Phantom!

I was so excited for today! I love Phantom of the Opera! Even though its leading lady is kind of useless and it glorifies a sociopathic kidnapping murderer... the music is a part of my childhood and I'll always forgive it its faults.

One thing I was asking myself was, what language would it be in? Were all the performers fluent in English? Had they learned the whole play phonetically? Would they do the dialogue in Korean and the songs in English (because obviously it would be way too much work to translate all the songs into Korean, keeping the meaning and syllables and timing intact...)?

Uh, no. I was wrong. The whole thing was in Korean, even the songs, and they sounded great! I was very pleasantly surprised. Good thing I know the play backwards and forwards, so I didn't actually need to be able to understand what they were saying.

The only time the translation got to me was when they sang that refrain: you know, "He's here! The Phaaaantom of the Ooooperaaaa!" This is because they didn't translate the names, including titles, so it came out as, "Yeogi! Duh Paeeentum ob di Oooopeiraaaa!" That made me giggle a bit. The rest was fantastic, and it sucked me right in.


Some observations:

...Monsieur Firmin was kind of adorable. He and Monsieur Andre got the loudest applause at the end, for some reason.

...Every time I see this play, I kind of wish it had been about Meg Giry. She's always in the background but I get the impression that she's a lot more sensible than Christine.

...Madame Giry was AWESOME. She was wearing this heavy white makeup and had drawn-on eyebrows that made her look like one of those Japanese oni masks. I also wish she played more of a role in the story, since she's obviously the only one who knows what the hell is going on, but she somehow manages to miss all the big confrontations.

...The Phantom is well and truly deformed, thank God. None of this Gerard Butler I-forgot-to-put-sunscreen-on-one-side-of-my-face bullshit. (I love Gerard Butler, but he was a terrible Phantom.)

...My main beef with the ending has always been that I didn't really like Raoul that much. This production fixed that by casting a guy as Raoul who was really, really hot.

After the show I had some fantastic curry with Eunmi and then she headed home. We might meet up again on Saturday to go out with her friends; I await her Facebook message.