The Culture Wars of The Phantom of the Opera

When it premiered in London in 1986 and expanded to Broadway two years later, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera was not just a blockbuster thanks to its Gothic plot, operatic score, and the star power of its main cast (Sarah Brightman and Michael Crawford, who originated the roles of Christine and the Phantom for both runs), as well as Andrew Lloyd Webber himself. Rather, it became a leading subject of what we would now call “a culture war” over political, artistic, and cultural-historical questions.

Notably, the musical was reflective of the politics of the Thatcher and Reagan era, and by virtue of being the work of an English composer, it was also the latest entry in a wave of non-US productions threatening the supremacy of Broadway-native musicals and plays. When it opened on Broadway in 1988, it joined Starlight Express, Cats, Me and My Girl, and Les Misérables in the ranks of non-US productions dominating the Broadway lineup. As a result, when it premiered, parochialism-driven vitriol was expected on the US side. However, “It is too simplistic to suggest that British reviewers were uniformly supportive of Lloyd Webber and that Americans were uniformly hostile,” writes Amanda Eubanks Winkler in Cambridge Opera Journal. “Issues of politics, economics, taste and class implicitly or explicitly shaped the critical response to Phantom on both sides of the pond.”

“Webber’s financial success, his role as a player in the capitalist system, was entirely incompatible with true artistry.”

In the first place, Andrew Lloyd Webber was a noted conservative. “Lloyd Webber’s political affiliation was already well known in the mid-1980s, around the time of Phantom‘s premiere, as the composer had become a vocal advocate for Tory policy, particularly tax reform,” explains Winkler. “He also deployed his compositional gifts to serve the Conservative cause: in 1987, for instance, he provided music for Margaret Thatcher’s Party Election Broadcast to accompany a montage of Thatcher meeting with world leaders and engaging in other acts of statesmanship.” By 1988, when Phantom debuted on Broadway, the Reagan-era consumer culture and flashy opulence were on their way out, so the ornate, maximalist sets and the lush orchestrations felt off-key to reviewers. Using a review by pianist John Eaton in The Washington Post as a starting point, Winkler reflects on how “Webber’s financial success, his role as a player in the capitalist system, was entirely incompatible with true artistry—a rebuke against Reagan’s economic policies that sought to commodify the arts and saw little value in public subsidy.”

Commercially, the production was a success from day one, but outlets like The Village Voice chalked its popularity up to the middlebrow tastes of its audience, “implicat[ing] the artistically ignorant bourgeois consumers who made Phantom a hit,” writes Winkler.

By contrast, the UK press, especially conservative and Thatcher-adjacent outlets (including The Daily Express, The Daily Mail, and The Daily Telegraph), was largely supportive of Webber’s success, often serving as its de facto cheerleader, with criticisms directed at New York Times critics and headlines like “How Brits Keep Broadway in Business.”

“Certainly Lloyd Webber’s string of successful shows in the 1980s could be seen (and was seen by Thatcher) as triumphant exemplars of her free market philosophy,” writes Winkler.

The Financial Times went so far as to call Webber a “romantic, operatic composer,” a description that reflects the cultural debate that Phantom embodied and exemplified.

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Phantom also engaged with traditional art forms. “This is a work that foregrounds a dialogue with the past. It features an operatic, lushly orchestrated, almost through-sung score, and music heavily outweighs spoken dialogue during its two-and-a-half-hour run time,” writes Winkler. The individual songs also reference earlier music traditions: Carlotta’s “Prima Donna” is reminiscent of a Straussian waltz; Phantom’s own in-universe opera, Don Juan Triumphant, nods to Mozart’s precedent while also adopting a more modernist sound; and other tracks draw inspiration from Benjamin Britten and Meyerbeer. And as Winkler notes, “one can plausibly hear Phantom as a commercial repackaging of the past, a synthesis of the twin Thatcherite values of traditionalism and capitalism.” These references to opera and classical music did not carry a markedly political tone. Opera was largely perceived as elitist at the time, making it an uneasy fit with the populist rhetoric of 1980s conservatism, so Webber’s references to the repertory could be seen as a way to bridge the gap between past and present while also making a case for opera’s continued importance. Phantom’s operatic elements “may be more sophisticated than Oklahoma! and South Pacific,” argues Winkler, citing a panel of music critics and performers convened by The New York Times.

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The divide in how audiences and critics received these operatic references was straightforward. For those who enjoyed Phantom‘s music, “Lloyd Webber’s adoption of an operatic idiom was a comforting sign that ‘high’ culture could survive without government subsidy in Reagan/Thatcher’s unforgiving commercial marketplace, and that broad audiences might still derive pleasure from the music of a latter-day Puccini,” writes Winkler. By contrast, for those who did not, “It was precisely Lloyd Webber’s commercialism (associated with the unbridled capitalism of the Reagan/Thatcher era) and the score’s accessibility and popular appeal that were so problematic.”

Ultimately, this debate served as a time capsule of the 1980s musical scene. Starting in the following decade, megamusicals such as Webber’s most notable productions declined in both commercial and critical success, giving way to jukebox musicals, musical adaptations of Disney classics, and irreverent subversions of the genre.

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