“What was more important was, how did these people’s circumstances change emotionally?”

“The impetus was not just to continue the narrative, that was one of the least important aspects,” Slater said. Yet, continuing the story of the characters from “Phantom” isn’t the point of this work, lyricist Slater insisted. And who is 10-year-old Gustave’s father, really? (Hint: Gustave is musically gifted). Meg and her scheming mother are reluctant to see Christine come back into the Phantom’s life to displace her. Christine’s marriage is rocky, and her friend from the Paris Opera House, Meg, is now the Phantom’s lead ingénue. In “Love Never Dies,” the Phantom’s romantic obsession with the beautiful singer Christine Daae has not faded in fact, he plots to lure the singer, her husband, Raoul, and their 10-year-old son, Gustave, to his Coney Island lair. Being able to unleash it on this new audience is pretty exciting,” Slater said. He’s happy that 30-plus North American cities will see the show first, “through completely fresh eyes, without prior preconceptions. “I feel like Detroit really is the beginning of a whole new chapter of the piece,” said “Love Never Dies” lyricist Glenn Slater.

The show opens with the beautiful “Coney Island Waltz,” peopled with carnies and showgirls set against a colorful, shabby-romantic turn-of-the-century milieu. He now lives in a lair underneath an amusement park in Coney Island and is the reclusive impresario of a seedy vaudeville house. “Love Never Dies” takes up the story of the Phantom, the masked, disfigured musical genius, in 1907, a decade after he’s somehow escaped the Paris Opera House fire.

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