“I love you” is the last thing the Phantom says to Christine. The line was this: “Christine, I love you.” Seems pretty self-explanatory, right? Well, I don’t really think so anymore. A line which, on the surface, is fairly mundane and self-explanatory but which, this time, struck me as pivotal and integral to our understanding of the Phantom as a character. To further demonstrate just how geeky I actually am, I will now reveal that, during my most recent trip to see Phantom, the thing I walked away thinking about - parsing, analyzing, ruminating on - was a single line. You won’t be the first, or the last, person to do it and I’ll always take it as a compliment, whether you mean it as one or not.)

(Feel free to call me a geek, by the way. I hope I get to watch it another twenty times - or another fifty. And every time I see it, I notice something new - or deepen my understanding in some way. (Sorry, but that really wasn’t cool.) Anyway, twenty is probably about right. I’m talking about the stage version, mind you, not the 2004 movie version in which you basically had to squint in order to discern the Phantom’s facial deformity thereby negating the entire point of the story. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen The Phantom of The Opera.

The phantom of the opera 2004 sex