Andrew Lloyd Webber dedicated the final Broadway curtain call of The Phantom of the Opera to his late son Nick — after its record-breaking run in New York came to an end.
The musical, based on the novel The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux, spent more than 35 years in New York playing almost 14,000 performances and reportedly taking in more than £1 billion in ticket sales as well as being adapted into a film starring Gerard Butler and Minnie Driver.
That remarkable run came to an end on Sunday night with Lloyd Webber dedicating the performance to his son who died from cancer last month aged 43.
He joined the cast — and producer Cameron Mackintosh — on stage for a reprise of the song The Music of the Night and told a celebrity studded audience at the Majestic Theatre how Nick had heard him write the music “when he was a little boy”.
The show tells the story of a deformed composer who haunts the Paris Opera House and falls madly in love with an innocent young soprano, Christine.
Lloyd Webber’s ex-wife Sarah Brightman, who played Christine opposite Michael Crawford’s phantom in the original West End production, said: “When Andrew was writing it, he was right there. So his son is with us. Nick, we love you very much.”
The show was badly hit when the pandemic lockdown closed New York’s theatres and Lloyd Webber said the production, which features an orchestra and a large cast with spectacular sets, was “probably” costing around £800,000 a week to run by the end.
Mackintosh said the “number of good weeks at the box office started to shrink” in recent years.
He told Variety: “Some of the really bad weeks, we lost a lot of money, particularly in New York.” But he predicted the show would return to Manhattan, saying: “Having been a producer for over 55 years, I’ve seen all the great musicals return, and Phantom is one of the greatest.”
The closure leaves Lloyd Webber with one show on Broadway — an updated production of his West End show Cinderella, now renamed Bad Cinderella.
The Phantom of the Opera still runs in the West End in Her Majesty’s Theatre, which is being renamed in honour of the King over Coronation weekend to reflect the new monarch.
