Of course our girl Christine was a cipher for innocence and beauty whose main conflict involved sorting out the right way to love the men in her life. The Phantom was the one with actual depth and tragedy.

When I re-listen to my old favourite now, I wonder how the sexism of the sequel could have surprised me so much [LINK]. It’s all there in the original: a plot based on two men fighting over a woman, the woman forced to choose who deserves her. Both men’s casual dismissal of the woman’s feelings except as pertains to their “victory” over the other.

(Yes, Raoul too — Christine’s worries about the Phantom take on a nasty resonance in these days when we understand that stalking is a terrifying, life-altering crime. But Raoul gaslights her every time she mentions it.

For example, in the lead-up to “All I Ask of You,” he tells her point-blank “There is no Phantom of the Opera” — despite the fact that she is almost breathless with fear and, I don’t know, there was a dead body in the rafters and scary shadows on the backdrops and notes from someone signing himself “Opera Ghost”* and Mme Giry, who’s worked there the longest out of them all, seems pretty sure that the Phantom is real, and Christine has claimed over and over that those days she was missing and no one could find her, yeah? A man kidnapped her and brought her somewhere among the caves underneath the Opera House which are places that exist, like, on the blueprints.

And after all that — not to mention the Phantom cackling audibly as he cuts down the damn chandelier — Raoul is still rolling his eyes in “Masquerade” when Christine asks him to keep their engagement secret because she’s terrified of the violent stalker who’s obsessed with her. Jeez, guy!)

Er… those parentheses got away from me. Anyway, it’s no mistake that each act’s set-up piece (“Notes/Prima Donna” and “Notes”) ends with the Phantom or Raoul threatening the other with “disaster,” with no mention of Christine or positive outcomes to her.

So what to do? There’s lots I like about the story despite its flaws. Luckily, this is theatre, which means every production can say something new.

That’s why I’d love to see a production that does two things:

1. Plays Christine’s fears and hopes as reasonable and real
2. Casts a “mature” woman as the Phantom

*record scratch*

Hear me out! No, not everything is made miraculously better by replacing male performers with female ones. But in this case, I think there’s a strong case to be made that #2 makes #1 easier to achieve by changing context and therefore meaning.

As an important sidenote before I explain in more detail, I want to be clear: casting a female Phantom would not help with the problems I mentioned above by changing the meaning of sexual violence. Any violence, including sexual violence, committed by LGBTQ+ people or within LGBTQ+ contexts is not any more acceptable than heterosexual violence. Sexual violence is wrong regardless of its perpetrator’s sexuality, full stop. Lady!Phantom is still wrong to kidnap, stalk, and control Christine and murder people around her.

That (very important point) said, this is how I imagine the way the Phantom would work in this scenario. She’d still dress as a man, complete with the usual cape and tux and wig (… spoiler for decades-old show?). But rather than the typical overblown Phantom make-up, the Phantom’s masked secret face would just be that of… a not-very-attractive older woman.

If you know the show well, or even if you don’t, you might object: isn’t the whole point of the Phantom that he is monstrously deformed? Even if it’s not, isn’t Joseph Buquet pretty clear with “Like yellow parchment is his skin/A great black hole serves as the nose that never grew”?

First of all, if you don’t think what Buquet says is par for the course in hyperbole describing older, female public figures one doesn’t like, you haven’t been paying attention to social media this US election cycle. But more than that, the key to the Phantom isn’t that he is “deformed,” it’s that the audience understands and believes that he and the world around him considers him to be superlatively ugly, to the point where the only socially acceptable thing for him to do is hide himself.

(That, I would also argue, was the real problem with the Phantom’s design in Joel Schumacher’s cinematic version. It wasn’t that he was too handsome — it was that the audience was supposed to agree he was handsome, because the director didn’t believe we’d believe in Christine’s infatuation if we thought otherwise.)

There are a lot of things this change would do, from give something more exciting for Mme Giry to play than weird loyalty to a murderer (she knows only too well there are few options for an ugly woman of her own age, genius or not, and she has a daughter who will one day be an old woman too) to highlight Raoul’s youth and frat-boy-ness. But the most important is how it would make the Phantom’s vulnerability something that Christine can share.

Christine and the original Phantom are opposites: the Phantom is an artistic genius who creates beautiful things but is ugly; Christine is a beautiful “thing” he would like to create. Her beauty and innocence are the pure opposites to his ugliness and guilt. He has agency, she has none.

But a female phantom could blur the stark lines between them. Suddenly, Christine isn’t just afraid of what the Phantom might do to her — she can also be afraid of becoming him. The Phantom experiences cruelty that shapes him into a violent recluse, but what if it’s cruelty over a feature Christine might someday share? The musical takes nobody’s feelings as seriously as the Phantom’s; if Christine’s fears and doubts are mirrors to the Phantom’s, her feelings become serious too.

If that doesn’t convince you, I’m not trying to insist the Phantom should be played this way or else it’s Wrong — that’s not how theatre works.

(Plus, yeah, you’re totally right, I should just do what I always do when I have a way I want to see a story and whip it into MS shape. Except so much of Phantom is music and vocal performance, and those are not things I’m very good at. Hmmm…)

The point is that a production of The Phantom of the Opera that played around with casting and design like this could be really interesting — a breath of fresh life into characters some of us thought we’d outgrown. And that’s what theatre has over every other narrative medium. So, you don’t have to agree, but, c’mon, the Phantom as an actress with the skill of Meryl Streep and voice of k. d. lang? Give it a think.

That’s all I ask of you.

(Sorry not sorry, couldn’t resist.)

* Another thing that has changed since my first viewing: what “OG” means.