'Til I Hear You Sing

It's taken me a couple of days to actually get to writing this post, just been a bit busy.

On Wednesday, Alex and I went to see the filmed showing of "Love Never Dies" performed by the Australian cast last year. I'd seen the show in London during the Summer of 2010 (as chronicled in my blog) I really enjoyed the show when I saw it then, but it really didn't get very good reviews. About 3 months later, they closed the show for some pretty major reworks.

One of the reworks was changing the how the show begins. In stead of a drawn-out reminiscing sequence, it is this song.

If you didn't listen to it, go do so now, please.

Yeah, I've got to say, I love this song.

I couldn't tell you if it is the voice, the music, or the text. They are all so interconnected and beautiful.

The Phantom, Ben Lewis, is fantastic. He does such a good job of playing the phantom. I felt like there was never any doubt that the phantom was crazy in this production, but at the same time, I still felt sympathy for him and wanted to root him on.

The music is beautiful. It's grand and sweeping and enthralling. I felt like it was such a good way to start the show of and make it so clear and real. And, if I'm not mistaken, Ben hits a high Bb there towards the end. Shivers? Yeah, they were there.

The lyrics are what I find the most evocative. There is such a raw longing, that it's tough not to connect with it. And yet, at the same time, there is this twinge of darkness. It's just... not... right. He sings of how he will never feel "more than halfway real" until he has heard her sing again. I think that most of us have felt longing and can empathize with the desire for what we feel like is impossible and unobtainable, but I feel like what makes the difference is how you handle that. For the phantom, the longing has eaten away at him to the point that there is nothing else in his life worthwhile. That's the point where I think you start to understand that something is not right with that man, but you still have this aching hope that he can find what it is that his soul needs. What a compelling contradiction of a character to have as your protagonist.

There are so many other tangents I could write about for this song, but I'll leave it at this and let you make analyses. May 29th can't get here quick enough.