A scream shatters the music and all heads turn upward. The glittering, gleaming behemoth that stands watch from above sways its protective gaze. A monster – an evil genius – laughs from the shadows, bent on revenge, hungry for death and destruction. Panic bubbles up in the crowd as the enormous crystalline protector loses its grip. Sharp, fiery death descends from above, crashing to the earth, crushing its victims.
The chandelier falls.
This is a scene that plays out in almost every version of The Phantom of the Opera. The imagery of the tumbling chandelier has come to define the story. Many of the movie adaptations use it in their marketing and the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical infamously links it to its spectacle.
But in Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera published by Next Stage Press, not a single chandelier falls.
This change in Phantom lore is partially due to my desire to write an accessible adaption of the story. Many theaters that perform Andrew Lloyd Webber’s version must make specific structural changes to their stage to allow for the explosive end of Act One. Something that a small black box theater like Dog Story Theater could never accommodate. I want a version that any theater can perform. So, the chandelier never falls.
And history supports this decision. The chandelier in the Paris Opera House has never actually fallen. When Gaston Leroux writes the novel, he bases the chandelier incident on an incident that took place in 1896 when one of the chandelier’s counterweights came loose and killed an opera patron. It is no less tragic, but definitely not as spectacular as the whole chandelier crashing to the ground.
History guides my hands through much of my adaptation. Like Gaston Leroux, I base the Phantom’s deformities on congenital porphyria – a horrifying and historical disease. I turn Raoul’s Naval expedition into the ill-fated Lady Franklin Bay Expedition. And I set the events of the play in January/February to line up with the masked ball, historically held at the opera house during the Carnaval de Paris.
Unlike the trap I fall into when researching Gaston Leroux’s life, this time, history sets me free. Of all the obstacles placed in the way to adapting The Phantom of the Opera to the stage, the chandelier looms the largest. As detailed in my previous posts, the make-up and set designs offer their own obstacles, but they all pale in comparison to the chandelier. Yet somehow, this is the easiest to overcome. To lay the chandelier to rest, I simply have to ask a question.
“What if…?”
Gaston Leroux asks the same question when writing his book. “What if a ghost lived in the catacombs of the Paris Opera House?”
And over a hundred years after the fact, it leads me to ask a question of my own. “What if Gaston Leroux wrote about a ghost in the Paris Opera House to hide the truth that there actually WAS a ghost in the Paris Opera House?”
LON. But what about the chandelier?
From the Next Stage Press publication
GASTON. Yes, the famous chandelier. No, I did not forget it. But it is actually based on something that happened years later, completely unrelated to the Phantom.
LON. But it’s featured so prominently in the book.
GASTON. The book had to be dramatic and compelling. Sometimes the truth is anything but…
LON. So how much of the story was true?
GASTON. The story needed to be told, but the truth had to remain hidden for those involved. So, I embellished a few things here and there.
LON. Embellished?
GASTON. The truth is always an embellishment for whoever is telling it.
Writing always starts with the same question. Sometimes that question creates a barrier. Sometimes it breaks that barrier. It can send chandeliers crashing to the ground or into fictional nothingness. Either way, death and destruction follow. Either way, a requiem is performed for that glittering, gleaming behemoth.
So, when you’re faced with that barrier, created or broken, ask yourself…
“What if…?”