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The Show
Facts & Figures
• Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical version of The Phantom of the Opera is the most successful piece of entertainment of all time, produced in any media, and its success is continuing all over the world.
• The Phantom opened at Her Majesty's Theatre, London on 27th September 1986, so is now in its 24th year, and at the Majestic Theatre in New York on 9th January 1988.
• The Phantom of the Opera became Broadway’s longest running show ever when it overtook the record set by Cats with its 7,486th performance on January 6th 2006. It is the only Broadway show ever to reach 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st birthdays with the 22nd fast approaching in January 2010.
• The Broadway production played its 9000th performance on 17 September 2009.
• It is estimated that Phantom has been seen by more than 100 million people worldwide having been played in no fewer than 14 languages.
• The show has won over 50 major theatre awards including three Olivier Awards, the most recent being the 2002 Oliver Audience Award for Most Popular Show, an Evening Standard Award, seven Tony Awards including Best Musical, seven Drama Desk Awards and three Outer Critic Circle Awards.
• The Phantom of the Opera has been produced in 149 cities, in more than 25 countries around the world, including UK, US, New Zealand, Japan, Austria, Canada, Sweden, Germany, Brazil, Mexico, Australia, Holland, Switzerland, Belgium, Korea, Denmark, Spain and Russia.
• The original cast album of The Phantom of the Opera was the first in British musical history to enter the music charts at number one. Album sales now exceed forty million worldwide and it is the biggest selling cast album of all time.
• The cast album has gone six times platinum in the US, twice platinum in the UK, nine times platinum in German, four times platinum in the Netherlands, 21 times platinum in Korea and 17 times platinum in Taiwan.
• Joel Schumacher directed a big screen version of the show which was released worldwide at the end of 2004. It starred Gerard Butler as The Phantom, Emmy Rossum as Christine, Patrick Wilson as Raoul and Minnie Driver as Carlotta.
• ‘Learn to Be Lonely’, a new song written for the movie, was nominated for Bext Original Song at the 2005 Oscars. Beyonce performed the song at the ceremony.
• Phantom – The Las Vegas Spectacular opened in a purpose built theatre at the Venetian Resort Hotel in 2006.
Some technical facts about the original production of The Phantom of the Opera:
• The dazzling replica of the Paris Opera House chandelier is made up of 6,000 beads consisting of 35 beads to each string. It is three metres wide and weighs one ton. The touring version falls at two an a half metres per second. The original version was built by five people in four weeks.
• The Phantom's make-up takes two hours to put on and 30 minutes to take off. The face is moisturized, closely shaved and the prosthetics are fitted, setting immediately, before two wigs, two radio mics and two contact lenses (one white and one clouded) are placed.
• 2,230 metres of fabric are used for the drapes, 900 of them specially dyed. The tasseled fringes measure 226 metres. They are made up of 250 kilos of dyed wool interwoven with 5,000 wooden beads imported from India. Each one is handmade and combed through with an Afro comb.
• There are 130 cast, crew and orchestra members directly involved in each performance.
• Each performance has 230 costumes, 14 dressers, 120 automated cues, 22 scene changes, 281 candles and uses 250 kg of dry ice and 10 fog and smoke machines.
• The touring production takes 27 articulated lorries to transfer the set between theatres.