The fandom of the opera!

A performance of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s long-running musical The Phantom of the Opera. Pic/Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre

Do you know what's a ‘Punjab lasso'; obviously unrelated to the Punjab lassi?

It's a weapon. While, I'm told, mentions of a similar/same weapon exist in ancient Indian texts, the Punjab lasso, for the said name, is exclusive to the fictional, French Gaston Leroux's novel, The Phantom of the Opera (1910).

Hence, the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical of the same name, based on it.

Wherein the villain Phantom aka Erik is especially skilled at strangling people with the Punjab lasso; a looped rope, like a hangman's noose. He'd picked that weapon up from his travels through India. Which makes for his exotic backstory.

We finally saw that fictional Punjab lasso at its imagined birthplace, i.e. the Indian sub-continent, given Webber's musical debuted, in Mumbai, at the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC; show ends March 30).

This is historic. Because the musical itself is. It's been on, pretty much in its original form, since it opened at London's West End in 1986. What's with the fandom around the Phantom?

Punjab lasso is the last thing Indians would've noticed in the performance.

The first, of course, is the sheer splendour that hits your eyes, as the curtain draws up, revealing grand, rotating sets - only stunning enough to match soprano singers hitting octaves so high, that I could sense their notes piercing through my ears.

At some point, I was convinced this music must be pre-recorded. Of course not.

Look closer to the pit below the stage, with the conductor thrashing his magic wands to musicians freely attaining crescendos and lows of a recreational drug. You realise why the singers feel like they're in a trance. As is the awed audience, on occasion.

Within all of this, does it even matter what The Phantom of the Opera is about? I think it helps, hugely, to know its synopsis/script, through and through, since the plot is not the point. And this may be true for all great musicals.

Once you're aware of what happens, on every scene - that ‘kunji'/key frees you up to simply observe bravura performances, stage-craft, lyrics that, in terms of music, is such a compelling cross between contemporary (a more electronic sound), and the semi-operatic, in the mould of R-H/Rodgers-Hammerstein (Sound of Music type) musicals. No?

Once home, and reading up on The Phantom of the Opera, what struck me is how the author Leroux was inspired by urban legends of his time.

There, indeed, is the Paris Opera House (Palais Garnier), the story's primary setting - which does have an underground lake where, as per rumours, a faceless man once lived!

The chandelier did crash inside Palais Garnier (in 1896) as it does in the book/musical. And Leroux was himself convinced, like others, that there lived a ghost in the Opera House.

Therefore, Webber's Phantom (Jonathan Roxmouth); obsessed with opera-singer Christine (Grace Roberts), while her lover Raul (Matt Leisy), for the most part, looks on!

That apart, what's broadly the ‘Beauty and the Beast' story of The Phantom of the Opera, if not every other classic/mythology, right?

From Paris abducting Helen in Homer's Iliad, to Ravan-Sita segment of the Ramayan; or Nosferatu, as dangerously drawn to Ellen, in the 1922 silent film, based on Bram Stoker's 1897 novel, Dracula!

Thought of the latter, because I'd watched that gothic, German silent film - right after catching Robert Eggers' Nosferatu (2024) - wondering, what a grand Broadway musical the original would make!

Just as I enjoyed the silent, The Phantom of the Opera (on YouTube), starring Lon Chaney, that is evidently closest to Leroux's novel.

Joel Schumacher's film, The Phantom of the Opera (2004), written, produced by Webber, is naturally closest to the musical.

Skipped that movie then. Will certainly skip it now. Because the musical, with real humans, for astounding live talents, is right before me.

And we've had enough of screen for entertainment - phone, laptop, lift, cinema…. What good is an escape, if you start to reside in it.

I know, you kinda feel the same way - observing the new ‘concert economy', with packed gigs and music festivals everywhere.

Or the crowds for The Phantom of the Opera. Many of whom would've paid several times the NMACC price to watch it abroad, if they scored tickets at all.
Webber's wife, Lady Madeleine, on the stage, after the performance, said it's "taken 20 years to bring The Phantom of the Opera to India."

Webber did produce a ‘Bollywood musical' Bombay Dreams (2004) for Broadway, with music by AR Rahman, that I watched. And was more depressed than disappointed.

That's because we've all healthily grown up on the Hindi film musical, that it did zero justice to. Which, in turn, is a reason, among many others - for why Bollywood movies don't run for several months in theatres (silver jubilee, etc) anymore.

As they did before. Back then, brilliant soundtracks, lovely song picturisations lured ‘repeat-audience' into theatres; who hardly cared for complexities in the characters/screenplay.

It's the same way that people go back to The Phantom of the Opera; again, and again. Making it the longest running show in New York's Broadway history - with its 15,000th performance in London's West End, that took place in 2024.

Yup, I could watch it again, too. It's the scale and the songs, silly!

Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets

@mayankw14 Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com

The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper