The debut of the stage musical was in London’s West End at Her Majesty’s Theatre on October 9, 1986. Since its debut, the stage musical has reached an estimated audience of 80 million people.
The first Broadway production of Phantom was at New York’s Majestic Theatre in January of 1988 and is now the second-longest running musical in Broadway history, playing to over 10.3 million people.

In order to prepare for his audition as the Phantom for Andrew Lloyd Webber, Gerard Butler took singing lessons on the sly, and rehearsed with Phantom musical director Simon Lee.

Emmy Rossum has trained at the Metropolitan Opera since she was seven and, to prepare for her role as Christine, Rossum took dance lessons, toured the Garnier Opera House in Paris (for which Phantom’s opera was loosely based), and visited the Musée D’Orsay to study Degas’ paintings and sculptures of ballerinas, many of which were based on the dancers from the Garnier Opera company.

Patrick Wilson underwent a five hour prosthetics process to age him to 70 years old for sense with Raoul that take place in 1919.

The original cast recording of The Phantom of the Opera, the biggest selling cast album of all time, has sold over 40 million copies worldwide.

The original cast recording was the first cast album in British musical history to enter the charts at number one, and has since gone gold and platinum in both the United Kingdom and the United States.

Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyricist Charles Hart composed an entirely new song for the film entitiled Learn to Be Lonely. Sung by Minnie Driver, Learn to Be Lonely is introduced over the end credits of the film.

Like the stage show, the film version of The Phantom of the Opera is set in Paris in the 1870’s, just before the Prussians came to the gates of Paris in the beginning of the Franco-Prussian war.

The film’s fictitious setting is broadly based on the Paris Opera House, the largest opera theatre in the world, also known as the Opera Garnier after its architect, Charles Garnier.

Hair and makeup artist Jenny Shircore based her design for the Phantoms disfigurement on a medical condition, underscoring the character’s background as a misunderstood former sideshow freak. The mask to hide his deformity was made of a very fine leather design.