"Am I fonder of goblins or shoes? - The Phantom and the Goblin King

I recently had the pleasure of taking in my very first Broadway show: Phantom of the Opera. As a veteran of several Rush concerts, I didn't think that I would be overwhelmed (if you've survived Peart on percussion, I think you can endure an actual artillery barrage). To my very pleasant surprise, we arrived just as the notes of the title theme were being played and some nerve sandwiched between my vertebrae began to corkscrew -- and I then proceeded to spend the next hour with my mouth actually hanging open. When the lights came up at intermission, I, being ignorant, thought that the show had ended and I felt bereft at being ejected from the experience. Besides the wonder of the whole thing -- statues sinking through the stage, actors dropping from the rafters, the stage elephant! -- I kept thinking of Jim Henson's cult classic: Labyrinth. (I talked about my love of it here). Is the Opera Ghost's influence so strong that he exerted it on popular culture?

As indicated in the title, the first connection came with that line of lyrics from "Little Lotte/ The Mirror" which asks, "Little Lotte, let her mind wander. Little Lotte thought, "Am I fonder of dolls or of goblins or of shoes?" I couldn't help but think of Sarah at her mirror, making up her stories (were they like Christine's "dark stories of the North?) and dreaming of who she might become.

 

Then there is the actual use of the word "labyrinth" in the main theme: "and in this labyrinth/ where night is blind."

Then there are the two masquerade scenes:

Finally, there's a great deal of similarity between the main characters. Both Sarah and Christine are painfully young and they originally look to the power they've summoned (Angel of Music and Goblin King) as a power that will free them and transform them into what they most wish to be (which, for both young women, is the center of the story). They both discover that the creature that once helped them is capable of great violence: the phantom murders and Jareth drugs Sarah and attempts to seduce her away from her quest. Both the phantom and the Goblin King are motivated on some level by love. Music is an inherent part of both stories, too!

Then there's the greatest thorn of all -- in both cases, I found myself cheering on the villain...

P.S. I thought I was very clever with these observations, but people on Google (it turns out) did beat me to them. The ones above come from my own notes, but it seems there are some pretty fan-famous web comics in which Jareth and Erik are roommates!