According to Playbill, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s sequel to the original Phantom of the Opera currently entitled Phantom: Love Never Dies is moving forward and will simultaneously open in three different territories at the end of 2009. Webber is approaching his sequel to his original masterpiece with amazing care. The first act was workshopped in the summer of 2008 at Lloyd Webber’s private Sydmonton Festival at his Berkshire country home. We’ve already done the first act,” Lloyd Webber explained, “and rather like The Woman in White, where the first act worked wonderfully, what we cannot do is presume that the second act is going to as well.”
Working with director Jack O’Brien, who staged the Sydmonton workshop, and lyricist Glenn Slater, he is now writing the rest of the show, and when they have completed the work, “we are going to do a workshop of the second act, then take a month off and do it again with both halves this time and then we’ll see.” Although Webber says he has a good idea who the Phantoms will be, rumors are circulating that Hugh Jackman and Gerard Butler (who played the Phantom in the 2005 film version of the musical) might get the starring role in 2 of the productions.