Exclusive: Phantom has not closed for good – Really Useful Group

Exclusive: Phantom has not closed for good – Really Useful Group

By BY MATTHEW HEMLEY

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Group has moved to quash reports that The Phantom of the Opera has closed permanently and has insisted the “brilliant original” will be returning to the West End.

RUG president Jessica Koravos told The Stage that reports that Phantom had closed permanently, based on an interview Cameron Mackintosh gave to the Evening Standard, were wrong, and that the show was only being closed to allow works to be carried out to both the show’s set and the theatre where it has been performed for 34 years.

She said the musical would return unchanged, using the work of the original creative team, including director Hal Prince and designer Maria Björnson, and added that when the show returns it will “indisputably be the longest-running musical in the West End”.

“What Cameron was meaning to say is, we have closed down the production entity that has been that [production of] The Phantom of the Opera for 34 years, and closed down the physical production. Even before the pandemic hit, we were already in a process of going carefully through the physical production, some parts of it already having been decommissioned,” she said, adding: “There are systems in that set you could not get the replacement parts for me any more – they just aren’t made after 34 years.”

Full Story: https://www.thestage.co.uk/news/exclusive-phantom-has-not-closed-for-good--really-useful-group