The Phantom of the Opera

At its heart is Christine Daaé, a young singer whose voice seems taught by some unseen master, the "Angel of Music" her late father promised her, who speaks to her through the walls of a locked dressing-room. Two men move toward her from opposite ends of the story. Raoul, the shy young Vicomte de Chagny, has loved her since childhood. And below the stage, in a black-hung room where a coffin waits beneath a red canopy, lives Erik, a masked genius whose devotion is closer to possession than to love.

The dread arrives dressed as spectacle. A diva's aria collapses into a croak; a chandelier tears loose and falls into the crowded stalls; a scarlet-cloaked figure sweeps through a masked ball. Yet beneath the gothic machinery is something more aching — a corpse that loves and adores and will never leave, a voice asking only "to be loved for myself." Menace and pity keep changing places.

Horror and heartbreak, vaudeville and tragedy, all echo through the cellars of a great opera house. The door stands open on the lake below the stage, and the singing drifting up from it is harder to walk away from than it should be.