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Everything Wrong with The “Trashfire Sequel” to Phantom of the Opera

Chris Well

Lindsay Ellis Outlines the Problems With “Love Never Dies”

Author and “It’s Lit” co-host Lindsay Ellis spells out everything wrong with the “Phantom of the Opera” stage sequel “Love Never Dies.”

Lindsay Ellis is an American author, film critic, video essayist, and YouTuber. Her debut novel, Axiom's End, published in July 2020, became a New York Times Best Seller..

A sequel to the blockbuster musical Phantom of the Opera, which was based on the 1910 novel by Gaston Leroux, Love Never Dies includes music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, lyrics by Glenn Slater, and a book by Lloyd Webber, Ben Elton, Frederick Forsyth, and Slater. It is loosely adapted from Forsyth's 1999 novel The Phantom of Manhattan.

The plot is not based on the story in Leroux’s original novel. Lloyd Webber told BBC News he didn’t consider it a sequel, but as a “stand-alone piece.” 

However, as he clarified for Entertainment Weekly, “Clearly, it is a sequel, but I really do not believe that you have to have seen Phantom of the Opera to understand Love Never Dies. I really don’t. But I hope if you see them together, if you wanted to see them back-to-back, that what you would get from them—from both of them—is the extension of where the story goes.

“The ending of the show is the ending of a chapter of my creative musical life because it has to be with what happened at the end of it, that shut the door for me with what happened with Phantom and Christine, because I can’t take it any further.”

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