Phantom II
Love Never Dies continues Webber’s darkly romantic musical tale
Love Never Dies continues Webber’s darkly romantic musical tale.
Meghan Picerno has the musical chops — and the resume — to play an opera star.
She has sung the lead role of Cunegonde in Leonard Bernstein’s Candide — with the New York City Opera, no less, and again just last month in a production in Barcelona — and the title role in Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. She also competed in Placido Domingo’s Operalia International Vocal Competition at London’s Royal Opera House.
So, yes, it’s safe to say she has been a good pick to play French soprano Christine Daae in Love Never Dies, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s sequel to his titanic hit The Phantom of the Opera.
Webber was not content to leave unanswered the important questions unresolved at the end of The Phantom of the Opera, when the half-masked Phantom disappears, leaving behind the Paris Opera House and Christine, his protege and love interest — including whether he, and her singing career, have survived.
So Webber and his collaborators — lyricist Glenn
Slater and their co-librettists, Ben Elton and Frederick Forsyth — bring the story forward a decade, and have moved the action from Paris to New York.
The show still hasn’t played on Broadway — American audiences are first seeing it on a national tour, which makes its penultimate stop Tuesday-Wednesday and Friday-Sunday (no shows on Thanksgiving Day) at Little Rock’s Robinson Center Performance Hall, under the auspices of Celebrity Attractions.
Ten years have passed; it’s 1907, and the Phantom (Bronson Norris Murphy) now lives among the joy rides and freak shows of New York’s Coney Island, where, though he has found a place for his music to soar, he has never stopped yearning for Christine, who has in the interim become a world-renowned coloratura soprano.
“It is a sequel, but it’s also a stand-alone piece,” says Picerno, who’s been playing Christine Daae (pronounced DAY-yay) on the road with the show for nearly 18 months.”So if you are a Phantom fan, you will be able to find out what happened to favorite characters. But if you’re not, even if you haven’t seen Phantom, you can still come and see a beautiful romance.
“And that’s what’s really special about this — in Phantom of the Opera you’re introduced to all these iconic characters, that literally everybody around the world knows, and now you see what happened to them. And it delves into the psyche a little bit more, so as a performer, it’s very interesting, because it can get to be pretty meaty.
“Christine has matured into this world-famous diva, what the Phantom had always hoped for,” she adds. “She’s married to Raoul, they have a son, but the marriage is strained — Raoul unfortunately developed a gambling problem, and they need money. So Oscar Hammerstein has asked her to come over to the United States to open his opera house — which was a real place, actually. They cross over to America and that’s when the story really begins.
“It’s not exactly a fairytale past for everything; like I think a lot of us have experience in real life — not everything has turned out the way you thought it would.
“The music, like the characters, is very mature,” she says. “It’s really complex, very beautiful, and Andrew has very publicly said it’s some of his best writing. He so aptly captures this dark, mysterious but beautiful world underneath. Coupled with the costumes and the sets, it’s really a feast for the eyes” as well as the ears.
Picerno says she couldn’t have taken on the role without operatic training and experience.
“Being on tour, it’s essential,” she says. “It’s absolutely needed to have classical training to have done this for the past year and and a half.” On the one hand, it’s a matter of stamina — an average week includes eight performances, and she still gives up the role to a cover once or twice a week. “And she’s supposed to be a 28-year-old opera star. I’m from the opera world, so I know what it’s like. Technically speaking, it’s a very hard thing, I wouldn’t have been able to without my operatic training.”
On top of that, she says, any Webber music is “very challenging — it’s beautiful, but it’s very challenging. You feel very accomplished when you’ve gotten through it all. He knows how to tell a story so well with his music and his rhythms and the melodies. The tone painting is absolutely exceptional, really brilliant.
“This piece, Love Never Dies, is very classical in nature, actually, and it’s very satisfying and very wonderful, because all the training that we get in the opera world on how to color, how to textpaint, enters into his music. So because of that it’s such a perfect marriage of someone in the opera world singing his piece. There are so many colors that he uses. It’s really rewarding and wonderful.”
The show is on a similar scale to the Phantom of the Opera tour that came through Robinson for two weeks in March 2017, when it was the first and biggest major production to fill the rebuilt stage in the newly renovated hall.
“Our tour is massive,” Picerno says. “Your average tour is six semi-trucks full of scenery and sets; ours is nearly 12. It’s a Broadway-scale show that happens to be premiering first by tour, and to be able to present it to and share it with an American audience for the first time is also really special.”
The tour closes Dec. 2 in Austin, Texas, and Picerno says she will will move on to a new project in January: “It’s something I can’t announce yet, but I’m very, very excited about it.”