Masks for Days

Musical Erik or book Erik?

I feel like there's so much more to book Erik. The thing about the musical that kind of bugs me is that it cannot stand alone. It's counting on the audience to have some kind of familiarity with the source material and to let that prior knowledge fill in the blanks. My partner watched the Royal Albert Hall version with me and as someone who had zero familiarity with the story or characters beyond being aware they existed he was kind of lost at times and was legitimately confused about why Christine seemed to flip flop around her feelings for Erik and why Madam Giry seemed to know so much about Erik even so they never interacted. A lot of the ALW musical is banking that you either don't care about the details or you know the story already and are going to fill in those gaps yourself. Erik is no exception. We're not even given his name in the musical and his backstory is almost hand-waved. He kind of dumps all of his trauma and background onto Christine during the Final Lair scene where as before that she hadn't known him as anything but the Angel of Music and the Opera Ghost. Musical Erik....kind of doesn't exist and I don't know if we can even call him Erik. We get either the Angel of Music or the Phantom but the actual human part of him, the part that is "Erik" and "Longs to have a wife, and a flat, and to be like everyone else" is kind of reduced to a few lines here and there. His name is never once spoken and I sometimes wonder if that was intentionally done to make him seem more fantastical and less human. It's a little weird to me because the musical plays up the tension and chemistry between Erik and Christine so much but actually cuts down all of the moments that motivate Christine in the book to go back and sing for him one more time. The parts where he's apologizing, where he's remorseful or where he tries to be soft. In the book she remarks that he sang her to sleep. None of these exist in the ALW musical. Musical Erik doesn't actually have any moments where he shows her genuine kindness, just a sense of ownership and intense jealousy.