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UHM... wait, what... like, authorized?

According to this site, Germany's largest theme park Europa-Park will launch a Phantom of the Opera roller coaster ride. it is described as a 360-degree experience where the visitors wears a VR headset, they enter a pre-ride room and finally the ride itself. It opens this spring, according to the plan. Someone on YouTube seems to have tried it out already, but no visuals.

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WAIT, WAIT, WAIT…..

Have I not told you guys this story?????

I must have mentioned it. I must have mentioned it at some point. 

HAVE I SERIOUSLY NOT TOLD YOU GUYS ABOUT MY HORRIBLE 7TH GRADE PHANTOM FIC????

Okay, buckle up, buckaroos, here we go. This might get long because I can’t shut up, but I’ll put some nice pictures in here to break up the wall of text:

The year is 2004. The film has just come out. I, a 13-year-old closet goth for whom everything is worthy of an overdramatic Shakespearean reaction, watch the movie. It is my first exposure to Phantom besides the silent film; I have never seen the musical before now. So I watch it.

And that’s it. I am gone.

I know, with the single-minded conviction of a medieval Christian martyr, that this is what I have been waiting for. This is now what I would live for.

Me, stumbling into the Phantom fandom, aged 13:

And it did.

IT DID.

But, like any 13 year-old in 2004 whose sole ambition was to be Amy Lee and also Anna Valerious from Van Helsing at all times, I had to rewrite the Phantom’s ending.

I had to.

And it had to be dramatic.

I actually remember sitting down to write this thing in my brown, spiral-bound, Mead 5 Star notebook at, like, 10 pm on a Saturday night after aggressively photosynthesizing the entirety of Fanfiction.net’s Phantom section on my dial-up AOL connection.

Above: Me at 13 about to pen a cultural touchstone with my hot pink gel pen while the Lizzie McGuire Movie soundtrack plays in the background.

I was ready, people, I was flexin’ my knuckles for a fix-it fic and I was full of whirling hormones and crying for no discernible reason other than the fact that I’m a crier, but also, I was 13 and “Erik is so lonely!”

The fic essentially went something like this:

The story plays out as usual, and at the end, Christine leaves with Raoul. Erik–-who looked like Gerard Butler in my brain because I had no other basis of comparison and also, I thought he was hot, thereby completely missing the “ugly” point, but whatever–-Erik breaks all the mirrors and cries and wanders down a corridor and cries some more.

Above: “He’s so SENSITIVE.”

The mob breaks into his lair, but they can’t find him. Even though, ostensibly, they should have been able to, because he really didn’t go far. I think I wrote that he “stumbled through a nearby corridor,” nearby being the operative word here, meaning the mob was either the worst mob in history or just really, really stupid.

Above: “The mob will never find me here.”

Okay, so the mob leaves after looting his lair (he’s got, like, millions of francs stuffed in the walls down there, can you blame them?), and at this point, Erik lets out the breath he’d been holding–-oh, also, I should emphasize again that this is Gerard Butler Erik, so he’s ripped and wearing that torn puffy shirt and those unreasonably tight leather pants and riding boots, even though he has not been anywhere near a horse. And I amended the film so that thick, dark Dracula hair was actually his hair and not a wig, because I wanted it to “fall wetly” into his–here we go, I definitely remember this–“piercing, ice-blue eyes.”

Above: Truly hideous. Look at it for at least eight more minutes to take in the full scope of abjection laid before you. You can even zoom in if you want. 

Actually, I think I gave him two different colored eyes à la Crawford, but I don’t remember what the other color was; probably red, let’s be real, because I was toying with a “HE WAS A VAMPIRE THE WHOLE TIME” reveal that then 13-year-old me thought was a stroke of literary genius.

So ANYWAY.

Ripped Erik is stumbling away and crying in his torn puffy shirt, his 8-pack heaving with his sobs, when he lets out the breath he’s been holding and collapses to his knees.

Then, faint with hunger–

(I don’t remember why he was faint with hunger?? I just remember writing that phrase, which is truly a baffling little tidbit because obviously, he’d been well-fueled enough to stage the whole Don Juan fiasco, and I hadn’t even established that hunger was an issue at play, here, so unless Erik was hypoglycemic and needed to keep his blood sugar levels up, I cannot explain his hunger fainting. My only explanation is that I was a fainter as a kid, so I just assumed most people passed out whenever things became vaguely inconvenient.)

Above: Fanfic Erik after not eating for about 2 minutes, which, honestly? Same.

–faint with hunger, he passes out on the banks of the underground lake and eventually rolls straight into the water.

Meanwhile, upstairs, the entire opera house is on fire from the chandelier crash. People are screaming. I wrote that “hundreds were dead” and that “mothers wept over their children,” which also concerns me in hindsight, because while I fully support introducing children to the arts at an early age, can you imagine trying to explain to your friends why you took your 5-year-old to see the horniest self-insert opera of all time, Don Juan Triumphant? 

Above: “I’ll find her if I have to burn down all of Paris and also this bastion of cultural and artistic nourishment, the very things I have sworn to protect and honor, but whatever.”

So the opera is burning down and Paris is in an uproar. Cut back to the cellars. Erik, still passed out, is now borne by the “furious currents”–I kid you not, I remember that phrase–of the opera lake–

(the underground, stationary, man-made lake, mind you, with no currents at all in real life; like, none)

–and his unconscious body starts to float out into the lake, spurred on by those furious underground lake currents with which we’re all so intimately familiar, until he drifts out from underneath the opera straight into the Seine.

Above: Turn your face away from the garish light of day.

Side note: I have never been to Paris, but I am reasonably certain that the Seine does not connect to the underground lake in the opera house. Which makes the fact that Erik floated all the way out to the Seine even more impressive.

Oh, by the way, the whole Seine was on fire.

I wrote some inexplicable science into the fic about the opera’s “oil stores” exploding in the chandelier crash fire and then leaking into the Seine, which caused an oil spill that subsequently set the entire river on fire.

A few things:

I had no idea the Paris opera house was as oil-rich as a field in Texas, who knew?

Hey, 13-year-old me, that’s not really possible because the Seine didn’t even connect to the lake underneath the–

You know what? Forget it.

Above: The Paris Opera House is the world’s leading petroleum supplier, followed only by Saudi Arabia.

So the Seine is on fire, and all of Paris is panicking, and here comes unconscious Erik floatin’ on down the river like the world’s ugliest, most ripped baby Moses.

Also, he was face-down.

Which should have meant:

Immediate drowning.

Immediate resuscitation, followed by violent choking and spluttering up water.

Death in some other, inescapable way because there’s water, water, everywhere, and also, it’s ON FIRE.

Above: Fanfic Erik, awash in a fiery river, just vibin’.

But Erik didn’t drown or catch on fire or die in any other inescapable way. Miraculously, as if guided by the hand of God, he kept on floating down the fiery Seine, FACE DOWN, without needing to breathe, apparently, because he was a vampire. Maybe.

But I hadn’t established that at all and wasn’t even sure that’s where I wanted to go with the story, so really, Erik was just some guy floating face-down in the river, miraculously not dying the entire time.

And this is where it gets so-bad-it’s good:

He just kept floating. He kept on going. 

On through the Seine out of Paris, out of France, and into–

–you guys ready?–

–into the ATLANTIC OCEAN.

WITHOUT WAKING UP.

AND WITHOUT DYING.

Above: Renaissance trade route with the New World? NOPE. This is roughly the route fanfic Erik went.

Does the Seine even empty into the Atlantic? Does it? I don’t know; I’m an American. None of us know anything about any geography, ever; we’re all idiots, and apparently, we don’t know anything about how DROWNING or BEING MORTAL work, because in my fanfiction, Erik just kept right on floatin’ all the way across the ATLANTIC MOTHERFUCKING–sorry, Mom, but sometimes a well-placed f-word is just great–the ATLANTIC MOTHERFUCKING OCEAN. 

This, I wrote, took “approximately six weeks.”

Which, sure, may have been a realistic travel time for, say, a steamboat, but for an unconscious Frenchman who is floating FACE DOWN in a LARGE BODY OF SALT WATER for SIX WEEKS without proper FOOD OR HYDRATION?

HOW?

Now, I did very well in science class. I did. You probably read that sentence and went

but I promise you, I did. I theoretically understood that it was impossible to survive such a journey.

But I just artistically decided that Erik could do anything he set his mind to.

Plus, I obsessively binge-watched I Shouldn’t Be Alive, and documentaries about parents who lifted cars off of their children in a surge of adrenaline that gave them superhuman powers, so I assumed that sure, an average 40-something-year-old guy could absolutely survive a six-week journey floating across the Atlantic Ocean face-down in a coma.

Oh, yeah, here’s another fun little tidbit: on his way across the Atlantic, he passed the iceberg that would sink the Titanic, because sure, why not at this point?

So eventually, he floats across the ocean and right into where all that tea wound up in 1773: Boston Harbor.

I remember writing something to the tune of “he bobbed into the harbor” which makes me picture his head banging up against a dock or Erik floating stiffly into American waters like a buoy.

Above: Oh, lawd, he comin’.

Yes, he was still unconscious. And face-down.

It’s nighttime when he finally drifts into the harbor, his sexy, Byronic antihero clothes still miraculously intact, and lo and behold, a hot Mary Sue (American, unnamed in the fic because I couldn’t decide between “Lena” and something else that was incredibly awful like “Persephone” or “Artemis”) just happens to be walking along the shores of Boston Harbor when she spots an unconscious man, face-down, in the sand.

(The Boston beach in my mind looked like a California beach, because that was the only beach I’d ever been to, never mind that Massachusetts and California are absolutely nothing alike other than being unbelievably expensive to live in and full of very loud, very opinionated people, heyo, same.)

She “exclaimed, her voice as pure as a bell”–yeesh–and dropped her “basket of violets”–what the hell? Who is carrying violets on a deserted Boston Harbor beach at, like, 2 am? –to rush over to help the man, her skirts rustling, her black hair flying.

And just at the moment she falls to her knees beside him, he wakes. 

Perfectly fine, mind you; just ill enough to be romance-novel sexy. You know. “Faint, delirious, heaving.” Whispering and/or moaning, “Christine.”

Naturally, the unnamed OC isn’t bothered by his hideous (it’s really not that bad, it’s more like mild acne, calm down like 85%) face, because her father was a former–

–here we go again, kids–

–a former Civil War general who was also a doctor who was also Abraham Lincoln’s best friend.

(You bet your ass I found a way to wriggle Abraham Lincoln into a Phantom fanfic. This is America. I can do whatever I want.)

Above: Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

So she was like, “I don’t care about your perfectly fine and objectively extremely handsome face, you are beautiful exactly as you are and also, I, too, am a trained doctor and also a singer and a dancer and impossibly strong, because I am able to lift up this ripped stranger and haul him over my shoulders and drag him back to my spacious apartments overlooking Boston Harbor.” 

Erik fell back asleep/into a coma at that point, just so you know.

And that’s where it ended. I didn’t know where it was going, other than “hot American Mary Sue nurses Erik back to health and teaches him to love again and they live happily, sexily ever after, but in America, and they open a school where Erik is the head music teacher and his hot wife is the hot Other Teacher and they love all the little children equally,” which still sounds more plausible than Love Never Dies.

Above: Live your dreams.

Thirteen-year-old me shelved the fic and then forgot about it, until I was cleaning out my room in 10th grade, found my handwritten magnum opus, and, so mortified I could feel my butthole shriveling up into my trachea, I shredded the whole thing.

Now, look, I’m not saying the loss of that piece of literature was equivalent to the fire at the Library of Alexandria, but, I mean….

…he floated across an ocean.

All for love.

(That was the tagline.)

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Um.

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The final performance ended as all the preceding ones had: a single character, Meg Giry, kneels alone on the darkened stage. Lit by a spotlight, she holds the Phantom’s mask, gazing out in fear and wonder. The last person alone on the stage for the final performance of this legendary musical was Sara Esty (GHS ’04). 

Sara recalled, “That final moment in Broadway history was transcendent. How this fell to me, I will never know. But life led me there.” 

Photo by Matthew Murphy.

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remember that time ben crawford went on reddit and just straight up lied?

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Paying our respects

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Throwback: The Phantom phan ball in Las Vegas, September 2012

The array of costumes worn was fantastic, the cast mingled and was absolutely awesome, and I got to know some people who means a lot to me. Some day, somewhere, we will have a reunion.

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Hi there! Two questions: 1. Do you how wide the lace/ruffles are in Christine's dressing gown's neckline? 2. Any clue which fabric/material are star princess dress' bust decorations? Thank you!

It’s one of those classic “depends on what versions you have in mind” kind of answers… Cause it really varies quite a bit. For the dressing gown I’d say a width around 15 cm / 6″ is pretty tandard. But note that many dressing gowns have a ruffle that is wider over the neck/shoulders, and then narrows in front and down towards the belt. It’s very visible in Harriet Jones’ West End one:

Many versions have a double layer in the ruffle - often a plainer one with ornate lace trim in the bottom, and a patterned one or lace on top. In these cases the plainer bottom one should be longer than the patterned/lace one, to add a bit of texture and richness.

As for the Star Princess bust decorations, you’ll find the whole range - organza, silks, lace, tulle. And beads and bling. Lots of it.

Australia/World Tour: blue tulle and silver tulle, both with star pattern. In addition several large plastic stars, and beading of pearls and crystals:

Recent Japan: tulle or lace, gathered satin ribbons, and wild amounts of silvery appliquées and fringe!

USA: Organza (?) and tulle, gathered and supported by horsehair braid. Decorated with silver and/or plastic stars, beaded stars and a bead fringe.

2000s West End: Tulle over organza, metallic trims, bead fringe, rich bead and silver stars and ribbons over the bust.

Early Hamburg: Layers of blue organza over silvery/metallic organza, as well as lace. In between various bead fringes and sequins, and on top silver stars.

Russia: Tulle over metallic organza, and trimmed with metallic lace trims. In addition a rich silvery/crystal bead fringe, and silver stars.

But all versions depend on layering, and mixing different textures, as well as blue, pink and metallic shades. The exact design is up to you!

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Hi Anea, hope you’re doing ok during this COVID crisis. My question is do you have any Christine star princess or Elissa photosets for artists to use as a Reference?

Oh, do I? OH YES I DO. Much due to the fact that these two costumes tend to be so specific and varied in different productions, and with lovely accessories. So I’m nerding a lot when it comes to these two. Here’s some:

STAR PRINCESS

Star Princess, World Tour style: https://operafantomet.tumblr.com/post/72240565957/the-australianworld-tour-star-princess-costume

Star Princess, Copenhagen style: https://operafantomet.tumblr.com/post/173429068147/the-star-princess-costumes-in-copenhagen-theyve

Star Princess, differences in various sleeve puffs/ruffles: http://operafantomet.tumblr.com/post/162858370237/from-design-to-costume-the-star-princess-puffed

Star Princess, bodices from around the world: http://operafantomet.tumblr.com/post/172162817027/just-your-casual-star-princess-bodice-deco-spam

Nine fairly different Star Princess costumes from around the world: http://operafantomet.tumblr.com/post/144286412232/some-fairly-different-star-princess-costumes-susan

The US Star Princess bodices: http://operafantomet.tumblr.com/post/107801167597/us-star-princess-bodices-whereas-theyre-very

New UK tiara: https://operafantomet.tumblr.com/post/612398440909045760/i-freakin-love-the-current-west-end-star-princess

Various tiaras: https://operafantomet.tumblr.com/post/172417282072/star-princess-tiaras-from-around-the-world

Various tiaras, another photoset: https://operafantomet.tumblr.com/post/166387974182/variations-in-star-princess-tiaras-around-the

Star Princess stars: https://operafantomet.tumblr.com/post/137575340782/star-princess-stars

Star Princess masks: https://operafantomet.tumblr.com/post/166669775702/star-princess-masks-backstage-jan

ELISSA:

Elissa backdrapes: https://operafantomet.tumblr.com/post/616347151567634432/elissa-backdrapes-christine-edition-lina

Elissa, false bodice continuation: https://operafantomet.tumblr.com/post/186773520087/the-false-bodice-continuation-of-the-elissa-skirt

Elissa, various tab designs: https://operafantomet.tumblr.com/post/181341980517/elissa-tabs-christine-version

Elissa scarf details: https://operafantomet.tumblr.com/post/616288458405806080/elissa-scarf-details-row-1-uk-row-2-world

UK tiaras: https://operafantomet.tumblr.com/post/615096689173446656/evolution-of-christines-hannibal-tiara-in-the-uk

Swedish/Danish tiaras: https://operafantomet.tumblr.com/post/180179413927/three-different-main-shapes-in-the-swedishdanish

US style tiaras: https://operafantomet.tumblr.com/post/153575583642/the-us-egyptian-revival-tiaras-christine-wear

Red, green or golden skirt? https://operafantomet.tumblr.com/post/614456655791390720/red-green-or-golden-elissa-skirt-whats-your

Also, there is a LOT more to be found in the general tags “elissa” and “star princess”, from nerdy details to overall views to costume making. :)

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Costume details from costume maker Tanya, chiefly for the UK Tour revival

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Sam Fleming explaining Maria Bjørnson’s POTO design to Playbill.

I might not agree with every single thing - some of it due to personal preferences, some of it due to different philosophy and traditions in different productions, and she has the Broadway view on things - but overall HIGHLY interesting to read her thoughts on it all. Some of it is really mind boggling! Also nice to get some things confirmed, like them going for the Degas sculpture rather than the Degas sketch that’s been published now and then.

What I love the most, though? She talks about these designs and the costume work as if Maria is still with us, looking over her shoulder… Bless her!

http://www.playbill.com/article/inside-the-tony-winning-costume-design-of-broadways-the-phantom-of-the-opera

Keep reading

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Oh Phantom Broadway. Thou art a legend. Forever.

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…aaaaand the internet just exploded, cause amazing stage-worn Phantom costumes are being auctioned off for charity

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Ethan Freeman (London)

Howard McGillin (Broadway)

Hugh Panaro (Broadway)

Earl Carpenter (London)

Ian Jon Bourg (Hamburg)

Jeremy Stolle (Broadway)

Norm Lewis (Broadway)

Ramin Karimloo (London)

Tim Martin Gleason (Broadway)

Masachika Ichimura (Tokyo)

A few are less aggressive but make me laugh. Please enjoy, @timebird84 and @isittheghost :)

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LAIRD MACKINTOSH, THOUGH

From his days as principal Raoul and u/s Phantom in Toronto (two first photos) to principal André and u/s + principal Phantom on Broadway - and then doing the very last performance of the original Broadway production… That is one for the books.

Phantom legend right there.

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🫢 I think I just found actual footage of a shapeshifted Sun Wukong on his way to steal yo girl 🤔

Edit: for anyone that doesn't know spider monkeys are very possessive and if they like you and wanna hangout with you they'll try to take you somewhere else to hangout alone 🥹

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Some Michael Crawford gems from the Behind the Mask documentary.

I love his dedication to the emotionality and sensuality and sophistication of the character.