Love Never Dies

Love Never Dies is the sequel to the musical megahit The Phantom of the Opera (POTO). The great Andrew Lloyd Webber must have realized that all his musicals post-POTO collectively had a grand sum of 9 rabid fans (one if them is me, of course), save the awesome Sunset Boulevard. Can you even recall the in-between musicals? *Enthusiastically raises hand into the air* I can! I can! I can! When you have the hectic social calendar of a leprous skunk like I have, you would end up listening to Andy’s forgotten and forgettable melodies from Aspects of Love, Whistle Down the Wind, The Beautiful Game, By Jeeves and Woman in White. So this guy obviously has some entitlement issues. Surely, after his ATM-machine productions of POTO and Cats, his omnipotence should not be questioned?!?

Of course, we have heard of his POTO 2 ambition during his birthday bash (cum money-generating concert; moolah gushing in from CDs, DVDs, the works… no Andy action figure?): Dame Kiri Te Kanawa sang The Heart Is Slow To Learn; you couldn’t really make out the words as the world-renowned soprano sang pretty much only the vowels and left out the consonants. This tune ended up in Andy’s bottom drawer, only to be given new life as Our Kind of Love in The Beautiful Game. Well, if you’re a big fan of the tune (if you listen to it often enough, it will grow on you… in a parasite taking root kind of way), you shall hear it once more as the newly titled Love Never Dies. Andy clearly needs this song to be put in its right place – hence where better than the sequel?

Never mind that we thought Christine Daae ends up happily married to the dashing, albeit boring as a kitchen sink, Vicomte Raoul de Chagny. She’d probably be sipping tea, lifting her pinky, while practicing her French, which she so clearly needs to know, since she’s in France. Duh! Maybe Raoul would find more profitable pastimes than merely being the patron of haunted opera houses? We’d think about the Phantom. Ah, poor chap that. We would leave it at that. He was a freak gone wild, and too bad he died. Ho hum.

I got my closure then. Now Andy wants me to revisit the ménage-a-trois once more?

To be fair, any excuse to listen to Andy’s music is good enough for me. Will his new tune soar like his original melodies in POTO? Will they be writhing with passionate emotions like those in Evita? Will they be as opulently memorable as those in Sunset Boulevard? Despite his many many misses, I can’t help but hope that Andy will get a hit again.

There was a scathing online commentary which cruelly re-christened POTO 2 as ‘Paint Never Dries’. I say, give Andy a chance. If we do not impose our own expectations and leave our decades-long attachment with POTO, we may actually find ourselves on a magical journey instead. Perhaps one that gives us the same exhilaration as another production did many years ago, one that began with an auction. Lot 666…