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He is.

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Magnifecent

Jeremy Irons, Beautiful Creatures, 2013

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Tomas Ambt Kofod and Louise Fribo singing 'I Nattens Dunkle Skod' ('Beneath the Moonless Sky')

Copenhagen 19 January 2013

It's just not fair, you know. They have a wonderful musical running in Copenhagen, and there isn't even a Wikipedia page for LND in Danish.

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Tomas Ambt Kofod singing 'Syng Endnu En Gang For Mig' ('Till I Hear You Sing') Copenhagen, 19 January 2013

The recording doesn't do justice to Tomas' voice and conveys none of his gestures and movements which are really marvelous. His Phantom is mesmerizing, dangerous, cruel, old and vulnerable in the way of Leroux's Erik, not ALW's nameless opera ghost. 

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Love Never Dies in Copenhagen (a review)

This weekend I saw Love Never Dies in Copenhagen, Friday and Saturday evening shows. Both times it were Tomas Ambt Kofod and Louise Fribo.

Just for the record: I like LND. I liked it the moment I heard OLC recording. I only wish there was any sense and the characters were at least a bit less awkward. I've never seen it live and I do not remember much of the videos, I never was able to follow the changes in libretto because none of them made sense. Here in Copenhagen everything makes sense, even sung in Danish which I do not speak, and the characters are real.

The libretto was revised considerably.

 The show starts with the Phantom sitting at piano, all alone in a dark empty space, between railings of their weird stage machinery. He is composing. Dissatisfied with the outcome, he throws away the sheet and puts his hand on the railing. And then he starts singing "Till I Hear You Sing". And his movements and the sound of his voice are those of an old, tired, overemotional man who is still able to impress with his voice. Tomas Ambt Kofod does not play a '(not-so-)young composer shamed by his physical appearance into a shadowy existence'. He plays Erik.

It becomes clear when we are introduced to Phantasma. It is a family entertainment now, with coy Edwardian dancer girls showing little above their knees in solid-black stockings and with a variety of friendly freak performers. Nothing demonic at all, ordinary entertainment for ordinary people. Something he is used to create.

It becomes even clearer when he meets Christine. Is he dying of love when he needs to lean to the wall lest he falls? He definitely has not much strength left, but he forgets about it each time he needs to impress. When "Once Upon Another Time" is sung, he tries to enchant Christine to the melody of "Seal My Fate Tonight", and grabs her possessively when she breaks the spell and tries to escape. He is both intimidating and fascinating when he makes her surrender. He hasn't changed, because a lover's kiss of the Brilliant Original and that what happened "Beneath the Moonless Sky" could have changed the nameless Phantom of the Opera, but not Erik. But it's not fear that convinces her, it is music. It absorbs Christine immediately as she begins reading the score, and reveals an unmistakable bond between the two of them.

After Gustave impresses Erik with his advanced piano skills, not just a simple melody, Erik tries to create a bond too. He leads the boy through darkness, singing of "Beauty Underneath" instead of showing it. No boat, no candles, no smoke - Erik leads his son directly into the inner side of his world, and resting freaks in night robes and no make-up wake up to greet him, and he is delighted, though some freaks look genuinely unpleasant. Erik is cautious now, he put Gustave to the test before taking his mask off, and yet Gustave is scared. Because Erik's face, half-intact as it is, is by no means the rococo seashell Mr Y inherited from the Brilliant Original. It is a face of a living corpse. It is better revealed when Christine is gone having promised she'd sing, and Erik takes the mask off once again in front of a dusty mirror and then turns to the audience. And what is he dressed in, caught working in his study? A patterned red dressing gown, a patterned red vest and a red tie.

Only when Erik confronts Raoul one can notice that Erik's voice is actually rather shrill, so expressive and powerful it is. Kofod alters his own voice significantly for the role. Erik also is very impressive: he throws away all the weariness of the age when he has to act in front of the audience, the same with Raoul as it was first with Christine and then with Gustave.

 Erik hasn't changed, neither has Christine. She is building her life on love that once has tamed the monster and has stayed with her ever since, even when he abandoned her, for she definitely loves Erik. And she loves Raoul too. And her love hurts him. But the love that tames monsters seems to be unbearable.

Yet Erik attempts once more to bear it. "Love Never Dies" is climactic. Yes, Christine's costume is ugly, and Louise Fribo does not go to B, but her voice explodes, so massive that she reels, and Erik almost collapses as he listens from the box, an actual audience box. I really feared he would.

They get to the final very smoothly: the interrogation is prompt, and searching brief and not chaotic at all. And here Erik finally faces Meg. The matter is that they never talk during the whole show and only meet when she takes Gustave away from the freaks' quarters. Meg is on her own all the way, tired to the point of breaking, getting nothing but her mother's poisonous words. Even when she recalls sweet memories of her girlhood in Paris, she sings to the suicidal melody of "Leave This Place Behind". It is not clear where she gets the gun from: Mr Y is definitely not relying on human weapons. He is comfortable in the world that he created, he goes and gets the only thing he needs to complete his conquest; his masked face is there on huge billboards in Phantasma. Meg and Madame Giry are not. Madame Giry holds the keys, but she is insecure from the start, and though she is right in all her guesses, she gets what she expects too. She also never speaks to Phantom before the "Devil Takes the Hindmost" quartet.

And Raoul only speaks to himself in the bar. He is not comfortable either, he's so different from his wife that he evades any her attempt to communicate, even when she hears the danger in the melody of the aria that Gustave plays and tries to warn him. He is not especially rude with his family, he's just too insecure in the world of entertainment they rejoice in. Their marriage made Christine lose music, but he had his own loss, adventure, and tried in vain to substitute it with gambling.

The final is set on the same platform with railings, and again the space is empty and dark. Erik sings hypnotisingly of beauty underneath, but it's ugliness that he sees underneath Meg's flawless appearance, ugliness that makes him accept her into his world of distortion. But he gets too absorbed into adoring beauty, and the tragedy follows for which no-one is responsible. Or Erik is.

He breaks. He stumbles away from Christine and falls on his knees. And he sings "Love Never Dies" making you wishing he believed in these words. But I don't think he will.

LND is the world of miscommunication and pure inability to communicate. The scenery is all iron grills and railings. Barriers are everywhere, there is even an adorned grill on the roof of the bar where so many people are trying to communicate. And bridges are narrow and dangerous.

Tomas Ambt Kofod and Louise Fribo act marvelously together. She looks older than him even despite his heavy make-up, but somehow it does not seems wrong. After all, Christine is still the wisest of the three. And when the aria is sung, she is young again, Little Lottie with her Angel of Music, though nothing has changed in her make-up. And Tomas does magic things with his hands, they are alert and hypnotizing. He could have been trained by Peter Karrie. I still can't believe he didn't read the book.

I never thought LND can be so believable.

P.S. Unforgettable stage door experience. Louise is all charm and Tomos is all performance. 

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while reading hapgood’s translation of the brick, i noticed that she uses the word “exterminate” quite often. i couldn’t stop myself from reading it in a dalek voice each time it came up.

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Dredging this up since it’s relevant to the current London cast. Old intro spot for the tv show Morning Makeover, in which Scott Davies’ Phantom tries to stop his ballet girls from getting makeovers.

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That's what arrived in the mail today! Yes, real printed photos of Peter Karrie! Neither ordered nor expected, came as a present from a wonderful person - a birthday present, as it turned to be. Peter Karrie for birthday. Almighty God, you have granted all the happiness a man could ever wish for!

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(via Twitter / SiShorten: Just found a great close-up ...)

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(via Twitter / SiShorten: 108 boys Ready to go ...)

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Katie Hall as the Corpse Bride (and Simon Shorten as Voldemort)

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Forgive me, I beg you, if you can I brought you nothing but woe

Sometimes I just hate Love Never Dies

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MEREDITH BRAUN - LOVE NEVER DIES (2012) (by meredithbraunonline)

She is perfect/ 

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Ramin Photo of the Day #148

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Ramin Karimloo’s beard appreciation post