Fans of Vicomte Raoul de Chagny

A black Raoul in the West End Live concert... and he's charming! (And ethnically extremely mixed, I'd guess.)

https://youtu.be/i8O2MRsjz7s?si=NzYqI_uPO9Oxf72-

For some reason I randomly checked on the Fantome-Stein site (crossover comic in which the Phantom is Frankenstein's Monster, Christine is a Goth chick and Raoul is Ambiguously Brown) tonight, and... after over three years of being "real stoked about the next few pages", the story has finally updated!
https://www.fantomestein.com/comic/chapter-4-page-36

I think I've finally worked out the rationale behind the final-act change to Raoul's dialogue in "Love Never Dies", where his insistence that he has bought tickets on the Atlantic Queen, which sails in an hour's time, is changed to which "leaves tonight" (thus removing any argument for Christine to leave with him *before* the performance in order to catch their boat -- there is now no logical reason why she shouldn't be able to have her cake and eat it, by singing for the Phantom and still departing with Raoul afterwards!)

It's because Lloyd Webber now wanted to bring Raoul back for the final scene -- I'm guessing that the assumption was that previously when Raoul leaves in a hurry during the performance he is taking a carriage directly to the docks in order to catch the "Atlantic Queen", and thus would already be on board at the time of Christine's death ;-p So presumably the departure was delayed in order to have Raoul still on hand.

(I don't actually see this as a problem, myself, having already written a story in which Raoul and Gustave leave, have an altercation with the Phantom en route, and *still* catch their boat, albeit by a pier-head jump!)

There's an entertaining argument that Leroux was consciously inverting the 'Gothic' sterotype: Raoul is the emotional, vulnerable heroine with an excess of sensibility who insists on pushing her nose into mysteries better left unexplored, while Christine is the strong, silent, reliable hero who thinks things through and has a Plan :-

I wrote this back on 14 February 2020 on a general writing forum in response to the question of how to write romance: Do you think it's counterproductive to pin down a specific list of "reasons why X loves Y" and vice versa? The thread recently resurfaced, which reminded me of it.

My instinctive response is that this simply isn't the way that love *works*.
( Read more... )
In canon, we don't know *why* Raoul and Christine love each other; there are various reasons why they *might*, but it's not suggested that any of these are the root cause of their relationship. For example, we're told that Christine grows up to be very beautiful -- but we're also told that Raoul experiences this as an impediment to his affections because he is shy and feels he can't aspire to her, rather than her good looks being the cause of his changed feelings. And we're told that they were inseparable as children, but it's when they meet again as adolescents that they become conscious of an extra charge between them, for no specific reason other than that they are older and aware of one another in a different way.

As adults they fall in love from a distance, and without either of them even consciously admitting it to themselves until circumstances in each case force a separate realisation; there is no 'why' or 'why now', there is just a 'now I know' (without being able to do anything about it at that moment, since the plot keeps them apart). ( Read more... )

It has just occurred to me that I don't *think* there is actually anything in musical canon to say that Andrew Lloyd Webber's Christine doesn't have a living mother -- just as musical-Raoul can perfectly well have both parents still alive (and in fact movie-Raoul apparently does!) ;-)

It's implied that Christine doesn't have a mother by the fact that only her father is ever mentioned in their childhood reminiscences, and of course it was almost certainly intended that her mother died when she was young because that section is clearly based on Leroux. But I'm not sure that there is any ALW dialogue that would contradict the possibility that Christine in the musical has a dead father to whom she is devoted, but a surviving mother out there somewhere.

(I think the fact that her mother doesn't turn up in the managers' office à la Carlotta and make a fuss when she first goes missing overnight does tend to prove that she isn't *living* with either parent at this point; likewise the fact that she goes to her father's grave when she is in trouble rather than seeking advice from her mother. Unless her mother is as eccentric as Madame Valerius, I think she probably doesn't know what is going on, which implies that she is either shut away in some institution -- an asylum, sanitorium, convent or even a jail -- or else is living overseas or otherwise estranged from her daughter. So from a practical fic-writing perspective it probably isn't all that useful as a plot suggestion...)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vRHgxviZJk

Apparently this was an Internet sensation nine or ten years ago; it's a little bit 'dog walking on its hind legs' for me (the impressive thing is not how well he can sing Christine/Phantom, but that he can sing both roles at all, even if neither is really comfortable), but half the entertainment lies in watching the 'greyed-out' characters reacting to the performance of the currently-featured singer. He does a doe-eyed Christine and a supremely arrogant Phantom (I get the feeling Nick Pitera is not an E/C shipper!)

Raoul spends most of the performance looking worried (and occasionally exchanging a confused glance with Christine), but in fact Nick's voice probably suits this role best -- he's a little lacking in the low notes, but that's less important than when playing the Phantom, while the singer can let his natural light voice ring without needing to go into falsetto.

Perhaps it's unsurprising that he also makes a pretty good Marius in his "One-Man Les Mis" compilation...

Some of the elements of Erik's character in Leroux are really very reminiscent of Tolkien's subsequent creation of Gollum; the tendency to weep and cringe and refer to oneself in the third person, to giggle in a nasty way, and of course to be consumed by longing for the unattainable within full view, to the extent of commiting murder to get it ;-p
And there's that scene where he paddles away across the lake with only his two eyes visible, which is an almost palpable echo of the subsequent scene in "The Lord of the Rings" where Gollum is spotted in the dusk paddling along after Frodo's boat.

I wonder if Tolkien ever did read "The Phantom of the Opera"? I'm sure there wasn't any direct influence involved (Gollum was created for "The Hobbit", which draws its imagery largely from fairy-tales), but "The Hobbit" was actually written only about twenty years later -- because "Phantom" is a historical novel, one tends to forget that it was written in quite a different era from that in which it was set.

He would have been about twenty and up at Oxford when it first came out, and not really in the right demographic to take an interest in that sort of thing -- by the time the film was made and the story acquired popular traction in the English-speaking world, he was busy making translations from Middle English and probably not an aficionado of Lon Chaney horror movies ;-D So I feel the odds are that he probably never read Leroux...

Philippe uses 'tu' to his baby brother and Raoul uses 'vous' back to him in return, which for some reason I find rather endearing as a reflection of their relationship ;-)

Christine calls almost everybody 'vous' almost all the time, like the well-brought-up young lady she is, but there are a couple of points where she uses 'tu' on Raoul in a reversion to childhood, not because she is expressing love for him (she mostly seems to call him mon ami (literally 'my friend') as a term of affection, which really doesn't translate, particularly when Raoul is using it to implore her in tones of despair...) but because she is annoyed with him: "tais-toi donc, Raoul!"

But she also uses it in her relief to find that he is still alive after his sojourn in the 'torture-chamber' ("Raoul! souffres-tu?") where it's clearly from very different motives.

Raoul uses 'tu' to Christine in pathetic appeal during his hallucinations about her in the torture-chamber ("Christine, arrête-toi!... Tu vois bien que je suis épuisé!": Christine, wait! Can't you see I'm exhausted?)

On the other hand, he also does so when he is yelling that he wants to kill Erik when they are on the roof: "Au nom de Ciel, Christine, dis-moi où se trouve la salle à manger du lac! Il faut que je le tue!... oui, je veux savoir comment et pourquoi tu y retournais!", and it is to this that she responds by snapping "tais-toi donc, Raoul" and "puisque tu veux savoir... écoute!" (shut up and listen if you want to know the answer) :-p
But after she resumes her account they are mutually back to using 'vous' again, even when some minutes later she asks him to kiss her: "si je ne vous aimais pas, je ne vous donnerais pas mes lèvres... les voici".

In the final scene I think Raoul uses 'tu' to Christine just once, in the line when he tells her that she should turn the scorpion and save the Opera. 'Va donc, Christine, ma femme adorée': 'go on, Christine, my darling'. But that's about the only time he gets to address her directly; he doesn't call her 'vous' in that scene either ;-)

I think Christine calls Erik 'tu' just once, at the point where she is begging him to swear that it really is the scorpion which will avert the explosion: 'me jures-tu, monstre, me jures-tu sur ton infernal amour' (you monster, will you swear by your hellish love) -- here she is clearly insulting him rather than attempting to appeal to him by addressing him fondly

It's just dawned on me that Raoul in the musical is definitely the son of a Vicomte rather than of a Comte -- when we see him in old age at the auction, the auctioneer calls out the name of the Vicomte de Chagny, and whether or not he has inherited his father's title at the time of the main action, he will certainly have inherited it by this point.

(Unless, of course, he does have an off-stage elder brother who in this version is not killed by Erik and peacefully continues the line of Comtes :-p)