The Phantom of the Opera turns 40 this year, Erin Craig’s Our Strange Duet give fans a new YA retelling of the musical, this time from Christine Daaé’s point of view. Erin sat down with Thought Catalog’s Nicole Stawiarski to talk all things Phantom, her writing process, and more.
This interview has been lightly edited for readability.
Nicole Stawiarski: The reason that this story is endlessly fun for me to come back to is it’s so much like that chandelier, right? We can always come at it from a different angle, and it’s going to reflect something new back to us every time. There’s always some new “illumination” to return for —
Erin Craig: There’s your title.
Nicole Stawiarski: It makes it really hard, though, to know where to start, because it’s so meaty. But I would love to just kick it off with how you distilled the entire Phantom canon into a new adaptation? Where and how do you identify the space in that scaffolding where you want to add your own imagination and your own original ideas as a writer?
Erin Craig: Oh, the source material has been so much fun for me. I’ve been a fan of the show. I was actually a stage manager before I became an author, and so this was actually the show that got me into theater. I was like the sporty basketball kid and everything, before I heard those chords. And so growing up, I saw the VHS of the music videos and all that stuff. I saw the show in Toronto, a bunch of national touring productions of it, and obviously the movie when it came out in 2004 and everything. So in the back of my head, I’m like, oh, I know this show inside and out. I had the George Perry book, I’ve been obnoxiously reading that for years.
And it was such a delightful process going through the script and like, “OK, what makes Phantom, Phantom?”. What do you have to have in this book to not only welcome new readers who may not have seen the musical into the fandom, but for the hardcore fans — I wanted to definitely give them Easter eggs for things, teeny little details that might be missed by the casual observer, and also expand upon everything.
And so, going through the libretto, we marked up a lot of the scenes that are definitely imperative. And the lovely thing about this book: it is told exclusively through Christine Daaé’s perspective. So going through the score and realizing, she’s not in the “Prima Donna” scene. She’s not in the manager’s office. She’s not hearing Carlotta take back her role. Where is she in all of this? And what happens in the six months between the chandelier crashing and the masquerade New Year’s Eve party? What’s Christine going off and doing?
And so the chronology of the story gave us lots of moments where it was suddenly like, oh, I could see the inside of Christine’s flat. What is that? And what’s her apartment look like? How does she decorate? All of these fun things. And then also getting to expand the story past the constraints of the theatrical production — we get to actually see the moment she first hears the Angel of Music’s voice, and what the music lessons look like, and all these things that happen before our show even begins.
It was really fun to let those moments blossom into their own part and give a richer meaning to the story that, for the fans, we all know and love very well, but there’s still those moments of surprise of like, ‘Oh, so that’s how!’ There’s so many moments I was like, what would it be like? You’re just chilling in your dressing room and then the Angel of Music’s voice comes to you. What do you do? I would run. Want to pretend to be brave, but no, it’s a little too much ghost for me. And so getting to use those moments of unknown in the stage show to build out the story and fully flesh it into this very important moment in Christine’s life — it was such a joy.
Nicole Stawiarski: I was going to ask you about that next, because I think she’s needed that internal monologue for so long. And as fans, I think we’ve all — myself included — geeked out and had our own theories and interpretations of all the complex emotions and motivations that are either conflicting on the surface or sitting just beneath that, right? There’s so much, and the novel affirmed a lot of my own interpretations. Even the second I opened the introduction from Wendy Adelacourt, and she immediately called out Christine’s agency and ambition, I was like, “I’m in the right place. This is gonna be so fun”.
But I wanted to ask you, because you flesh it out on a literal sense, but also on a figurative sense as well. For me, Christine seeing the Phantom in “the mirror” was always such a larger metaphor about female ambition, right? It’s ugly, it’s disfigured, it’s unnatural. It doesn’t belong in a patriarchal society, and so it has to be hidden away. And I always found it meaningful that she finally confronts him face to face after that first performance. So she’s already had a taste of the spotlight and the adoration of the audience, and she looks at it directly. And there’s so much language in the musical about them — and it’s echoed in the novel now — about them being one and the same, or becoming one, and that kind of symbiotic relationship. And my favorite lyric from that title number was when they sing to each other: “I am the mask you wear,” and he answers, “It’s me they hear.” And I was always like, in a Freudian psychological sense, that could be her talking to herself on some level.
So, very long-winded way of me asking you to talk about all the ways Christine is masking in the narrative, and the different masks that she has to wear to survive in a 19th century Parisian environment.
Erin Craig: Yeah. So when we first — we knew we got the book, I was going to be writing it and everything — I was so excited. And then I remember the moment I sat down and I was like, “Oh my gosh, you have to write Christine’s perspective!”
I feel like there’s so much of the stage show — it’s her story, but it’s being told around her by the men: the managers in the office, Raoul deciding all these things, Phantom even making her career trajectory. And she just kind of — to teenage Erin she just kind of went along with it. Like, “This is, OK, I’ll sing this part. No, I won’t. Oh wait, we’re doing this. Oh, I guess I’m singing Carlotta’s role now”. All of these things — she gets pushed around a lot.
And it wasn’t until I started going beat by beat with the libretto, and what I wanted all these new scenes to look like, that I realized she has ambition. I don’t know that I had ever, in my teenage fever dream of just, “Oh, the Phantom’s so dreamy!” — even though he’s not, but he is — that I was like, oh, she drives so much of this. And it finally clicked for me.
We do get to learn more about her backstory, with her father dying. In the book, it’s revealed that she was in Paris when her father got sick and died unexpectedly, but she blessedly was with the Girys — they’re old family friends. And there’s a moment where she’s remembering that after the funeral, Madame Giry pulls her aside and is like “OK, what are you gonna do with your life now? You don’t have a mom, your dad’s gone, you don’t really have a lot of money. You gotta do something”. And it could have been very easy for her to be like, “Oh, I’m gonna be a shop assistant. I’ll be a milliner’s assistant. I’ll sell flowers. I’ll do whatever”. But would that have Madame Giry says, “I can take you to the ballet studio, and we’ll start to build this career for you as a ballet dancer. Maybe you’ll be good enough, you can get to the corps one day”. That’s the path she chooses.
And it was so lovely to find that creative ambition spark that she had before the Phantom puts it in her, like, “You’re going to sing and this is what I’m going to do for you”. She chose this life to begin with. And it was so lovely to take that moment and really let it grow, and build on all of these things, because she’s not a ballet dancer. She started very late in life. Traditionally, that’s not how things would be done. But the fact that she decided to choose a life which arguably is far more fraught than being a shop assistant and all the other choices she could have made in 1890s France — she chose this path.
And I think she’s always had this creative ambition and this drive to create and make music and share that gift with the world. But because of circumstances — her father was a violinist, they traveled a lot — she didn’t ever get to sit down and take music lessons and things like that. She kind of had to let that ambition rest on the back burner, until the Phantom opens this up for her and was like, “I will give you these lessons. I will set your career in motion in ways that you might not understand in the moment as it’s happening. But I wanna give you the chance to do this.”
And I don’t know if he ever — like when he first reached out to her, if it was, “you’re going to be the voice for my music”, or if it was a natural progression of the two of them inspiring [each other], the flint-on-flint thing. They both sharpened each other to the point where he does write this grand opera for her, and she is the voice that’s going to bring it into the world.
And I think she does have to hide so much and wear these masks for all of the people that she’s around. She talks about how she doesn’t like keeping secrets from Meg, but she’s not supposed to tell anybody about the Angel of Music, and she can’t tell the Phantom about Raoul. She does have all of these different layers that she’s got to deal with to get what she wants out of life. And so it was really fun to think about, who is she when she’s with Raoul? Who is she when she’s with Meg? Who is she when she’s in her apartment by herself? Who is that Christine?
And it was really lovely to have those moments of quiet, where there’s no singing, there’s no talking, it’s just Christine and her thoughts. One of my favorite parts is when she goes to visit her father in the graveyard, going into “Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again” in the musical, and we do get to see her, just herself. She’s raw with her rage, all the things that just happened in the manager’s office, she’s got the grief of her father, she’s got all of the confusion — and it was just her in the fog and all of these colliding thoughts. And it was such a fun scene to write, because it’s one of my favorite parts in the musical itself. It’s just such a beautiful song. But to really dig in and see all of the swirling chaos of Christine. She is swirling chaos.
Nicole Stawiarski: It’s such a — yeah, it’s such a pop psychology goldmine. It’s messy. There’s bits and pieces of all of our lives that we recognize. But to follow up on what you just said about her father: one of my favorite moments of the book came even earlier on, where I think you really started to address and deconstruct that core wound for her, where she’s on the precipice of really just having a breakthrough. She’s confronting the anger and the sadness over her own loss of innocence, and confronting the fact that she believes so strongly and really wanted to believe in the fantasy he concocted for her.
And she’s at the point where she’s confronting the reality that, “My life right now looks nothing like what he promised, and I’m upset about that.” And it’s strange because it’s so mature, and it’s so self-aware. And I think she’s almost about to do something with that, and she kind of immediately flees into the fantasy that Erik concocts for her, and then the fantasy of Raoul —
Erin Craig: Of an Angel of Music and dead father grief.
Nicole Stawiarski: Which I get. We’ve all been there, where doing the work is hard, and there may be a fun distraction that we choose instead.
But I’m curious: what do you think it would look like for her to really sit with that a bit longer and maybe not lean on these men as an emotional anchor? And do you think she’ll get there eventually, maybe when she’s a bit older and able to recognize these patterns and wounds that she’s repeating with different people?
Erin Craig: Well, absolutely. I would love to have an entire novel of the first voice and, like, “Yes, I will take this music lesson.” There’s a whole story there. But, you know, page requirements and things.
But no, I think she gets there eventually. If the book went on another three or four chapters, I think we definitely would see more of that, because she does have the moment later on in the book where she’s like, “I can choose Phantom, I can choose Raoul. I don’t really like either of them at the moment. They’re both kind of being boneheads. What if I just went and sang and had my happy little — I could bounce around Europe. I don’t need to be a viscountess. I don’t need any of these things.”
And I feel like where the epilogue leaves us off — I’m trying to say any of this without any spoilers, but if the book did not end where it did, and she wasn’t feeling the rush to get married and have that security, I think she totally would be like, “OK, the opera has burned again — Erik’s forever setting the opera on fire — let’s go to like Rome and sing opera there. You know, La Scala is great. We’ve got, the Met’s opening up in New York. There’s places I could go.” I think she’d eventually get there a little earlier. Darn Raoul and his like, winsome ways.
Nicole Stawiarski: And you did such a great job, because it’s always the eternal conflict. There’s always a good love triangle in pop culture, and this is like one of the most historic. And you showed the positive and negative of each of these three people, no matter how messy and dysfunctional it gets. I’m just curious, to tackle that trio, because it is the core of the story: where was it the most fun to just play with the messiness and the dysfunction and the chaos?
Erin Craig: Oh, it was so much. I usually don’t like writing in love triangles, and that was one of the things that I was like, “Oh shoot, this is a big one.” And I’ve never liked Raoul, like ever, in any iteration I’ve ever seen. Patrick Wilson’s a delight, I’m sure, but — but it was really fun to see, oh wait, as Christine, I need to fall in love with Raoul. What is it about him that is so compelling?
And I think for Christine, he represents this moment because he was there when her father was alive. And he offers the safety, security of wealth, and a title position, all of that. But I think truly for her, it’s that moment of, I can pretend my dad is still alive. Like when he’s off in a room someplace — he knew Raoul, we were all happy together. And obviously there’s great dysfunction everywhere across the board with them. But there is that comfort of, “I want to take the easy path and have just a happy, simple life.” And Raoul is very much that happy golden retriever for her, and he does bring her out into the light, and he does give her a calm and safe, certain existence.
And then with Erik and Phantom and everything, there is the hint of danger and the mystery and the creative spark that is so tantalizing to her, because I think it scratches her at an intellectual level. Raoul is safety, security, all of that. But Erik really challenges her to be the very best version of herself. And once she unpacks all of it — “Is it my father’s ghost? Is it the Angel of Music? Who is this person I’m talking to?” — she just sees Erik and him as he is, this very flawed genius of a person. I think it’s flattering that somebody with that much talent and creative force — because he is such a force in the show — that “someone like that would be attracted to me.”
And I think she also just — and it’s almost a love square, rectangle, I don’t know, weird trapezoid — because she does also have, “Could I go off and do this on my own, without either of these men?” And so it is kind of just this tug, back and forth, with all of them.
It was really fun to get extremely messy, like the final confrontation on the lake. It was really fun to be in her head for that. I think I watched the 25th anniversary scene probably like 300 times, just every single moment of the looks that would go across Sierra’s face throughout all of that, and to see the tug of, “I want to love him. He makes me a better person. If I love him enough I can make him a better person.”
Nicole Stawiarski: I can fix him!
Erin Craig: But because she does have such a big compassionate heart, and she loves everyone in her circle so fervently, it definitely doesn’t help her situation, because she wants to save Raoul, she wants to save him, she wants to save herself. And I think she does what she thinks is best, but then is thwarted again by Erik saying, “Eh, go off with Raoul. I feel bad about what I’ve done, go off on the boat. I’ll make the choice for you, even though you just made the choice yourself.” And I think there is some anger in her. She did make this really hard choice and chose it. And then the guy was like, “Eh I know better. I’ll send you off.” And it’s a noble sacrifice for him, but it’s still her not getting to choose her own ending.
Nicole Stawiarski: I think just having all of the dialogue, all of the internal monologue — it finally makes sense. It was so chaotic, and you do see how quickly the emotion and the facial expression changes, and I remember it being so enigmatic for the longest time. Like, “OK, what does she really want?” And it’s — she wants it all, kind of. At different points in time.
Erin Craig: It’s the best and worst of all possible options. She’s got them all, and they’re all really good and really terrible. But then she makes the choice, and that was always the most heartbreaking part of the final scene for me, is that she chooses him. They could have a twisted love, and then he’s like, “Eh, go for it, go off with the sunshine boy. It’s fine. I’ll just run away off in New York.”
Nicole Stawiarski: He ruins it for himself. On that note — which of the three, if any of them, do you think would benefit from modern therapy, and could really work on their ways?
Erin Craig: Meg. Madame Giry. Carlotta, all of them. I would love to see Erik on a therapist’s couch. I think we could do a whole YouTube series; that would be fantastic.
Nicole Stawiarski: Put him with Orna.
Erin Craig: Christine definitely does have a lot of stuff to work through. She did have such a close relationship with her dad, and then the unexpectedness of his death, and then going straight into this huge life change with the ballet and everything. I think she never had time to fully process it. She’s clearly still working through her father issues throughout the book. And she is kind of stuck in that weird Belle Epoque sense of the thing where it’s like, “What man is going to take care of me?” kind of lifestyle. And so, yeah, therapy for Christine would be great too. Raoul’s got mommy issues. They all—yeah.
Nicole Stawiarski: I love that you already brought up Carlotta, because my other question was, I love the addition of Raoul’s mom, the Dowager Vicomtesse, because she’s such a perfect complement to Carlotta. And whether Christine recognizes it consciously, subconsciously, these two women are kind of showing her her futures, right? They’re both powerful and successful in different ways and within different strata of society, and they’re both kind of being cast aside at the same moment, for reasons of age. The Dowager Vicomtesse is getting kind of banished to the cottage after she’s been running the estate on her own—she’s essentially been the vicomte this whole time without any of the claim to the title, and she is being discarded at the same time.
Carlotta sees the writing’s on the wall: Christine’s the ingenue, she’s going to be replaced.
And I think there could be more self-awareness from Christine of, “Oh, I’m part of this cycle, and look how it’s affecting the women around me. And this is kind of what I will expect, even though I’m at this precipice of, I’m going to be the next new thing, the bright shiny bride or the bright shiny star. Actually, that’s gonna be short-lived, and maybe I should prepare myself for these very real outcomes that I’m gonna have to deal with.” I would love to just hear your take on that feminist reading, but also: how did that new character come to you, and how did she evolve as you were writing the novel?
Erin Craig: So when I first started going into the drafting process — I had been a production stage manager with opera companies before I was an author — I knew from the get-go how all of the audition processes were, rehearsals, opening night, tech rehearsals. I knew all of that, except, as a stage manager, I never sat in on vocal coaching. I had no idea what happens in a music lesson. I know what happens when the chorus is singing and the conductor’s giving them notes and things, but actual one-on-one vocal coaching, stage managers aren’t a part of.
So I reached out to one of my former sopranos who I absolutely adore, and I was like, “Can you teach me how to sing?” And she’s like, “Like professionally?” And I’m like, “No, but can you walk me through the process? I can’t tell you why.” She’s like, “OK, this is weird.” But she was talking me through the arpeggio breathing and all the different diaphragm stuff.
And we hadn’t talked in a couple of years, so we were catching up, and she said that she was actually writing her dissertation on the aging out of women from the ingenue roles in opera. She said she got a call from her agent when she turned 45. And it was like, “OK, what roles are you singing now?” And she’s like, “The ones I was singing yesterday — like, my vocal prowess right now.” “But you don’t look 16 anymore.” And so it looks weird having a Gilda as a 40-year-old woman, even though, vocally, you are still a rock star.
And that just stuck in my head for a very long time. And I was like, “That’s Carlotta.” She had a great career. Depending on which version of the libretto you’re reading, she’s had a twenty-year span at various grand opera houses across Europe. And a lot of people have seen the movie only, in like the Minnie Driver — she’s a terrible singer, but she wouldn’t have been cast all these years if she was a bad singer. I think it’s just the ridiculousness of an older woman playing a 16-year-old. It doesn’t sit right.
And so I knew I wanted to expand on that premise with Carlotta, and I really wanted to give her a moment of, like “She’s not a villain.” Yes, she’s kind of a bitch, but she’s getting her entire livelihood yanked out from underneath her by this fresh-faced ballet dancer. She’s not even an opera — like, she worked all these years, went to the conservatory, did all these things, and a ballet dancer’s coming and taking her roles. That would be, in theory — we could have a whole Carlotta spin-off book of how maddening that would be.
And then, like you said, I wanted to get more feminine characters within the book that we don’t necessarily get to see in the musical. And so I realized the vicomte has died and Raoul has assumed the title, but I was like, “Mama is still often in the background doing something.” And it started to have those echoes with Carlotta. And Christine again, she’s kind of a wrecking ball. She comes through and changes the Vicomtesse’s world. Raoul’s been a Lothario all over Europe. He’s been a naval captain, all these things. And suddenly he wants to come home and settle with a new bride, and it’s like, “Oh shoot, I’m not going to be the one working with the vineyard guys, and doing all the stuff with my tenants. And that’s infuriating.” And again, it’s a ballet girl destroying all of this.
And so it was really fun to have Carlotta, but in real life character, where she’s not throwing theatrical temper tantrums and hats and jewels and things like that everywhere, but she’s still just utterly vicious, and all of her one-liners, the little asides she’s got, are just devastating. And I loved her so much.
Nicole Stawiarski: There is an aspect of, with Christine’s ambition, it’s so easy to see her — like, yeah, you would do the same to protect everything you’ve fought and scraped to accumulate and hold on to. They’re all in the same boat together.
Erin Craig: Absolutely. And both of them are such luminaries in their respective fields. It would be very unheard of for a woman in France in 1895 to have that much power. One’s artistic, one is with all of the feudal titles and everything, but it is very strange that a woman would have kept the estate running and everything as she did. But because Raoul’s off doing his naval captain stuff and hitting all the track races and horses all throughout Europe, as he does, she was given the opportunity to do it, and she’s clearly quite good at it. It’s a good estate that Christine’s walking into. And if we — you know, the sequel, obviously, we see what Raoul does with it. But there is so much correlation between the two women, even though on paper they have nothing the same. They really are — they’ve got the same steel backbone.
Nicole Stawiarski: You arrived at my last question, which is the sequel, right? Love Never Dies. I think it’s a little less familiar to standard pop culture fans who may have seen the movie but not the stage shows. And I was curious — there were hints of Raoul’s gambling and drinking throughout the novel, and it’s like, if you know, you know. I was just curious how much the existence of that sequel colored the world you created here, and is there any possibility of a continuation of this story, to get the internal monologue of what happens stateside in that Part 2 of the story?
Erin Craig: That was one of my first questions after we were told that I was gonna be writing it. I remember all of the questions, like, “Oh my gosh, what about this? What about this? What about this?” And I was like, “Whaaat about [sings] Love Never Dies?” Because it’s there. It exists, for better or for worse, and it is canon. And there are some character choices that, if you know, you know.
And so I was like, “How much do we hint toward that?” Because if you go in super “Phantom Phantom Phantom”, this is the best, Meg and Christine are buddies — and then we see the ending of everything in the sequel, it does kind of feel like a slap to the face. Like, “What? How did this go wrong so badly?”
And so I did want to put little seeds of that in. There’s a lot of Christine and Meg conversations where we see Meg’s ambition kind of butting up against Christine’s ambition, and just that hunger to be the best and to prove yourself and to get the leading role — like, your best friend has it, and all of that. I wanted to gently layer in that, on the off chance that we do get a second book. Fingers crossed.
And to see kind of Raoul’s playboy thing — one of the things Andrew and I talked about was the jockey riots that happened in Paris, and why Wagner is no longer playing at the Paris Opera House. And I was like, “Oh yeah, Raoul is totally a Jockey Club member.” He’s got a good career, he’s got a good title, but he’s totally the guy going to the opera to ogle the ballerinas. And then happily, Christine’s is one, and he sees all of this, and he gets his great love of his childhood back. But had Christine not been there — what would the story look like if Christine had had an off night, or something. If she hadn’t gotten Carlotta’s role? What would that have meant to him? He’d still be ogling the ballerinas at the opera house years later.
So I did wanna have the layers of what was to come. But the music is so good. I love the Love Never Dies score. I think it’s some of Andrew’s greatest stuff. The plot line, there’s some holes and things that we definitely would love to have a chance to do again, but we definitely wanted to hint toward it, acknowledge it, because it does exist in the state that it is, and go from there. But if you’re a super fan, you kind of know — we’ve got the “Beneath a Moonless Sky” line in there to hint toward all of the things to come. So we definitely placed some very key Easter eggs in the book, but if you’re a casual reader, or if you’re new to the fandom, you might read it and never think twice about it.
Nicole Stawiarski: Or maybe fall in love and then have to do it all. You’re booking the stage show, you’re flying to New York for the interactive theater version. There’s just so much to engage with at this point in time —
Erin Craig: It’s such a renaissance. Masquerade, and then Love Never Dies will be at the Palladium later this fall as a concert. I think the week after the 40th, the big gala for the 40th anniversary. So yeah, there’s the spectacular Sydney Harbour show that they had outdoors. That staircase. I will dream about that staircase for the rest of my life.
There’s such a renaissance of all things Phantom right now, and it’s so exciting to be a part of the team and seeing all these generations of fans. One of the things in the early signings and stuff we’ve been doing is just getting to hear everybody’s stories about the first time they saw the show, or, remember listening to the CD. One person was telling me their parents painted their dining room, and they just listened to the vinyl on repeat. And so every time she hears it, she remembers her parents dancing around the painted dining room. And to get to hear everybody’s stories, and kind of be the keeper of all of this Phantom love is just such a joy.
Nicole Stawiarski: Well, I’ll share with you really quickly before we sign off, my personal story. My grandmother played the music for me when I was 4. I don’t know if I remember it fully or I just heard the story so many times, but my brother was 2, and he started bawling his eyes out. It scared him. But I always felt so connected, because I was really into it. He was like, this is terrifying.
Erin Craig: So when I started doing all the research for it, I rewatched the 2004 film, and my 9-year-old at the time — she was like, “What is Phantom?” And I was like, oh, it’s just — Mama saw it in 8th grade and fell in love and all these things. And Wicked had just come out, and so she’s like, music! And so she started watching it, and I think she got to Buquet’s death — it was like end of act one — and she’s like, “This is highly inappropriate for me.” And I was like, “Probably, but we have to keep watching it for research. You can leave the room.”
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