The Pharaoh's Song

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The composer was a poor writer of dramatic music, he says. His characters tended to just kind of stand there and tell you about themselves,. They rarely was music used to actually advance character, advance plot. So it's that song that the Pharaoh sings is, you know, just a straight up kind of Elvis pestige.

The chandelier crashes for a final time as Broadway’s longest-running musical, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s extremely ’80s Phantom of the Opera, closes after 35 years and nearly 14,000 performances. Vulture’s Andrea Long Chu assesses its cultural staying power.

This episode was produced by Siona Peterous, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Victoria Chamberlin and Laura Bullard, engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noel King.

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