Elijah David

As I mentioned in last week's post on The Hunchback of Notre Dame , I've been listening through some of my favorite musicals again lately, along with favorite musicals suggested to me by others. Two of those musicals are inspired in whole or in part by Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera : Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera and his maybe-sequel (he can't seem to make up his mind about that) Love Never Dies . I want to look at what's good (and not so good) in these musicals. The Phantom of the Opera Phantom is one of those musicals that everybody seems to know about. At the very least, they've probably heard one of the show's more popular songs like "Music of the Night" or the title number. If you're unfamiliar with the story, it's the tale of an up-and-coming opera singer named Christine Daaé and her lover, a young nobleman named Raoul, as they are swept into the machinations of the mysterious Phantom of the Op...

Here's a little background for today's post. I recently started listening to the soundtrack from The Greatest Showman  (despite not having seen the film) and the music rekindled an old, oft-buried desire of mine: to write a musical. By way of research, I started looking into my favorite musicals (again) as well as those of my friends who were quick to suggest shows they loved. One of those musicals was the stage version of Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame . Despite trying to listen to other musicals as well, I've been in a bit of a loop listening to this production in the last few weeks. Between this and listening to The Phantom of the Opera  and Love Never Dies , I'm feeling a serious Beauty and the Beast reading/rereading marathon building. But that's beside the point. I want to talk about why I loved reading Hunchback  and why I love the musical. The Novel I will admit that for years I was more familiar with Disney's adaptation than with Vict...

I was listening to the soundtrack for Finding Neverland (the musical) today, and when I reached the song "Circus of Your Mind" a thrilling idea occurred to me -- this is the sound I would want in a musical version of Something Wicked This Way Comes  by Ray Bradbury. It's possible that the idea was slightly influenced by my listening to the soundtrack for the Addams Family  musical recently as well. In any event, I started wondering about what else I would like to see in a Something Wicked  musical. The Story For those of you unfamiliar with Something Wicked This Way Comes , it is the story of two friends, Jim Nightshade and Will Halloway, who were born within minutes of each other on the night before Halloween. Their friendship is tested when a traveling carnival run by the mysterious duo Cooger and Dark comes to town. The carnival (true to its trope) brings the citizens of the town face to face with their deepest desires and fears, usually with messy results (su...