Great Night Out:  A safe bet
Best bit: take your pick from falling chandeliers to boats floating across the stage
Morning after effect: still humming along

'I'll only see it if Michael Crawford's in it' - well he isn't, so get over it - that was a lifetime ago.  Such a lifetime that Phantom now holds the record as the longest running (Broadway), highest grossing, biggest machine of a musical of all time on both sides of the pond.  Toe to toe with Les Miserables, which is ahead by a nose in London, they slug it out to see who can keep going.  My money's on the guy in the mask.  No wonder his Lordship has houses and castles doted all over, I would too if I got the royalty cheque from all the Phantom productions going on at the same time.

The Venetian in Las Vegas recently welcomed Phantom, The Spectacular, a shortened down non-stop roller coaster of a 90 minute show, which cuts out most of the time wasting luvvie-duvvie stuff and cracks on with the high energy, hydraulics driven action stuff.  

But here, at Her Majesty's Theatre London, is where it all began.  October 1986 and the curtain goes up on Andrew Lloyd Webber's biggest gamble of his life.  Graduating on from Joseph and Jesus on to grand opera style.  He wrote it for his wife, Sarah Brightman, a dancer from Hot Gossip, without partner Tim Rice he changed lyricists half-way through using first Richard Stilgoe and then Charles Hart, and held the nation in suspense choosing a TV slap stick comic as the Phantom (in reality a pretty safe bet if you'd seen Michael Crawford in Hello Dolly).  Hydraulics, dry ice, stage effects, you name it, Hal Prince put it into the production.  Everything to lose.

But some smart marketing meant that pre-releases of the songs went to the top of the charts before the show opened, so the audience knew what was coming.  Cliff got a hit out of his duet with Brightman and Michael Crawford became a serious player around the world as the Phantom conquering London, Broadway and pretty much everywhere else as well.  No show had ever had this much excitement around its opening and probably never will again.

It was the dawn of the blockbuster musical franchise.  Followed by only a few, Phantom leaves a Titanic wake behind it in which the rest wallow.  How long will it last?  Is it old fashioned and out of date?  Has time worn away its shine?  Find out for yourself is my response.  If you've seen it before, take someone along who hasn't, and see how they react to what is still a modern day masterpiece.

Audience
Phantom is suitable for audiences aged 12 and upwards, not because of anything that may disturb younger audiences, but this is a two and a half hour piece of grand musical, and will easily lose the attention of younger children.

Theatre
Her Majesty's Theatre is a beautiful theatre (owned by the Lord as well by the way) and is beautifully ornate and a perfect setting for this musical.  Sitting in the middle section of the stalls will be exciting, but the front of the dress cricle affords you a better view of all the action which takes place around the theatre.  If you're driving you may be surprised to know that a good portion of the left hand side of The Haymarket is single yellow line parking (as at Oct 2008) so if you arrive around 6:30pm you can often park right outside.