Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again

The Phantom of the Opera
Poster
Music	Andrew Lloyd Webber
Lyrics	Charles Hart Richard Stilgoe (additional)
Book	Andrew Lloyd Webber Richard Stilgoe
Basis	Le Fantôme de l'Opéra by Gaston Leroux
Premiere	9 October 1986: Her Majesty's Theatre, London
Productions	See list  1986 West End 1988 Broadway 1988 Vienna 1988 Tokyo 1989 Toronto 1989 1989 Los Angeles 1990 Hamburg 1990 Melbourne 1991 First US Tour 1992 Second US Tour 1993 San Francisco 1993 Scheveningen 1996 Basel 1997 Auckland 1999 Mexico City 2000 Copenhagen 2001 South Korea 2002 Madrid 2003 Budapest 2004 Film adaptation 2005 São Paulo 2006 Las Vegas Spectacular 2007 Melbourne 2008 Third US Tour 2008 Warsaw 2009 Buenos Aires 2009 South Korea 2011 25th Anniversary 2012 UK Tour 2013 North American Tour 2013 Hamburg 2014 Moscow 2014 Tartu 2014 Prague 2015 Helsinki 2015 New Zealand Tour 2015 Puerto Rico 2016 2017 Belgrade Various international and amateur productions
Awards	Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Musical Tony Award for Best Musical

The Phantom of the Opera is a musical with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyrics by Charles Hart and Richard Stilgoe. Lloyd Webber and Stilgoe also wrote the musical's book together. Based on the French novel Le Fantôme de l'Opéra by Gaston Leroux, its central plot revolves around a beautiful soprano, Christine Daaé, who becomes the obsession of a mysterious, disfigured musical genius living in the subterranean labyrinth beneath the Opera Populaire.

The musical opened in London's West End in 1986, and on Broadway in 1988. It won the 1986 Olivier Award and the 1988 Tony Award for Best Musical, and Michael Crawford (in the title role) won the Olivier and Tony Awards for Best Actor in a Musical. It is the longest running show in Broadway history by a wide margin, and celebrated its 10,000th Broadway performance on 11 February 2012, the first production ever to do so. It is the second longest-running West End musical, after Les Misérables, and the third longest-running West End show overall, after The Mousetrap.

With total estimated worldwide gross receipts of over $5.6 billion and total Broadway gross of $845 million,Phantom was the most financially successful entertainment event until The Lion King passed it in 2014. By 2011, it had been seen by over 130 million people in 145 cities across 27 countries, and continues to play in London and New York.

In 1984, Lloyd Webber contacted Cameron Mackintosh, the co-producer of Cats and Song and Dance, to propose a new musical. He was aiming for a romantic piece, and suggested Gaston Leroux's book The Phantom of the Opera as a basis. They screened both the 1925 Lon Chaney and the 1943 Claude Rains motion picture versions, but neither saw an effective way to make the leap from film to stage. Later, in New York, Lloyd Webber found a second-hand copy of the original, long-out-of-print Leroux novel, which supplied the necessary inspiration to develop a musical: "I was actually writing something else at the time, and I realised that the reason I was hung up was because I was trying to write a major romantic story, and I had been trying to do that ever since I started my career. Then with the Phantom, it was there!"

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Wikipedia