Broadway Shockers: The Phantom of the Opera Actually Closes on Broadway

As 2023 draws to a close, TheaterMania looks back on some of the most jaw-dropping stories of the year.

They said it would never happen, and yet, on April 16, we watched the chandelier rise and fall for the last time. The Phantom of the Opera played its final performance at the Majestic Theatre — show number 13,981, 35 years after its premiere.

The reasons for the closing made complete sense. Sales had gotten soft. Costs had gotten high post-Covid. The sets, a lot of which were built in the late 1980s, were wearing out. But even after an extremely unexpected surge in ticket sales that pushed the initial February closing date to that Sunday in April, no one really expected the music of the night to fade out for real.

The closing of Phantom of the Opera marked the end of several eras. It was the last remaining vestige of the British mega-musical invasion of the 1980s. Those shows, many of which are now considered classics, still do make the rounds: Les Miz, Cats, and Miss Saigon are perennially on tour, but in versions that feature smaller orchestras and less taxing design elements. Even before it closed on Broadway, Phantom itself has toured of late in a much more scaled down (read: cheaper) iteration.

Another epoch that Phantom‘s closing hastened the end of composer Andrew Lloyd Webber’s reign as the undisputed composer king of Broadway. Under two months after Phantom turned out the lights, Lloyd Webber’s Bad Cinderella called it quits after a short and disappointing run at the Imperial. Without that show, there were no Lloyd Webber musicals on Broadway, the first time anyone could say that since September 9, 1979, the night before Evita began previews.

While we’re unlikely to a staging the likes of Hal Prince’s original Phantom ever again, the Lloyd Webber canon is in the process of being reconceived by younger directors with similarly iconoclastic bents. This summer, the new Perelman Performing Arts Center in lower Manhattan will premiere Zhailon Levingston, Bill Rauch, Arturo Lyons, and Omari Wiles’s radical reimagining of Cats, which sets the show within the Ballroom culture of the 1980s. It’s heavily rumored that Jamie Lloyd’s modern dress West End Sunset Boulevard, starring a blood-covered Nicole Scherzinger, will come to our shores this season or next. Starlight Express is even getting another go-round in 2024, at the Troubadour Wembley Park Theatre in London.

As for the Phantom? Well, I’d imagine he won’t be gone for long. But he won’t look the way he used to. That era is long gone.