By Stephen Johns

Photo by beembag from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s long-awaited (or at least long-rumoured) sequel to The Phantom of the Opera seems like a potentially disastrous idea. And it looks like we’re about to find out whether that’s the case: according to a report in Playbill (which was later picked up by the Star’s Richard Ouzounian), the sequel, bearing the Bond-esque title Love Never Dies, will “likely” have its world premiere in Toronto this fall.
Toronto must’ve seemed like a natural choice for Lloyd Webber and his production company, the Really Useful Group. The “original” Phantom ran for over ten years at the Pantages (now Canon) Theatre; it returned for four months in 2007, when it did sell-out business at the Princess of Wales Theatre. Phantom established Toronto as the world’s third-largest theatre centre; its success spawned numerous other hit musicals, including the Really Useful Group’s productions of The Sound of Music and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. (The former is still running at the Princess of Wales; the latter is returning this fall.) The city isn’t churning out hits like it used to, but given Toronto’s love affair with the original Phantom it’s an obvious location for the sequel’s premiere.
Lloyd Webber’s in need of a hit. Back when Phantom was selling out the Pantages, almost everything he touched was turning to gold—but Lloyd Webber hasn’t had a bona fide hit since Sunset Boulevard, and even that was a disappointment in light of Phantom’s success (its Toronto production, for instance, lasted less than a year). From a commercial standpoint, revisiting his biggest triumph is certainly intriguing. From an artistic one, it sounds like the worst idea since…well, since Lloyd Webber wrote a musical about trains and then staged it on roller skates (see: Starlight Express). And that’s the thing: the Phantom sequel is such a seemingly crazy idea it just might work. Its creators—led by Lloyd Webber, book writer Ben Elton, and director Jack O’Brien—are certainly accomplished. The original musical owed much of its success to Harold Prince’s staging; if the new creative team can approximate his original vision, there’s every chance Love Never Dies will succeed. Whether audiences will buy into it remains to be seen, obviously, but we’re willing to be cautiously optimistic. We still love The Phantom of the Opera, and we’ll give Love Never Dies a chance—even if we’ll be expecting the worst going in.