‘Phantom of the Opera’ to close on Broadway after 35 years

The music of the night is coming to an end — after 35 years. “Phantom of the Opera,” Andrew Lloyd Webber’s beloved musical about love, obsession, a mysterious masked person — and that iconic chandelier drop! — is closing in early 2023, a show spokesperson told the Daily News Friday afternoon.

Broadway’s longest-running show opened in New York City on Jan. 26, 1988, two years after making a splash on London’s West End.

It will now close its curtains one final time at Broadway’s Majestic Theater on Feb. 18, “allowing one of the most romantic musicals in Broadway history to end its run during Valentine’s Week,” producers said in a news release.

The unprecedented success and longevity of the show are “quite astounding to me,” said producer Cameron Mackintosh.

“As a British producer who has been lucky enough to have been producing in New York for over 40 consecutive years, it has been an unparalleled honor to have presented the longest-running musical in Broadway’s history,” he added.

Based on Gaston Leroux’s classic 1910 novel of the same name, the show has won more than 70 major theater awards — including a Laurence Olivier Award for best new musical in 1986, and Tony Award for best musical in 1988.

It was also adapted into a 2004 film directed by Joel Schumacher.

The original cast recording, which sold over 40 million copies worldwide, is one of the best-selling cast recordings of all time, according to Playbill. The show also gave the world some of Lloyd Webber’s best-known songs — including “Think of Me” and “The Music of the Night.”

“Phantom” tells the story of a disfigured masked man who lives in the catacombs beneath the Paris Opera House. After falling madly in love with a young soprano, he becomes obsessed with her and begins using devious methods to make her into a star.

Around the world, more than 145 million people in 41 countries and 183 cities have watched the show, which has been performed in 17 languages.

On Broadway, it became its longest-running show on Jan. 9, 2006 — but it has since nearly doubled that figure.

The show has also been “the largest single generator of income and jobs in Broadway and U.S. theatrical history,” employing an estimated 6,500 people (including 450 actors) in New York alone, according to producers.

As of September, it had been seen by 19.5 million people in nearly 14,000 performances, grossing $1.3 billion since it opened, according to numbers compiled by The Broadway League, the national trade association for the Broadway industry.

However, the COVID-19 pandemic, which was devastating for the entire theater industry, proved to be too much for the dramatic love story.

Last week, the show’s box office hit just over $865,000, filling 81% of its seats. Shortly before the COVID-induced lockdown, the show was averaging about $1 million per week.

“As a producer, you dream that a show will run forever,” Mackintosh said Friday. “Indeed, my production of Andrew [Lloyd Webber’s] ‘Cats’ proudly declared for decades ‘Now and Forever,’” he added. “Yet “Phanton” has surpassed that show’s extraordinary [21-year] Broadway run.”

After “considerable discussion” that involved Mackintosh, Lloyd Webber, the Shubert Organization, and producers The Really Useful Group, “we concluded that the right time for “Phantom” [to close] was after the show’s 35th birthday.”

The final Broadway performance, will be its 13,925th show.

All international productions are set to continue, a show spokesperson told The News. The London production, which will celebrate its 36th anniversary on Oct. 9, “continues to play with no end in sight,” the spokesperson added.