Mackintosh, his voice quivering, brought the show’s return into more personal focus.
“We must never forget that the arts are a great economic engine for New York.” “We now call the Shubert Organization the Schumer organization,” Webber quipped before the senior senator from New York, who helped to pass the $15 billion Save Our Stages rescue package. And inside, after the audience had donned complimentary Phantom masks for a group photo, Senator Chuck Schumer joined Webber, the show’s creator and musical theater giant, and Mackintosh, “Phantom’s” longtime producer, for a pre-show address.
Outside the Majestic Theatre, where lines of fans in Christine Daaé and Phantom costumes filed in to take their seats, guests like Joel Grey, Laura Linney, Liz Callaway, Charlotte d’Amboise, Michael Arden and a handful of Real Housewives, including Luann de Lesseps, Aviva Drescher and Leah McSweeney, walked the reopening night red carpet. I’m just happy to be here saying hello, seeing everybody who has made this show, and thinking about ‘Phantom’-what it reflects about ourselves and what it means for us as theater people.” “This is a classic, and it always will be. “Some things just last forever,” Lewis, who made history in 2014 as the first Black performer to play the Phantom on Broadway, told Variety at the party.
There, guests like Andrew Lloyd Webber, Cameron Mackintosh, Boggess, and Norm Lewis mingled before the show-and Lin-Manuel Miranda, ever the musical theater geek, traipsed around in a Phantom mask. “There is no Broadway without ‘Phantom,’” Sierra Boggess, one of the musical’s most loved Christines, told Variety before the show.Īndrew Lloyd Webber deejays the “Phantom of the Opera” reopening party.įriday’s reopening began at an intimate cocktail reception for close friends of the production in the back courtyard of Barbetta, a theater-district restaurant down the street from the Majestic. The chandelier inside the Majestic Theatre, Broadway’s most beloved ghost light, rose again on Friday evening as “ The Phantom of the Opera,” the longest running show in Broadway history, returned to its first performance since the industry’s COVID-19 shutdown and, with its soaring path above the audience, brightened the lights of Broadway to a brilliance and grandeur not experienced in 19 months.įriday evening’s reopening performance-a marathon event for the show’s guests, who made their way through cocktail parties, dinners, and after-parties celebrating the splendor of “Phantom’s” return-was devined to be one of the most special nights in Broadway history, and it was: Few shows in Broadway’s tenure have defined the commercial capabilities of theater and the stylistic characteristics of musicals like “The Phantom of the Opera.” The show, which opened on Broadway in 1988 and has never closed, takes its first post-pandemic bow not just as a monied buttress for the industry, but as a symbol for Broadway’s own endurance.
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