Thanks to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s famous 1986 musical (with lyrics by Charles Hart), the story of the deformed phantom who haunts the Paris Opera House is well-known to modern audiences. But the roots of the story go back much further than that.
The original Phantom of the Opera was penned by French writer Gaston Leroux in 1910. And in 1925, Hollywood produced a silent movie version of the tragic tale with Lon Chaney Jr. starring in the title role with Mary Philbin as the beautiful opera singer Christine Daae.
On Saturday, Jan. 17 the Regina Symphony Orchestra will present a special screening of that film as part of the Shumiatcher Pops concert series. Similar to an old-style silent movie house before “talkies” came along, the RSO will provide the soundtrack which promises to be filled with all sorts of thrills and chills. Gounod’s Faust and Saint-Saens Dance Macabre are two of the compositions that will be performed.
You can find out more about the concert, which goes at Conexus Arts Centre on Saturday at 8 p.m., on the RSO website. And to close, here’s video from 2006 of Sarah Brightman and Antonio Banderas performing a song from Webber’s rock opera:
http://youtu.be/S88rkpPu8_g
