Rebecca - Charing Cross Theatre

Oh and just to add - their voices are sensational! Really looking fwd to this, think they've cast it brilliantly!

Well, since I'm on the other side of the fence, I DO think lyrics play a big part in how a show is perceived and received.

Forever my favourite/foremost example: Les Miserables. A show that has been a huge success worldwide wherever it was shown - except in Austria and Germany where it floundered three times in Vienna, Duisburg and Berlin. I'm purposely saying "floundered" because none of the three was a terrible flop, but none did very well either, certainly not compared to how beloved this show is virtually everywhere else.

And why? I personally still blame the godawful translation that sounded stilted and unnatural, often had the characters sing rubbish (making the audience go "what now?!" instead of being moved by a song) or simply changed vowels so that the songs sounded screechy. For example "On my own" with its low O's was changed to "Ganz allein" with its high A's and it changes the contemplative feel of the song to something that just doesn't sound half as pleasant.

The first translation of Rent (by the same guy who fancied himself a rock star and didn't care for musical theatre at all) was so godawfully bad they binned it later and did a new one.

So I wouldn't underestimate the effect clunky unnatural lyrics have on an audience that keeps wondering "what did she just say?" rather than immerse themselves into the plot. But I would agree that it's a secondary problem to getting people to buy tickets in the first place.

Re. the Video of "Mrs De Winter is me" - if you know you're going to have to lipsync to a very cleanly recorded track, trying to look as if you're live at the mic, then any possibility of finessing the lyrics with naturalism, a bit of back singing, or other 'in the moment' playfulness is lost, due to being:
     "riggid -ly - on - four - four - beats, ma - king sure it's safe to sync, scared you'll give the game a - way".

Or is that not how these are done? Either the video's just out of sync in its YouTube upload, or much of this is lip synced. Far better to properly act it, and not make these lyrics sound as terrible.

The problem is... They didn't realise they actually had to pay them.

I quite like the vocals (whether lip-synched or not) and I like Danver’s subtle mannerisms and expressions. However, whilst I have no issues with Lauren Jones’s singing, I don’t like the way she smiles after each delivery of the line ‘Mrs. De Winter is me’. She smiles in a way that is obviously gloating towards Danvers (slightly taunting her) and I don’t think this is in-keeping with the character (plus it’s a bit like Joan Collins smiling/gloating at Linda Evans or John Forsythe in a 1980s episode of Dynasty!)

I understand that Danvers has treated her very badly, but I think the song should convey that ‘I’ has changed and become stronger; when she sings ‘I am Mrs. de Winter’, it should be firm, showing her newly-discovered authority and show Danvers ‘she means business’ when she says this. To me, that is her arc. She doesn’t need the ‘bitchy’ smirk; this is not her character (despite destroying Rebecca’s cherished ornament during the song - another part of the show I’m not so keen on. Does she actually do this in the novel?) She needs ‘polite assertiveness’ to show the changed dynamic in the relationship. I think this is a truer reflection of the character.

I’m not sure if I’ve made my point very clear here. I can ‘see’ what I mean in my head, but apologise if it hasn’t come across in my explanation. I’m probably being too critical. Nevertheless, I look forward to seeing it in October. Hope it’s selling better than it was a few months ago.

True, it's not accurate to the book or film. But this is musical theatre, so I'm open to some exaggerated emotion. Earlier in the show Mrs. Danvers pretty explicitly tries to get Ich to kill herself, so I think all bets are off.

In the version I saw (Vienna 2022), Ich actually pretended to drop the ornament, took a moment to gloat at Mrs. Danver's panic, then really dropped it.

Yes, I saw that production too. I enjoyed it very much, especially Willemijn as Danvers, and I appreciated the mega-musical, if dated, style of it.

I, too, noticed the taunting of Danvers before dropping the ornament. I agree it adds to the ‘melodrama’ of it all, but I still think that scene is not true to the character. To me, she needs to show that she has become a stronger version of herself, with the idea that she is still a woman of integrity and kindness, but with the new-found ability to be assertive. In the scene as shown, ‘I’ actively and deliberately becomes spiteful. I get that a modern audience may want to see it this way, but it verges on camp when, in actual fact, it could be such a powerful (and still in-character) moment.

Anyway, it is what it is. The London version won’t compare to the Vienna version we both saw, but hopefully, it will still be as enjoyable - even if in a different way!

I actually always thought, from the novel, that "I" proved herself not to be a very nice person at a certain point in the story. I appreciated it as another of the novel's dark twists, to show a different side to "I" after it had got the reader on side with her for so long. I don't think that means that she has to do things like smashing ornaments or smirking necessarily, but I'm okay with her being unsympathetic, or at least generating an ambivalent response from the reader/audience, in the last section of the story. That's just how I interpret it though.

'This room needs a makeover' doesn't exactly sing...

Which really proves the point that it never needed to substantially decrease it's orchestra. It recouped years decades ago, way before I was even born and is constantly selling out each night. Phantom is the last show on the West End that needs to worry about making money. BTW Lion King has 17 musicals, still the same number from when it first opened. Wicked has 17 as well I believe. 

To be fair, it's only in the last few months that Phantom ticket sales have increased so much - genuinely was looking like closing notices would be imminent around 6 months ago... Performing at literally around 60% capacity...