After ten years i've seen it again.  It's brilliant.  I love it.  You have to be so thankful for beautiful music.  A friend said that in an interview Anthony Warlow said that after ten years he plays the phantom much more comfortably this time.  I agree.  I was so drawn into the performance.  At times i could feel the phantom's pain and loneliness.  The tone of his voice had such sadness at times.

The effects were great, especially at the end with the phantom disappearing behind the chair, leaving the mask behind.  The costumes as well were magnificent.

I woke up this morning and the songs were still in my mind.  The music is so captivating.  My favourite part lasts only a few seconds but it's a single violin that plays just before Christine Daae sings Wishing you were somehow here.  It's intoxicating.

When Gaston Leroux wrote the original novel - which i'm halfway through now - he based it on a true story.  A French opera house with a labyrinth of cellars and a subterranean lake at its base had some unusual manifestations and events taking place.  The people there devised the concept of a ghost, but further research indicated a man of flesh and blood lived in the cellars and was responsible.  He lived as a phantom would.  Christine Daae really was kidnapped; the Vicomte de Chagny really disappeared and his older brother, Count Phillipe, was found dead on the bank of the lake.

Wonderful.