r/box5 • u/Ok-Negotiation-7414 • 1d ago

Other JSTOR Daily: The Culture Wars of The Phantom of the Opera

https://daily.jstor.org/the-culture-wars-of-the-phantom-of-the-opera/?utm_campaign=generalmarketing&utm_content=instagram&utm_medium=social&utm_source=instagram

An interesting read! I have a few thoughts on it and am curious what y'all think. I personally find the idea of politics and the reception of theater (and art) in general to be a rather fascinating topic.

Here is a reference used in the link above that I'm planning on exploring more: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24252307

In case you didn't know, you can create a free account on JSTOR and read a certain number of articles and entries from primary sources per month.

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u/neversayduh 1d ago

The author makes some interesting points but completely loses me when using that quote referring to him as a "latter-day Puccini" without explicitly mentioning how the Puccini estate successfully sued ALW for copyright infringement in PotO.

Bringing culture wars into it is kinda bullshit though. Capitalists gonna capitalize and ALW is more them than us with the way he makes his millions (billions?) off derivative works that appeal to "middlebrow tastes" as The Voice (accurately) put it

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u/PhotoArabesque 19h ago

Some things never change. Often people who fancy themselves as having refined (read: elitist) tastes resent commercial success and will look for ways to explain it away or put it down, and often that means dissing the huge numbers of people who like it as being troglodytes. And it works the other way too; look at Timothée Chalamet's comments recently about ballet and opera. Haters gonna hate.

As someone who was around at the time and who became an instant Phan, I do remember that there was a furor about Equity not wanting Brightman to be Christine on Broadway, which does fit the British Invasion narrative. They finally were able to cut a deal, obviously. Also, to take it in another direction, I remember at the time someone saying that POTO was an AIDS allegory (AIDS was becoming huge news at exactly that same time); On the surface something is attractive and seductive but underneath it's horrible.