Current music:	Anna playing "On the Steppes of Central Asia" on oboe
Entry tags:	poto

Even Phantom of Manhattan would have been better than this

From realcdaae, who is sputtering in horror, the plot:

As for "Phantom . . . Once Upon Another Time": It's set in 1906 in Coney Island. The Phantom, aka Erik, having fled Paris, is running a freak show. At night, he crawls into his lair and makes love to an automaton that looks like Christine.

Christine, meanwhile, has become a famous opera singer. But she's fallen on hard times because her husband, Raoul, has squandered their fortune. So she's accepted a high-paying gig from a mysterious impresario to open a new amusement park. On her first night in New York, she draws back the curtain in her hotel suite and comes face to face with her new employer - flash of lightning, crash of chords - the Phantom!

Christine has a child, Gustave, but is his father Raoul or the Phantom? I can't tell you because no one's seen the second act yet.

But I can tell you that Raoul, who was so handsome in "The Phantom," is now a drunken wreck.

I have a few new readers perhaps less versed in Phantom of the Opera lore, so a bit of background. Once Upon Another Time is loosely based on action writer Frederick Forsythe's "approved" sequel to Andrew Lloyd-Webber's Phantom of the Opera stage play. In The Phantom of Manhattan, the Phantom has fled to New York, where he spends some time as an automaton-maker on Coney Island, and later becomes an engineering enterpreneur with a big corporation and a penthouse apartment. Like Cornelius Vanderbilt, who was snubbed by NY opera high society and denied a box in the "old" NY opera house, and who built the Metropolitan Opera to spite the snobs, Erik has built a splendid opera with which to lure his lost love Christine to the New World.

Christine obligingly shows up with her dutiful but sadly impotent husband Raoul in tow. Raoul has lost his manhood in some street fight where, to his credit, he was doing something noble (although I can't exactly remember what.) Anyway, nobility is in character for him, so that's not so bad. However, I hate this "impotent" or "sexless" or "banished from Christine's bedroom" Raoul theme, because what it boils down to is that Raoul - by having sex with his wife - is somehow Profaning the Sacred Vessel Worthy Only to Carry Erik's Very Special Sperm. In fact, irkage over that theme was one of the spurs which led me to write Phantoms of the Past, so that I could give Christine an Erik Love Child *and* a good sex life with Raoul too.

So, in the grand old tradition, also along for the ride is Christine's love child by Erik - nominally Raoul's, but sired upon Christine under unexplained circumstances one really can't picture in the musical.

Now it is no secret that I am highly partial to Raoul as a Phantom character - even in the ALW versions, especially stage!Raoul, whom I think is brave and loyal and full of warm masculine sex appeal. It is true that ALW is not kind to Raoul in his stage play, making him at the end a decrepit and wheelchair-bound wreck who clings to souvenirs of the past. However, in POM, at least he has stayed by Christine, even though his injury has made it perfectly clear that her son is not his.

We knew from press releases earlier that ALW did fire Frederick Forsythe as a script writer, and that there would be major changes from the POM storyline to Once Upon Another Time (OUAT.) But it's terribly disappointing that those changes have to take the hackneyed, cliched, fourteen-year-old-phanbrat route of Drunken!Abusive!Profligate!Gambling!Raoul.

As for the Phantom having a Christine!Real Doll, that's just too full of LULZ to be believed. I know some of the more talented among you can come up with a really obnoxious macro / motivational poster / movie poster to riff off Lars and the Real Girl. (You know who you are.) Or maybe ALW has been reading this chock-full of meta-y goodness thread on "Erik and the Real Girl," started by the astute sabrinafair2.)

ETA: my_daroga has the Best Crackfic Explanation ever. I am going to poke her repeatedly to encourage her to write it.