‘Think of me fondly’: Voice, body, affect and performance in Prince/Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera

This article argues that Lloyd Webber’s megamusical The Phantom of the Opera, and specifically Michael Crawford’s original performance of the title role in London, New York and Los Angeles, combined sound, voice, gesture and technology in a unique physical expression of desire that reinscribed, exceeded and even redefined spectacle at the level of both the visual and the aural realms (paradoxical as that may seem). This argument runs counter to existing arguments about the separation of scopophilia and audiophilia in the theatre and also departs from some of the arguments about the narrative in different forms which is often discussed as privileging sound and hearing over image and sight.