Andrew Lloyd Webber's ‘Love Never Dies', a continuation of The Phantom of the Opera story, will close at the Adelphi Theatre on August 27. It was previously booking through until January 2012.
The troubled musical (quickly christened ‘Paint Never Dries' during preview performances) opened in March 2010, then closed for a revamp last December. Original director Jack O'Brien and choreographer Jerry Mitchell have long departed the project.
In May, an entirely different production was launched in Melbourne, Australia. At the time, Lloyd Webber told the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper, “I would like this show to go everywhere because I think it's just the best. This is the show that should go to Broadway without any question.”
Hold on Australia… Spider-man The Musical might be heading your way!
UPDATE:
Mark Shenton, in his excellent blog, has commented on the bizarre determination by the “Paint Never Dries” cult to force the show off:
The “Love Should Die” campaign, which itself should finally die now, on the other hand took against the very idea of the show before it even opened, exerting a spurious sense of ownership over the Phantom and all it stood for in their sad, miserable lives.
While they have regularly indulged in an orgy of name-calling about the show, which most of them have not seen (though one told me she felt qualified to judge based on the bootleg videos she had seen of bits of it online), the moment anyone reciprocates, as I have done here previously, to call them on their fatuous objections to the show they go into aggressive meltdown.
That last thread drew a record 66 comments. Now I'm delighted that this Stage blog gets that kind of traffic, of course, but it is also disturbing, frankly, that they devote so much time and energy into one single pursuit and conversation. What will they all do now that the show is closing?
Graham Spicer is a writer, director and photographer in Milan, blogging (under the name ‘Gramilano') about dance, opera, music and photography for people “who are a bit like me and like some of the things I like”. He was a regular columnist for Opera Now magazine and wrote for the BBC until transferring to Italy.
His scribblings have appeared in various publications from Woman's Weekly to Gay Times, and he wrote the ‘Danza in Italia' column for Dancing Times magazine.
