Home
Creators
Search Recent Random
Posts
Search DMs Popular Hash Lookup Tags Random
Importer
Import FAQ
Register Favorites Keys Review DMs Logout
Community
Telegram ThePornDude
Home Creators Posts Import Register Favorites Logout

The Phantom of the Opera at the Royal Albert Hall (2011) - Uncut Version (Patreon)

Published:
2026-10-31 01:37:49
Imported:
2026-11
Tags:

Videos

  • 774654055.mp4

Downloads

Content

Ramin Karimloo, Sierra Boggess, Hadley Fraser, Wendy Ferguson, Gareth Snook

Files

Comments

Tyler Explains It All

So, Sierra Boggess (Christine) is from Denver (where I live and grew up). She is very famous to us musical theatre Coloradans. She went to the same high school my brother did (many decades before, but still the same one lol) As a musical theatre composer and writer, Sierra Boggess is a dream. I’m currently working on a musical with the range of this show, and Sierra is the person I NEED as the lead. She is that amazing. Andrew Lloyd Webber has said she is his one of his favorite Christine’s of all time. And he was married to the original. It’s no surprise he asked her to do the sequel show in “Love Never Dies” in London.

Clare Manion

I’m so excited to see this! I had a recording of the original production that I listened to constantly for a while in high school. While I’ve seen the movie, this’ll be the first time seeing the stage play. (Thank you Adam!) And then, of course, for fellow band nerds, there’s this version: https://youtu.be/pCxuZBob_vA?is=Ah-trNn1FVLMcsmy

Youtalkingtome

Break a leg on your show! Boggess's voice was an absolute revelation in this production. What a talent.

Youtalkingtome

Ha! All my drama friends in high school played that recording nonstop. It's why I know so much of the music.

Actuarial Lurker

So when will Andrew Lloyd Webber pay Pink Floyd for ripping off the 1971 song Echoes as the main theme of this musical?? Actually the band declined to sue since they were so rich it didm't matter....but the two DO have the SAME 12/8 time signature, ascending and descending scales ,and chromatic structure.. Saw a performance on Broadway back in the early 2000s....

Tyler Explains It All

Speaking of Disney, Sierra Boggess made her Broadway debut as Ariel in the Little Mermaid. She originated that role on stage. She was the perfect Ariel. No offense to Jodi Benson, but no one beats Sierra

tiramisujen ≽^•⩊•^≼

Fun fact Sierra Boggess who plays Christine in this version is now currently playing Carlotta as part of the 40th anniversary celebrations! 😆

sharkey197

I saw a documentary once about this show and before it opened it was going so badly investors were trying to take their money OUT of the show, conviced it was going to flop . Then it went on to make history. That's showbiz.

AdamPacio.art

Quick note on Opera vs. Musicals -- it comes down to the microphones. Opera developed before microphones were a thing, and they learn a specific, exaggerated diction. They expect their voice to be mixed by the Opera Hall accoustics, and the exaggeration to the pronunciation sounds weird near their mouth, but out in the middle of the hall, it comes off as a perfect phrase. Musical voices, even if they're operatic 'style', are not the same as true Opera because their diction is not altered. The microphones are much closer to their mouth so they don't have to distort pronunciation for the hall to mix out in the middle. It uses a different kind of projection and enunciation whether or not you have a mic near your mouth or not. Microphones? Operatic STYLE, but not True Opera.

Pam Nail

This opened on the West End in 1986 and on Broadway in 1988. The original Christine in both productions was Sarah Brightman, who was married to Weber at the time (he apparently wrote the role specifically for her). The movie adaptation of this is not great, but a couple of years after this opened on Broadway, there was a miniseries based on the novel (not the musical, so any music was from the actual operas). The Phantom was played by Charles Dance (Tywin Lannister on Game of Thrones) and Christine was played by Teri Polo (Helen Santos on The West Wing). It was pretty fantastic for a TV movie in 1990. The silent film with Lon Chaney is still the best film version of the story. I'm also partial to Brian DePalma's Phantom of the Paradise.

Actuarial Lurker

"Yeah, the beginning of that bloody Phantom song is from Echoes. *DAAAA-da-da-da-da-da*. I couldn't believe it when I heard it. It's the same time signature—it's 12/8—and it's the same structure and it's the same notes and it's the same everything. Bastard. It probably is actionable. It really is! But I think that life's too long to bother with suing Andrew fucking Lloyd Webber. I think that might make me really gloomy." -Roger Waters

Aaron

The concert you watched of Les Miserables had a post performance reunion thing too but you guys stopped the video too early. You should go back and watch it. Emmy Rossum (Fiona from shameless) played Christine in the movie. The guy playing the phantom, Ramin, is incredible. He played Jean Valjean in the most recent Broadway revival of Les mis and got a lot of press For being “hot Jean Valjean” because he rips off his prison uniform to reveal his six pack Abs in the opening number haha.

Actuarial Lurker

some people call him Andrew "Floyd" Webber...

vala p

I'm going to watch this and I'm going to enjoy this and then I'm going to spend a ridiculous amount of time pretending I can hit the high notes in The Phantom of the Opera. Between that and the annual return of Mariah Carey, it's not going to be a pleasant few weeks for people within earshot of me. But I'll be having a great time.

san

I always enjoyed the little gothic tale at the heart of this: the grief stricken ballet girl, so lonely she trusts a voice in her wall, and the genuinely disturbing bond she forms with this virtuoso who has known nothing but abuse and rejection his whole life, and in turn only knows how to show her a very twisted love. I like that, as you both said, Raul kind of sucks a little, so while the better choice is obvious, it often felt to me more like a choice between safety/stability vs the volatile pursuit of her artistic passions, embodied by the Phantom. Her lingering behind at the end always gets me. By all accounts she is leaving him to this angry mob who wants him dead and you see her wrestle with it. It’s such a nice touch.

ScarlettMi

I always love that moment where the chandelier lights up and moves up into place above the audience. It’s a fantastic opening, especially live.

AdamPacio.art

Really glad you guys enjoyed the performance, all three hours of it. You were mostly correct about the Chandelier. Phantom on West End and Broadway both came to fame in the mid-80s because of the Chandelier. And the signature engineering marvel of the Chandelier had to be adapted because the Prince Albert Hall in London has a very large proscenium relative to a shallow stage, and the width of things combined wouldn't allow the mechanism of the Chandelier to function. So they had the Phantom shatter it instead. In the musical intro, the stage appears in disarray as done here, but the chandelier is literally laying to look like it's in separate pieces, on the stage floor. The old man/Vicomte was indeed the older Raoul, after Christine's death, when the old opera populaire sets were being auctioned off. When the auctioneer flips on the lights to demonstrate they refitted it, and the organ music starts for the intro, the stage is in darkness for a while and various pieces and sculptures and curtains move into place for the old theater splendor. And the chandelier gets "reassembled" and is dimly lit on the center of the stage, but when the music crescendoes, suddenly the chandelier quickly animates and rises off of the stage, out over the audience in the orchestra seats front and center, and then rises to where it hangs from the ceiling. In Act One's finale, after carlotta croaks, Phantom cries from offstage, "Behold, she is singing to bring down the chandelier!" the chandelier stars swaying and rocking in its ceiling mount, tipping from side to side until they announce Christine will play the lead instead. Buquet's death and the rooftop serenade with Raoul happens. Then at the finale of Act I, "You will curse the day you did not do all that the Phantom asked of you!" The Phantom is cackling in the rafters as the play within a play takes their bows. And then when the Phantom shouts "GO!" he is pointing at the chandelier, which immediately drops straight down from the ceiling and stops mere feet above the audience's heads. In the book and the silent film, the chandelier drop kills many in the audience, and THAT is the 'famous disaster'. This was mid-80s, well before any Spider Man safety issues. I lived in the Mid-Hudson Valley and knew 'of' Kevin McCurty, who was one of the set designers on the Original Broadway Production. He had designed the mechanical Elephant which originally featured in the opening scenes from Hannibal at the start. (It walked across the stage powered by actors inside and I think reared up at one point.) I don't know how long the Elephant survived in productions. But Kevin was a bit of a celebrity among the theater kids of the area, and he mentioned the safety checks and structural integrity checks that had to be done periodically on each and every bead on every strand of the chandelier decorations, and like all Broadway Fights, the drop had to be tested over an empty audience between or before every new performance, with a go/no go call from the Engineer and Safety Coach or Master Electrician. But with few interruptions, the Chandelier rose and fell every night, dropping in 'controlled' free fall at the end of Act I, right over the heads of the patrons who paid the premium for the most expensive seats in the house. On the Phantom's original backstory - Madame Giry mentioned the Maze of Mirrors he built for the Shah of Persia, but in the novel, that maze of mirrors was cleverly designed as a torture chamber for the enemies of the Shah. There was one central room containing a dead tree with a lone branch and a hangman's noose hanging from it. The angles of the halls and the seamless mirrors made it look like you were wandering through a forest where every direction you looked, you saw only the hangman's tree, which the Shah was basically saying, "You'll eventually die here, so if you want to end the suffering, you know what to do." The cruelty of the Phantom was learned in the Persian courts because that's what the Shah used his genius for. Until he was sold off like a slave into a traveling freak show that went to Paris, where he escaped and took refuge in the basement of the Opera Populaire. He was always caught by toxic shame and self-loathing because of his face and his mother discarding him to die. But he learned a lot of ways to kill people with ropes because in the mid-1800s, the British Raj and the new railroads and steam engines were finally reliably connecting Western Europe with Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Arabian Peninsula. The West was obsessed with Eastern Mysticism and mind-over-body disciplines like Yoga, the Fakirs, the whirling Dervishes, the Sufi Mystics, the Gurus of the Ashrams, the Zen Buddhist Monks, and of course, the Ascended Masters of Tibet and Shangri-la. So that was the original novel version of where the 'powers' of the Phantom came from. he could hypnotize you, which is how he taught Christine. He could master minor levitation, the toughening of the body to lie on beds of nails or walk on hot coals barefoot, the ability to summon flames, and of course with the "Punjab Lasso" of the noose, he could do the fabled "rope trick" where a short length of rope extends magically straight up, and stays taut with nothing holding the top end. When he snares Raoul in the final confrontation, Raoul is being hung by a three foot length of rope that magically is pulling him upwards by the neck, until he's on his tiptoes to stay alive. You can't exactly sing operatic style while you're being hung by the neck, so the play makes some concessions which makes the effect kind of get lost, because they can't maintain the tension or the impossible height. It doesn't exactly come off well, but it's canon to the book. The climactic moment when Christine kisses Phantom, she answered the choice with a new option. She didn't pick one over the other. She looked beyond appearances, saw a tortured, lonely soul in pain, and she gave it her unflinching love, trying to awaken it to compassion, knowing that the Phantom was too long hurt to make the first move. So she had to. It worked. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Sarah Brightman were married for a time, and she was his muse. The whole plot of Phantom is a sort of gothic romance love poem from Webber to Brightman, with he portraying himself as the misshapen Phantom, unequal to the love of his muse who he needs to bring his music alive, Sarah Brightman. When you can keep in mind that the original story came from the middle of the 1800s, suddenly Raoul is behaving as a perfect gentleman, Christine comes off as an incredibly strong heroine, and the whole thing becomes a very tragic love story all around. (Pay no attention to the growing pile of corpses in the lobby.)

AdamPacio.art

Both Sierra Boggess and Jodi Benson were trained in the conservatory program at Milliken University in Decatur, Illinois. My brother was a Broadway performer (dance swing) and now teaches in the Milliken U theater department, and says they have as their slogan, "Milliken makes mermaids". Sierra Boggess endowed a hall or a performing art center/program that bears her name in Milliken now, apparently. (I haven't yet been out to visit and tour).

JustALilTired

You are correct, the old man at the auction was Raoul. He and Christine were married for years and she had passed away so he is there in her memory. I may be in the minority, but I think the movie is overly criticized. Gerard Butler isn’t this caliber of singer but he performs the hell out of the role and the rest of the cast are solid.

acidnova

Opera is also generally entirely sung, going back and forth between recitative (the dialogue) and aria (the songs). Recitative tends to be very syllabic and essentially speak-singing (but are still fully composed - it's not like they're improvising how they're singing) whereas arias are proper songs with full melodies and will use a lot more melisma (multiple notes on a single syllable - think of Mariah Carey's style of singing). Musicals typically actually speak the dialogue parts and only sing for the speciic musical numbers.

Ben Gilbert

You may remember Michael Crawford as Hero in A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum..

Ben Gilbert

I've seen probably 9 or 10 film and television versions of the story. The 1925 silent film with Lon Chaney is the most iconic version of the Phantom. The scene where Christine snatches his mask off is one of the most memorable moments ever. Theaters were encouraged to have smelling salts on hand. The 40s version with Claude Rain was good but it changed the story quite a bit. There was a Hammer Horror version starring Herbert Lom and a gory film from 1989. And then there is the unique Phantom of the Paradise written and directed by Brian de Palma and starring Paul Williams.

Forty

Amazing reaction! it genuinely made my day watching you guys react to my favorite musical! This was the very first show I saw live when I was a kid, and it left a lasting impression on me, it was what got me into musical theatre. I'm glad you guys enjoyed it! A few notes to this overall production: Raoul is usually portrayed by most actors I've seen as sincere, somewhat naive, and genuinely sweet. Hadley Fraser's interpretation of Raoul here is actually a bit of an outlier in that regard. He comes across as pushy and almost impatient or annoyed with Christine at times, to the point where he gives off a bit of that villain energy you guys mentioned. That's not really how Raoul is typically played. So yeah, this was essentially a anniversary concert performance at the Royal Albert Hall, so while they did still use many of the sets, props, and effects from the original show, like the boat, there are still some significant differences. Most notably, the large LED screens used for the backgrounds. In the original, the candelabras during the boat scene, the gravestones during Wishing and many other scenic elements are all actual physical props and sets. Here, many of them are images projected onto large screens. In the original production, the chandelier is actually sitting on the stage during the opening auction and when the overture begins, it rises dramatically over the audience and all the way up to the ceiling, where it remains until the end of Act 1, when the Phantom sends it crashing down toward the stage. It's a pretty cool effect to experience live, because the chandelier really does swing over the audience's heads before hurtling downward and then swinging toward the stage. There are also a number of smaller differences here and there. Just to name a few: the mirror effect in the original production doesn't rely on cameras the way it does here, and I actually think the original illusion is much cooler. The stair case during Masquarade is missing, and during Down Once More, Christine and the Phantom travel back to his lair in the boat, whereas in this, they're simply walking through the rafters. None of this takes away from how great this anniversary performance is though of course. Especially the cast here is spectacular, Sierra Boggess and Ramin Karimloo are my favorite Christine and Phantom respectively.

Lola Lirola

Oooh, I think you will enjoy the podcast One Song! (if you don't know it already). They dissect one song per episode (duh) and they pull all the influences and they separate all the instruments, and it's truly fascinating. They did an episode on Led Zeppelin, and it was hilarious how the song was basically a Frankenstein's monster cobbled together from other sources. They recently did one on Dolly Parton's Jolene that was lovely, they just did one on Thriller... It's a truly great podcast!

Lola Lirola

There's a delirious 70s glam-rock version of this, called Phantom of the Paradise, where Dr Zaius from Planet of the Apes plays the Phantom, Marion from Indiana Jones plays Christine, and they're all in a sort of Studio 54 set, and it's incredible. Really recommend as a companion piece to this!

kosmickrab

I will not stand for this slander for the 2004 film!

san

I saw a SAG-AFTRA interview a couple years back (it was about a different show, can’t remember which) and Sierra was there so of course someone asked her about this performance. I still remember her response: she said she has a relative who is a surgeon and that some days he thinks ‘I did well, that was fine’ but somedays he thinks ‘God, I wish they’d film this for the books’. She’s a stage actress so she’s rarely filmed and she feels very fortunate that one of the times she wishes she’d been “filmed for the books” she actually WAS.

Roland

When the original Phantom was cast, most of us were thrown by the choice of Michael Crawford since we only knew him from the 1970s sitcom Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em, where he played the bumbling but well-meaning Frank Spencer, who was a complete vortex of chaos. In that show, which was a massive hit in the UK, Crawford demonstrated amazing physical comedy chops similar to Buster Keaton, while adding Mr Bean-like facial expressiveness and fantastic vocal (speaking) ability. But world-class singing talent as well, not many of us saw that coming. :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qmxbHctBPw Trigger Warning - the 1970s laugh track is extreme. :) + Recent interview with Michael Crawford and (the brilliant) Michele Dotrice who played Frank's devoted, but long-suffering, wife Betty. (Dotrice was married to Edward Woodward (the original Equalizer). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GDrUqz7UBc

nj

i was coming to the comments to bring up the miniseries. we recorded it from tv when it aired and i watched that tape over and over. i didn’t know who charles dance was at the time but, after looking up the miniseries today, i’m sure he’s a big part of why i loved it so much. and burt lancaster, whom i adored from rocket gibralter.

nj

a-mahzing.

nj

speaking of the les mis 10th anniversary, i was excited to see colm wilkinson among the phantoms at the end.

vala p

Oh man, I watched the heck out of that show it was everything my dramatic teenage soul needed.

nj

when kevin said they didn’t have the opportunity to see the touring company because [midwest], i had to look up the tour dates - i was sure i’d seen it at the des moines civic center when i was maybe 10, and surely anything that would go to des moines must have gone to kc too. well, no. we must have driven to see it in chicago. sorry for doubting!

vala p

I saw Colm as Phantom, It was truly one of the highlights of my life

vala p

Minnie Driver was fantastic in it

vala p

Phantom is a great show and the story ends there. Thank goodness ALW would never make a sequel that ruins the whole story

Ben Gilbert

When it opened on Broadway it made the cover of Time Magazine.

John Marnell

Now that you've done Phantom on the channel, you are in perilous territory. Somebody might commission a watch of the sequel, Love Never Dies. If they do, cancel their order and refund the money. There are very few musicals I would describe as going beyond just 'not my cup of tea' into outright BAD and Love Never Dies is the very worst of the latter category.

AmyAin'tMyName

Michael Crawford didn't sing because he was in another show at the time. He was saving his voice. I'd seen the reunion encore before on YouTube but never the whole production. It was fantastic.

Roland

According to the Googles, your guess as to why Michael Crawford didn't sing was correct: > Michael Crawford did not sing during the 25th-anniversary concert of The Phantom of the Opera at the Royal Albert Hall because he chose to save his voice and honor his performing commitments in another show. At the time of the October 2011 anniversary run, Crawford was starring as the Wizard in The Wizard of Oz at the London Palladium. Because he was actively performing in a demanding West End role concurrently, he opted not to strain or risk his voice by singing during the gala curtain call. <

vala p

I would watch the Cats movie twice before I watched Love Never Dies again

vala p

Ooh ooh, I know that production. Hannah Waddingham was the Wicked Witch. I have the CD somewhere

Balazs Foldes

Luckily, I am alone at home, free to butcher all the songs to my heart's desire!

Balazs Foldes

Oh, it was so good watching this along with you guys! I have not seen the 25th anniversery one yet, it was a great production! I also recommend, should you have a boring period sometime, to watch the 1925 (silent) movie with Lon Chaney as the Phantom. It is a pretty strong telling of the Phantom's story!

Ben Gilbert

Butler was better than you would think, but he was much too handsome for the Phantom.

Ben Gilbert

It was written and directed by Brian De Palma.

san

The creatives in that movie really dropped the ball with the Phantom make up. They could’ve make him look SO monstrous but just didn’t.