They screened both the 1925 Lon Chaney and the 1943 Claude Rains motion picture versions, but neither saw any effective way to make the leap from film to stage. He was aiming for a romantic piece, and suggested Gaston Leroux's book The Phantom of the Opera as a basis.

In 1984, Lloyd Webber contacted Cameron Mackintosh, the co-producer of Cats and Song and Dance, to propose a new musical.

7.1.3 Highlights from The Phantom of the Opera.

1.4 Design, direction, and choreography.

48 hours after the announcement in September 2022, ticket sales for The Phantom of the Opera skyrocketed. The Broadway production is expected to close in February 2023. By 2019, it had been seen by over 140 million people in 183 cities across 41 countries. With total estimated worldwide gross receipts of over $6 billion and total Broadway gross of over $1 billion, Phantom was the most financially successful entertainment event until The Lion King surpassed it in 2014.

The original West End production remains the second longest-running West End musical, after Les Misérables, and the third longest-running West End show overall, after The Mousetrap. Phantom is currently the longest running show in Broadway history, and celebrated its 10,000th Broadway performance on 11 February 2012, the first production ever to do so. A film adaptation, directed by Joel Schumacher, was released in 2004. It won the 1986 Olivier Award and the 1988 Tony Award for Best Musical, with Crawford winning the Olivier and Tony for Best Actor in a Musical. The musical opened in London's West End in 1986 and on Broadway in New York in 1988, in a production directed by Harold Prince and starring English classical soprano Sarah Brightman (Lloyd Webber's then-wife) as Christine Daaé, and Michael Crawford as the Phantom. Based on the 1910 French novel of the same name by Gaston Leroux, it tells the story of a beautiful soprano, Christine Daaé, who becomes the obsession of a mysterious, masked musical genius living in the subterranean labyrinth beneath the Paris Opéra House. The Phantom of the Opera is a musical with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, lyrics by Charles Hart, and a libretto by Lloyd Webber and Richard Stilgoe. 1988 Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Broadway Musical.1986 Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best New Musical.1986 Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Musical.

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