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Politics and the Reception of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera

2014; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 26; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1017/s0954586714000093

1474-0621

Amanda Eubanks Winkler,

Theatre and Performance Studies

Abstract This article analyses the complicated and conflicted critical response to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera within the political, economic and cultural context of the Thatcher/Reagan era. British critics writing for Conservative-leaning broadsheets and tabloids took nationalist pride in Lloyd Webber’s commercial success, while others on both sides of the Atlantic claimed that Phantom was tasteless and crassly commercial, a musical manifestation of a new Gilded Age. Broader issues regarding the relationship between the government and ‘elite’ culture also affected the critical response. For some, Phantom forged a path for a new kind of populist opera that could survive and thrive without government subsidy, while less sympathetic critics heard Phantom ’s ‘puerile’ operatics as sophomoric jibes against an art form they esteemed.