The PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE musical that never happened

Steinman + DePalma...oh, would that it were to be

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There was a demo tape. Nothing particularly unfamiliar to Steinman fans on it (full info at http://mljs.evilnickname.org/jimsteinman/musicals/phantomoftheparadise.html), but it's catalogued at the NYPL. Frankly, it does not fill me with hope that Steinman and De Palma were going to be a revolutionary team of any kind. (Also, jeez, did he try to fit "Total Eclipse..." into every show he did post-Eighties?)

See catalogue info here.

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Updated On: 8/14/14 at 03:36 AM

Steinman fan though I am, I think it would be a big mistake to dispense with the cheesy goodness that is the Rocky Horror-esque Paul Williams score. Proceeding without it would be rather foolhardy, in my opinion.

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Although with Jim's rampant recycling, you can at least venture a guess what songs would have gone where ("Who Needs the Young?" as a number for Swan, "Tonight Is What It Means..." is so campy and glam out of context it could replace the Beef construction song easily, "Total Eclipse..." [sigh] as the Phantom and Phoenix's theme).

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Jim wrote a song with the same title (and some other lyrics that later popped up in Whistle) well before he re-used any of that in the Webber musical.

The full Rory Dodd demo (not chopped up, and sadly in crappy quality) can be found here.

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Both the Everly Brothers compilation and the NYPL listing mislabel it as the ALW version. It's not.

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A couple new songs definitely wouldn't hurt, but I think they should go the Xanadu route and flesh out the score with other songs from Paul Williams's back catalogue. This would work well for two reasons:

1. Part of the essential charm of the film is the (unintentionally?) campy mix of horror and superhero iconography with quintessential Seventies soft rock and bubblegum pop, of which Williams is perhaps the definitive master.

2. All the characters in the story are pop composers, would-be folkies or soft rock singer-songwriters already.

I can see Act 2 opening with "Touch" from the recent Paul Williams collaboration with Daft Punk. The lyrics are rumored to be explicitly inspired by Winslow, as Daft Punk have cited "Phantom of the Paradise" as one of the main creative forces behind their "Random Access Memories" album.