And unlike the Broadway show, we don’t have a chandelier that we can drop on people-so we just go to a blackout. Vox Lumiere means “voices of light,” so when our performers are voicing what this woman is doing on the screen, you’re getting the essence of Vox Lumiere. I wrote an aria so when the woman opens her mouth, our Carlotta is singing a completely different composition.

In the silent movie, you see a performance of the opera singer Carlotta singing a famous aria at the end, the Phantom drops the chandelier on her because he’s very unhappy that she’s performing instead of Christine. We don’t want to mimic what’s going on the screen, so what can we do to enhance the story? Kevin Saunders Hayes, DIRECTION AND MUSIC:The concept was to take the two-dimensional world of the film and marry that with the live three-dimensional world, so the onscreen actors and the three dimensional “real” actors could interact with each other. Scroll below for testimonials from the creative team and browse through a slideshow of the production. The Los Angeles–based theatre company recently used The Phantom of the Opera as its inspiration-not the Broadway production, but the 1925 Lon Chaney film-pairing it with a steampunk aesthetic and a contemporary score from Kevin Saunders Hayes. What happens when you combine live theatre, music and silent film? You get a Vox Lumiere production.

Phantom of the opera costume reference