My Son Blew Chunks at The Phantom of The Opera

Last night I took my nine-year-old to see The Phantom of the Opera at the Pantages. I was hoping it would resonate with him in the same electrifying way it did for me when I saw it at fifteen. I immediately needed to see it a bunch of more times or I would simply wither away and die.

Does it hold up all these years later, I wondered, as the stage filled with mist and candelabras and the orchestra pit pumped out melodramatic 80s synth pop?

For me it was a resounding YES. I was bawling my eyes out by the end. So much so that my son kept looking over at me.

“I’m okay,” I choked out between sobs.

I wished I was no longer in a theater and instead alone, away from my concerned son, so I could just let it all out.

The musical uncorked me. And I didn’t even see it coming! I have seen it repeatedly and yet I had forgotten how moving the ending is.

I can barely think of him, curled on the ground, bereft, singing, “Christine I love…. youuuuuuuuuuuuuu” without wailing. And the monkey!

That musical awakened something in me when I saw it as a teen. It was my Twilight. I was in love with the Phantom. I wanted Christine to end up with him. Never mind that he’s murderous and quick-tempered. The fucker can sing and he can make her sing! Plus his mother never loved him because he was born fugly! Get out of here boyfriend Raoul with your traditional good looks. I’m rooting for the monstrous ghoul with sensual hands who appears in mirrors!

A note about productions: in my day the phantom had weird lips. They were normal on one side, the side that does not wear the mask, and they began to become more swollen and distorted on the other. Last night’s phantom had 180 degrees of normal lips and his mask was not white, it was a burnished skin color-esque gold which I’m still processing.

“Why isn’t he wearing a mask?” Elliot whispered at one point.

“He is, it’s just gold and kind of hard to see, wait til he turns,” I whispered back.

That was but one snippet of our scintillating showtime conversation. Mostly we just stared at each other with big dumb grins when the music swelled and the chandelier lit up and sparked and wobbled.

The chandelier moment was changed from the original too, but it was still spectacular.

So I cry my eyes out for like 15 seconds which was really more like emotional edging than full catharsis and then everyone bows and we stand up and clap and then it’s time to exit the theater.

A thing about me is I’m very snobbish about where I sit for musicals. It’s orchestra or bust. I lack the attention span to pay attention if I’m not immersed. So we were in the fifth row which means waiting for a ton of people to slowly make their way to the exit before we can do the same. Imagine a herd of cattle just slowly mooing their way to Hollywood Blvd.

“I feel a little queasy,” Elliot says as we’ve moved three centimeters forward. This kid is no stranger to barfing, we even keep a load of professional level emesis bags on hand, but it’s always from car sickness. We have not been in a car for hours.

“Do you feel like you’re going to throw up?” I ask nervously. He makes the international signal for borderline (hand in front, palm down, tipped left and right). Ok, I say, deciding we will attempt to exit on the side instead of the front. In order to do this we pivot 45 degrees and I’m sorry for writing a Substack that requires a protractor.

“How are you—” I begin to say, turning toward him, when suddenly I am hit with a spray of vomit. He is less human than exploding vessel at this point and having nothing else to hand him, I hand him his “Wicked” hoodie and suggest throwing up into it. I guess I was thinking the hood could capture the vom but there’s no time to communicate that. Barf is spraying the seats, me, his hands and hair. It’s chunking up on his shirt.

It’s fucking awful and it smells worse and shockingly no one seems to notice.

And now I’m faced with a conundrum: Do I let my walking biohazard of a son stand here and keep barfing while we wait the 18-27 minutes to exit the theater, closely pressed to people with noses the whole way, or do I speak up and get us out of there?

“Excuse me my son is throwing up, can I get past you?” I say. This gets us past about eight people and out of the row and into the wings where we can get to the exit. Eventually we find someone who works there who heroically rips the lid off a garbage can in case he needs to empty his guts into it and then directs us to the closet bathroom. There is a line but it’s short. Everyone is exceedingly nice. The woman in front of us who assures us she will be fast and will hand us paper towels asks if this is his first show. I just say it’s his fourth, I don’t even explain that this is his fourth “Broadway” as he calls them (said Broadways have all been seen in Hollywood), because I feel like there’s nothing worse than schtick when you’re already feeling nauseated.

When it’s our turn, we do as much rinsing as possible, and then we throw out his shirt which requires unbuttoning and without going into disgusting details let’s just say I palpated so much of what he’d eaten for dinner. I had made it myself so I really got to experience the full life cycle of that viral Tik Tok pasta.

Then we say goodbye to the shirt which kind of makes me sad and I give him my jacket to wear. And then we slowly hightail it to the car which miraculously, today, does not smell like hot parmesan.

When we get home I find out that Elliot had no idea what was going on during the musical but still loved it. Quite a testament to the elaborate staging I suppose.

I can’t get over the fact we chundered at the Pantages. It was all very surreal.

But back to the Phantom and how moving and beautiful and powerful it is. I get that it’s a bug hunk of velveeta, or rather it has artificial cheese product elements, but it coagulates into something so profound for me.

There is something that certain works of art do, where the end leaves you somewhere different than the beginning, where you feel you’ve been changed, and where it strikes a note that feels so emotionally true and you don’t see any of it coming. When I experience this, I immediately want to experience it again. I felt this about the end of La La Land. Also, interestingly, the end of Homeland. And 200 Cigarettes too. DON’T JUDGE ME.

I guess it’s specifically endings I’m talking about?

Am I talking about “catharsis” in the Aristotelian way? I think maybe I am. And so I would like to know what works of art do this for you? What do you think is heady enough to stand alongside great works like Phantom and 200 Cigarettes?