The Phantom of the Opera: Introduction

0:00Hello and welcome to Storytime for grown-ups. I'm Faith Moore and this season we're reading The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston LaRue. Each episode will read a few chapters from the book, pausing from time to time to give brief explanations, so it's easier to follow along. It's like an audiobook with built-in notes, so brew a part of tea, find a cozy chair, and settle in. It's Storytime! I'm Faith Moore. Hello, welcome back. This is so exciting. I am so happy to be back with you. I missed you. Welcome to season six of Storytime for grown-ups. I'm Faith Moore and this is the introduction episode to The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston LaRue. We always do an intro episode before

1:02every book so that I can give you a little bit of context, some historical information, some details about the author, just things that I think might be helpful to know going into the story. But I never do spoilers, hate spoilers, I never do them, so I won't be doing any spoilers today and I won't bog you down with information because I think it is totally possible to pick up a book like this or any of the books that we've read on this show. It's totally possible to pick them up with no prior knowledge whatsoever and really enjoy them. But since this is a show about finding a way into these books that might feel inaccessible because of the old fashion language or historical details that we didn't know, I think it makes sense to give a little bit of information at the beginning. But I won't overload you and hopefully you'll want to come back on Monday to actually start the book with us. But before I get into all of that, we do have a few housekeeping things to take care of as usual in these intros. First of all, I want to welcome back everyone who has been with us before whether you joined us all the way back at the

2:02beginning with Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte or during our last book which was David Copperfield by Charles Dickens or anywhere in between welcome welcome back. I am so glad that you came back for more that makes me so happy and I want to give a very special welcome to those of you who are joining us for the first time. I am so glad that you found the show. I'm so happy you're here and hopefully you will stick around for this book and for many more books to come. Just in case you are new here or just in case you need a refresher, let me just tell you a little bit about this podcast. It's a podcast that aims to make classic books more accessible. It aims to make them less boring texts that you have to read and analyze in school and more like what they are meant to be which is amazing stories that you read with as much emotion and as much interest as any of your favorite modern novels. The way that we do that is that we read each book out loud so I'm going to be reading the Phantom of the Opera to you a few chapters each episode. So the actual book not just like a

3:03summery or discussion of it, the actual book so that you can say that you have read it by the time this season is over. You will have read it. So we will read the book aloud with notes along the way, meaning if something is confusing or unclear or a word is unfamiliar, I will just pause as I'm reading and give you a little tiny explanation. Not more than ascendants are two. Suppose just a couple of words. The idea is not to stop the reading to talk about the book. The idea is simply to give you the tools that you need to experience the book the way it was meant to be experienced or the way it would have been experienced by people reading it at the time. But then, but wait, there's more. Ben, I take your questions and thoughts and comments and that's when we discuss what we've read so far. So at the end of each episode, I always invite you to contact me via my website. The link to that is in the show notes, which is the description of this episode. Just, you know, scroll down in wherever you're listening, whatever podcast player you're listening and just scroll down or you can go to

4:04faithkmore.com. That's my website. You can click on the contact there and you can fill out the form. It's the same thing. You will see very quickly if you're new here that I really do mean it. When I say please contact me. This show is nothing without your questions and your comments. I cannot do it without you. So really do not be shy. Please do write in. I reply to every email I get and then I pick one or two or sometimes more to read out loud on the show at the beginning of each episode. And then I use those to talk about the chapter or chapters that we've read the episode before. And that way, we build a deeper understanding of the story. We get to experience it with each other and to share our reactions. And I can explain anything that was confusing that I didn't happen to cover in the notes along the way. So do get in touch. That is important. And you can get in touch after this episode too. If there's anything that I say here that particularly interests you or was confusing or that you'd like to know more about, you can get in touch. So again, it's faithkmore.com and then

5:06you click on contact or you can just scroll into the show notes and check out that link. Speaking of the show notes, there are a lot of links there that you can check out. I'm not going to go over all of them now, but I will just highlight one, which is that we have an online community where you could go between shows to chat about these books, to chat about literature in general, whatever you want. It is called the drawing room, not because we do a lot of drawing there, but because every lovely old Victorian house would have had a withdrawing room, a room where people would withdraw after dinner to chat or read or play cards, play music, drink tea, do all of the lovely things that I wish that we could do together in person if we could be in person. So we have a drawing room. This podcast, I like to think of it as the main room of our lovely Victorian house, but we also have a drawing room where we can withdraw after the show. It's very active. There's always somebody commenting there. I check in from time to time. It's great fun. And depending on which membership tier you choose, we also have monthly voice chats over there and we call those T-time. I'm there.

6:11You're there. It's kind of like a group phone call and we talk about the book. We talk about any questions you have. It's wonderful. I love it. We will be having one near the end of September, so I will let you know in the next week or so once that is scheduled. But if any of that sounds interesting to you, then please just check out that link in the show notes to join us because we would love to have you over there in the drawing room. Other than that, please make sure that you subscribe to the show and your podcast player that way you'll get all the chapters in order automatically and you won't have to go looking for them and you won't potentially find them kind of out of ordering. It confused. Speaking of that, just to let you know, we are sometimes going to be reading more than one chapter during an episode. Some of the chapters in this book are really short, so I grouped them together. So I will always post in the show notes which chapters will be reading next times. I know some of you like to keep track of that. Also, for those of you keeping track, this book is going to take us until November 12th. So it's a much shorter book than David Copperfield. The final chapter will air on November 9th and the conclusion episode, which will be like

7:14this intro episode with no chapters to read, but just a kind of general wrap-up of everything that we've been discussing along the way that will happen on November 12th. And then we will have a Christmas special for the rest of November and December. So all of that is to say, please subscribe, please get all the episodes and stay with us. Also, if you are new or if you haven't listened to all of the books that we've done yet, please feel free to scroll through the Storytime for Ronop's Feed and your podcast player. All the books that we've done are still there. You can listen to them. They're completely free. Lots of people like to listen to some of the other books during the days that aren't Monday or Thursday when the new episodes drop. So you're welcome to do that. You can also go back and listen if you haven't already to a special announcement that I dropped during the break that we just had. I'm not going to go into that too much now because I don't want to overload us with information. But I did announce that I have a new book out. So a book that I wrote rather than one that I'm reading to you on this show. It's a romantic comedy. It's called Wooing Jane. And you can learn more in that announcement. But also I've put some links in the show

8:18notes where you can learn more about that. It comes out October 2nd. There is an in-person event in Franklin, Tennessee on October 3rd. I'll be in conversation with my brother Spencer Clavin about this book, Wooing Jane. And it is available now. The book is available now for pre-order. So it would mean the absolute world to me if you would pre-order a copy. So that's all I'm going to say for now. I will come back to it in later episodes and we can talk about it in the drawing room as well if you have questions or you can email me. But I don't want to take up any more of this episode with those details. So please just scroll into the show notes. Take a look at the information that's there about my new novel. I'm really excited about it. And please pick up a copy, pre-order it, pre-order several, give it away as gifts, whatever. That would really, really help me. I would really appreciate it if you would do that. But we'll talk more about that later. Let's now talk about the phantom of the Opera. Okay. So the first thing I want to say is that this book is a first first story time for Bruno's because it is a book that we are going to read in translation. It was

9:23originally written in French. It initially came out serially in a magazine meaning in installments. That's true for a lot of the books that we've read on here. But it also came out like that. And then it was published as a full book in 1910. So it is also, if I'm not mistaken, it is also the most recent book that we've read on here. A little princess, that's the book we read last Christmas. I think that was the closest one before this. That was published in 1905. David Copperfield for reference was published in 1850. So this is quite a bit later. And it takes place in France, in Paris. So a lot of firsts for us, which may seem sort of daunting. Like if you have been with us for a while, you probably feel pretty familiar now with life in England around the mid to late 1800s, even the early 1800s because we read Pride and Prejudice. But now we are at least 60 years in the future. And we're in a totally different country with a totally different government and totally different culture

10:25norms. And you know, is all of that going to bog us down and make this book hard to read? But the good news is that it's not. And the reason for that is that this book takes place essentially in one location. I mean, that is not entirely true, but for the most part, it is true. This book takes place in one location, which is the Paris Opera House. So in general, we only need to try to understand what goes on inside an opera house in Paris. Also, even though the book came out in 1910, it takes place in the late 1800s. So yes, it's Paris in the late 1800s, not London or some other part of England. But I think that you will find that a lot of the way of life and the clothes and the kind of cultural touchstones are things that will feel at least a little bit familiar if you have read British literature from the Victorian period as we have on this show. But even if you haven't, if this is your first book with us and you haven't really read many of the classics, that is totally okay too. I will make sure that you are not confused as we go along. And also

11:28here in this intro episode, I will help you as much as I can to prepare. But let's begin by talking a little bit about translation itself and what that is going to mean for us. And then I will get into a few more details that I think might be helpful for us to know going in. So we are reading the translation that is by Alexander Tashira Dematos. And the reason for this is that it is the only English translation of the fandom of the opera that is in the public domain. That means that I can read it out loud to you here without infringing on anyone's copyright. All the other translations out there of which there are several, which you may have discovered if you tried to pick up your own copy, but all of the other translations are still protected by copyright. And therefore, it would be illegal for me to read them to you. So here we are. We are using Dematos' translation simply for that reason. So because of this, because this is the only translation that is available to us on this show, it means that we are technically reading an abridged version of this book.

12:29Dematos did cut some of the original text, which you will find in a more modern translation. So what he cut has been put back in if you have a more modern version. I believe he cut about 80 pages from the book, but this is also the most popular translation of the book. The one that we're going to read. It is the one that most people read. So in a sense, it has become the definitive version of the book in English. So what we are reading is the version that most people read. It is what most people think of when they think of this book. And it is what most people have read when they tell you that they have read this book. That said, if we read this book together and you love it and you wish there was more, there is. You can pick up a more modern translation and read the whole thing. I believe that David Coward's 2012 translation is supposed to be the closest to what LaRue actually wrote, like his tone and his style. And that one is totally unabridged. So maybe grab that one if you're looking for the closest thing to what the author intended. But I actually really love the translation

13:34that we're going to read. And I love it for a lot of reasons. But one of them is that Dematos published his translation in 1911. So only a year after the book came out in the original French. So the language feels very similar to the language in a lot of the books that we've read here on story time. And I think that really adds to the atmosphere of the story, which I'm going to talk about more in a moment. But this is also the translation. So Dematos' translation, it's also the one that Andrew Lloyd Webber was working from when he created his musical, which I'll also talk about briefly in a moment. The other thing to say just about translations, since this is the first book that we're reading in translation, is that translation is not like a direct one-to-one sort of thing. There's no way to express in English exactly what LaRue wrote in French. Just like there's no way to express in French exactly what Dickens, for example, wrote in English. Translation doesn't work that way. Each language has its own unique way of expressing things based on the cultural

14:39viewpoints and the history of the country that speaks that language and things. So when you are trying to translate something from one language to another, it's not as simple as just translating each word from the first language into the word. That means that same thing in the other language. The only way to truly know what Gaston LaRue actually wrote is to read this book in French. And some of you may speak French and be able to do that, which is awesome. But my French is pretty rusty and I never was fluent to begin with. So I don't have that luxury. I don't have the luxury of reading in French, and I know a lot of us don't either. So we are going to make do with a translation. And because each translation is its own thing and different translators might translate the same thing different ways and do, we are going to treat Dematos' translation as its own thing. This is the book, as it is presented to us in English. And we are not going to worry about whether LaRue meant something else here or whether this isn't as good as it might be in French. This is the book that we've got and I promise you it's a really great book. By the way, the person who has written a

15:43ton of really clear and amazing stuff about translation is my brother, Spencer Clayvin. The same Spencer Clayvin that you can meet on October 3rd in Franklin, Tennessee, where he will be with me discussing my new novel, Wuying Jane. But anyway, Spencer also has a new book coming out. His comes out in February and it is all about translation and language and how language works and why it works that way. I have read it. It is really wonderful. It is called a way with words. Why language makes humans irreplaceable. And so if you're interested and you want to know more about translation and these kinds of issues, you can preorder a copy of that. I have put a link in the show notes to that book as well. But anyway, we will be reading this book in translation. You'll find that there are some words that don't get translated, particularly where they have to do with the names of places and people. So for example, the word Rue which is spelled Rue, it means street. So you will hear for example about the Rue scribe. That just means scribe street. A scribe is like a scribe. So it's

16:49basically writer street or something like that. But in the book, I will be saying Rue scribe because that is what is written. Similarly, there is a character who is a count, like a British aristocratic title, right? Count so and so. And there's another one who is a vi count, which is the title just below count. We'll talk much more about this as we get into it. But often in the book, those titles are left in French. So instead of count, you'll hear quant. And instead of vi count, you'll hear vicon. Although sometimes, dimatos does translate these into English, in which case, you will hear count and vi count. But I will do my best to give you notes along the way when these things crop up. If it seems like we won't be able to figure out what they mean in context. Also, I will do my best to pronounce the French words as they are meant to be pronounced. But as I say, my French is rusty. I took French in school from around the age of nine through the age of about 18. So I do have some French, but not nearly as much as I should, given that I studied it for nine years. And as I say, I was never fluent. So I will do the best that I can with those French words.

17:54And also, of course, the names, people's names in the book are mostly in French, like Philippe and Gleisard, rather than Philip and Richard, for example. So I'm going to do my best to stick to the French pronunciations of those. But forgive me if you are a native French speaker. And I am actually butchering it. I'm terribly sorry, but I'm going to do the best I can. I want to talk a little bit now about the author, Gaston Leroux, because I think that will then lead us nicely into talking about the Paris Opera House, which I also want to get to. So Leroux was born in 1868. He was born in Paris, and he was the illegitimate child of Marie Bidot and Dominique Leroux. But his parents then married when Leroux was only one month old. So basically they were a family, they went on to have more children together. And essentially that made him the legitimate oldest son of the family, which was important because his family was incredibly well off. And when his father

18:54died, Leroux inherited a huge sum of money, like millions of French francs, which is a little hard to translate into today's dollars, but it was a lot like he became a multi-millionaire, let's say. He had gone off to study law, but when he got this inheritance, he took his money and he started to party. So he started to party a lot. He gambled, he drank, he spent huge sums on luxury items, and he blew through the entire inheritance in less than a year. So then he was essentially facing bankruptcy and he needed to make some money. So he began working as a court reporter, like David did in David Copperfield, remember like reporting on things that were going on in court. But also he was a theater critic for a daily newspaper in Paris called L'Eco de Paris, which translates to the Echo of Paris. He then embarked on a career as a journalist, and he worked for other papers than that. He reported on important events and things. For example, at one point,

19:55he went on location to cover a volcanic eruption. He also reported on the 1905 Russian Revolution, but eventually he kind of burned out. He needed a break. He was working too hard, so he quit journalism in 1907, and he began to write fiction. In English, his most famous novel is definitely the Phantom of the Opera, but in France, he was actually known for his mystery novels. He was a huge fan of Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote the Sherlock Holmes stories, as well as of Edgar Allan Poe, and LaRue wrote a book called La Mistère de la Chambre Jean, which translates to the mystery of the yellow room. And this is one of the first, if not the first, locked room mystery novels. And I think that you will see, as we get into the Phantom of the Opera, that in a sense, this is another mystery story. It's gothic, it's spooky, and I will get into the genre and things like that in a bit as well, but at its heart, it's a mystery story, and I love that about it. And I

20:55think that comes from LaRue's background as a mystery novelist. So he was pretty successful at that, and he did well. Then he and some colleagues founded a film company together in 1919. The company would essentially publish novels, and then they would turn them into films. One of the novels they did not adapt for film was The Phantom of the Opera, which was made by Universal Studios into a silent film in 1925. So LaRue was actually still alive when it came out. He died in 1927, but he had sold the rights to Universal, and so they made the movie not him. But apparently, LaRue was happy that it did so well. He died when he was 58. He had been married twice, once to a woman named Marie Le Franc, but he separated from her and he took up with another woman, so they were still married, but separated. So then he was with another woman named Jean Caillet. They had a son and a daughter together, and then they did get married in 1917 when Marie, the first wife, died. But I think it is his time as a theater critic that really inspired the

22:02Phantom of the Opera. There were a few actual rumors going around at the time about the Paris Opera House. Rumors that I am not going to share with you now, but I will share with you later, because if I shared them now, they would give things away, but I will share with you later. There were these rumors that LaRue would have heard during his time as a theater critic that seemed to have been the inspiration for this novel. So we will come back to that as we read and as these things crop up. But let us just talk a little bit about the Paris Opera House next. So the Paris Opera House, which is still there, by the way, you can go and visit it. It is a truly amazing building. It is absolutely gorgeous inside and out. It's just totally opulent. It's like marble and gold. It has this vast kind of sweeping staircase inside. If you're a fan of the Phantom musical, there is a scene on a giant staircase, and it is modeled after that staircase in the Paris Opera House. I encourage you to actually look this up online, not the scene from

23:05the musical, the house, the Opera House itself. Look at some pictures. It's really, I mean, I hope to be able to visit it one day in person. I have been to Paris, but for some reason I've never seen the inside of the Opera House. It's a really lush, opulent, beautiful place. It is often called, and you will hear it called this in the book. It's often called the Palais Gagne, which means the Gagne Palace, because it was built by someone named Charles Gagne. He was the architect who designed it, and it looks like a palace. It really does seriously, Google it. So it is called the Palais Gagne. It was built between 1861 and 1875. So that's how long it took. It was built at the behest of Emperor Napoleon III, who was actually deposed before it was finished. The politics of France during this time period are super complicated, and luckily it is not really necessary to understand any of it, to understand this book. So I am not going to go into too much history. The only thing that is worth

24:05knowing, and it's also kind of interesting, but is that for a very short time in 1871, a revolutionary government called the Paris Commune seized power in Paris. When that happened, the National Guard, which was the main military force of the Commune, it used the as yet unfinished Palais Gagne, building as a base. So they stockpiled supplies there, and they also had some prisoners kept there. This all would have happened before the events that take place in the Phantom of the Opera, but it does get mentioned in the book a couple of times. So I'm mentioning it here, and I will remind you about it when it comes up. But I thought that was interesting and also worth mentioning, just so you have that in your mind. I want to talk a little bit now about operas themselves, because opera at the time was a huge form of entertainment, and operas involved not only acting and singing, the way that we might think of an opera, but also ballet, so dance. The opera had

25:06its own ballet core, and every opera had at least one ballet that would happen as part of the story, or sometimes just kind of randomly in between acts, and the different departments of the opera would have kind of like their own domains within the opera building, their own kind of backstage areas. So there would be a floor for the dancers. The principals dancers would have their own dressing rooms, and the chorus dancers would be all kind of grouped together. Dancers would begin very young, so there would be a lot of little girls running around, and their mothers would be back there to supervising them and kind of vying for position and for promotions for their daughters, and then the singers would have their own backstage area. And again, the principal singers would have their own dressing rooms, but there were also many, many layers of cellar under the opera house, where they would store all of the huge props and sets, where the people who managed like the gas lighting would work, so the lighting for the stage, right? But it was lit by gas, and somebody would have to operate that machinery. There would be workshops where people sewed costumes and made

26:11the sets. It really was kind of like a whole world, and like a world, it had its own hierarchy. So the singers were higher up than the dancers. The dancers were higher up than the scene shifters. I mean, higher up in the hierarchy, not necessarily higher up in the location, although in some cases, that is true, but the dancers were higher up than the scene shifters who moved the scenery around. Those people were higher up than the people who never went on the stage at all, and just worked on like making props and stuff. It was like a little microcosm, a little world all happening inside of the opera house, the Palais Gagnet. And it was a world that the public very rarely saw. What the public saw was the huge opulent lobby with the staircase that I was talking about a minute ago, and also the theater with its seats and its boxes, where the boxes would be private areas for very wealthy and important audience members, and of course the stage where the opera itself took place. The only audience members who would be allowed backstage, so not into the workshops and the storage

27:14places and stuff, but into the places where the dancers and the singers had their dressing rooms. The only audience members allowed back there would be the subscribers, and these would be people who had paid extra to be allowed the privilege of going backstage after the show to greet and kind of hang out with the performers. And some opera-class men who were subscribers would have had, let's call them liaisons, since we're getting into the French spirit, they would have had liaisons with the performers, and then they would kind of pay for them to have a more luxurious life, because in the social hierarchy outside the opera house, opera singers and opera dancers would have been sort of like celebrities, but they wouldn't have been opera-class. So an opera-class man could have an affair with an opera dancer, for example, but he couldn't marry her, or if he did, it would have been a great scandal. Although sometimes opera singers and dancers did end up marrying their lovers, and that was a way for them to social climb, essentially. So the opera was sort of this microcosm unto itself, with a hierarchy and a social structure that wasn't really

28:19the same as the hierarchy and the social structure of the world at large, because in the opera, the prima d'anas, so the lead female singer, she would be like the queen or something, and everyone would look up to her and cater to her and do her every whim, but in the world at large, she was a stage performer, and so in some way she was vulgar when compared to people with landed-estates and titles and things. So this book, The Phantom of the Opera, it largely takes place within the Palais Garnier, within the Paris Opera House, during its heyday. So during the time when it was this glittering world of opera and opulence and splendor, and so that's basically the setting for the book. So now let's talk a little bit about the genre. Okay, so this book is usually classified as Gothic horror, but don't panic. I know that many of you don't like horror, and you're not interested in anything that might scare you, or keep you up at night, and I totally get that. I don't like that kind of thing either, but I do love this book. So let me try to just kind of flesh out this idea of Gothic horror a little bit without giving anything away about the plot, because I think it

29:24will be helpful for two reasons. The first is to try to reassure people who are worried that they're going to be terrified, but the other is to try to go into this book with the right attitude, because I actually think that that is really important for this book. So Gothic horror is actually usually used interchangeably with Gothic fiction. So it doesn't actually mean horror in the way that we think of horror now, like a horror movie or something. There is no gore or things jumping out at you, or kind of overly grotesque imagery or ideas or anything like that. I think of it as more spooky rather than scary. So there is usually an atmosphere of sort of psychological unease, let's say, it almost always involves like an innocent young woman who gets in over her head in some way. There is often some kind of sexual tension, and there is also a hint of the supernatural, if not something overtly supernatural going on, but usually there is some actually kind of ambiguity about it. So there is something supernatural, but is it supernatural? Is it real? And

30:27that's part of the plot. So a Gothic story has a sort of tense atmosphere, a spooky atmosphere. There is the sense that something supernatural might be going on, and it's usually kind of melodramatic. So it's great for spooky season, which we are entering right now, but again, it's not gore or grotesque or anything like that. But this particular Gothic story, the fan of the opera, it is also really funny. Both because LaRue is funny, and he interjects humor into the story intentionally, so that there is a kind of lightheartedness to it that it wouldn't have otherwise, but also because it is so melodramatic, it is so over the top that it's not really meant to be taken seriously. I don't even think LaRue means us to take it seriously. I think that we are supposed to have so much fun while we're reading this. I think that we are supposed to feel like we are on like the most fun ride at our favorite theme park. I often compare this book to eating candy. It is not the deepest book that we're ever going to read on here, although it does have some really

31:30interesting themes that are very worse than discussing it, we will. But it's not the deepest book we're ever going to read on here. It's not the best written book that we're ever going to read on here. It's well written. I love it, but it's not the best written. These are not the most realistic characters that we're ever going to encounter, but it's kind of like discovering a bowl of M&M's or whatever your snackable candy is of choice. It's like discovering it and discovering that you can eat as much of them as you want without getting sick or gaining weight or anything. It is that fun. It is that enjoyable. Leroux manages to both give us an actually spooky story and actually creepy premise and scenario with stakes. We really care about and suspense that will really leave us on the edge of our seats, but to do it with his tongue just a little bit in his cheek so that we're always kind of laughing, kind of mused by what's going on, even as we really care about how it all turns out. So I wanted to say that right up front because I want to give you permission to laugh. I want to give you permission to be like, what? That just happened. I think if we go into this book,

32:32assuming that it's going to be serious, that it's going to be scary, that we're supposed to believe that all of this could happen in real life or something like that, if we go in that way, that we're going to feel like this book is really silly. But if we are in on the joke, if we go in ready to have a ton of fun, ready to write a super fun ride and eat a bunch of M&Ms or whatever, then I think we're going to have a great time. I mean, honestly, every time I read this book, it makes me laugh out loud, not because it's funny, although it is. It makes me laugh out loud with just how much fun it is, seriously. So I think it's important to have that attitude going in so that you're not fighting against like your preconceived notions that it is supposed to be serious. I'm scary. So I want to just end by talking very briefly about essentially the legacy of this book, because when I announced that we would be reading this book, I got a ton of emails from people saying that they had no idea that this story even was a book, which is super common. You do not have to feel even a little bit silly about that. Most people don't know that it's a book, because even though

33:34most people have heard of the Phantom of the Opera, it is much more likely that they have heard of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical of it and or potentially the old silent movie of it with Lawn Chatey. And I think both of those are wonderful in their own ways. I have said before and I will say again, just to be clear that I absolutely love the musical. I have seen it live, I don't know, maybe 20 times more than that, a lot of times, okay? And I do admit I have the whole thing memorized. I used to listen to the soundtrack over and over again. I mean, I am a serious Phantom musical fan. I'm actually kind of a Broadway geek in general, which may not come as a surprise to you, maybe it does, I don't know, but I am thanks to my very cool and very glamorous grandparents who are no longer with us, but they instilled in me a love of musical theater for which I am eternally grateful and of which I am not even a little bit ashamed. So I love the musical, but I love the book in a different way, because the book is a different thing and you don't have to

34:37have seen the musical or any of the movie adaptations or anything in order to enjoy this book. And if you have seen those things, you can still enjoy the book because there are similarities, and it's fun to see where certain things from the musical and movies came from, but there are really important differences too, and that's fun to think about as well. So you don't have to pretend, like you haven't seen an adaptation if you have, there's a lot that will still be fun and surprising, and you don't have to worry about missing something if you haven't seen an adaptation, or if you absolutely nothing at all about this story, because the original readers of this book wouldn't have known either because those things wouldn't have existed yet. So whatever your level of familiarity is with this story, you can enjoy it. So I think I'm going to stop there. I think that's enough to go on for now, and of course, as we go along, we will add to this, it will talk about specific things that come up, and I will remind you of any of the things that I have said today that seem relevant, but please do write to me now after this episode. Again, it's faithkmore.com and click on contact, or you can scroll into the show notes and find that same link. Let me know if you have any

35:40questions about anything I said today, or if it made you think of something that you want to share with me, whatever you want, please write it. I love getting your emails. I really do. And on Monday, we will begin with chapter one. We're actually going to read the prologue and chapter one on Monday. So I have saved up a lot of your reaction emails to finding out that we are reading this book. So I will read some of those to you at the start of the next episode, since we won't have a chapter to discuss yet. And I want you to get to experience what I get to experience, which is this outpouring of excitement about this book. It really was huge this time. I got so many letters. So I'm going to share some of those with you next time. And then we will begin the book. So please tell your friends, tell your family, your coworkers, strangers on the street. Just tell everyone about this show. Let's get even more people listening to this book then before. Check out the drawing room, if you're interested. Pre-order a copy of my new book, We're Wishing Jane. Please, please, please pre-order it. And come back on Monday for the Phantom of the Opera by Gaston LaRue. I will see you

36:41then. I cannot wait. Thank you so much for listening. I'd love to know what you thought of the chapters. Is there anything you'd like me to clarify? Did something particularly interest you? Please go to my website faithkmore.com. Click on contact and send me your questions and thoughts. Or you can click on the link in the show notes to contact me. I'll feature one or two of your entries at the start of the next episode. Speaking of links, don't forget to take a look at the other links in the show notes. You can learn more about me, check out our merch store, or become a member of the Storytime for grownups online community. Before I go, I'd like to ask a quick favor. This is an independent podcast. It's produced, recorded, and marketed by me. So I need your help. Spread the word about the show by posting about it on social media or texting a link to your friends. Subscribe, tap those five stars, and leave a positive review wherever you're listening.

37:43If you are able to support the show financially, there's a link in the show notes to make a donation. I would really, really appreciate it. All right, everyone. Storytime is over. To be continued.