Andrew Lloyd Webber has announced that he is writing a sequel to The Phantom of the Opera, the world's most successful musical, which is slated for a multi-city release in 2009.
The musical, Phantom: Love Never Dies, will be opening at the end of 2009 on Broadway in New York, in London's West End and in Shanghai all on the same day. The three-city opening would be groundbreaking, as Phantom 2 is the only musical to ever have simultaneous openings.
“I don’t think you could do this if it wasn’t the sequel to Phantom,” he told the Time of London. “We’ve been into the feasibility of rehearsing three companies at once and opening very fast in the three territories. The one which really interests me [in the Far East] would be China … I think to open ‘Love Never Dies’ in Shanghai would be an enormous thing.”
The sequel to Phantom, which debuted in 1986 with Michael Crawford at the helm, will take place a decade after the original musical on Brooklyn's Coney Island.
“It was the place,” Lloyd Webber said. “Even Freud went because it was so extraordinary … people who were freaks and oddities were drawn towards it because it was a place where they could be themselves.”
The Phantom, who mysteriously disappears at the end of the original musical, will reunite with his lost love Christine. The iconic roles have yet to cast.
"We are pretty clear who our Phantom is going to be — I can’t say who," Lloyd Webber said.
Phantom of the Opera is the longest running show on Broadway. The story was based on the novel of the same name by Gaston Leroux. In 2004, the show was adapted for the big screen starring Gerard Butler as the Phantom and Emmy Rossum as Christine.
