I posted last week about different versions of the Phantom of the Opera, from Gaston Leroux to Andrew Lloyd Webber – which only brought us up to the late 1980s. Today I’m sharing Part Two of a trip through my Phantom collection, exploring just some of the many versions that came after Webber’s play. It really changed things in the Phantom world – and there are far more versions after it than before!
Click here if you missed Part One, and see below for Part Two with a stack of more recent Phantom of the Opera stories, including Susan Kay, Terry Pratchett, and not one but two novels where the Phantom meets Sherlock Holmes.
1. Yeston and Kopit’s Phantom is definitely at the top of my list of “plays/musicals to see.” Concord Theatricals handles the licensing. If you go to this site and scroll to the bottom, you’ll see a list of theaters that are planning upcoming productions. Currently, Indiana and Pennsylvania in the fall (which I wouldn’t count on due to coronavirus), but I like to keep an eye on things just to see if there’s ever a theater close by that might be doing it.
https://www.concordtheatricals.com/p/2753/phantom-yestonkopit
2. Used to be whenever I walked into a used bookstore, I’d look for Kay’s Phantom. A few years ago I found it. A hardcover. For $7. I don’t know how much they cost now, but back then, they expensive and hard to find and I felt soooo giddy.
3. The only one I have that you don’t is Phantom of the Auditorium from the Goosebumps series. I was a big Goosebumps reader as a kid, so I felt like I had to have that one on my shelf. Apparently there is a musical based on it, too, and I squandered my opportunity to see it last year.
Ooh, good information on how to track the play! I’ve been wanting to figure out the best way to keep an eye out for it. And I’ve actually read Phantom of the Auditorium, even though I wasn’t a Goosebumps fan…I think I got that one from the library at some point, just because. 🙂
I had no idea there were soooo many different versions of the Phantom. The story really resonates with people, and across a long time.