Musical Today 
The Phantom of the Opera
What The Phantom of the Opera actually is
A disfigured musician lives in the cellars of the Paris Opéra, teaches a young chorus singer in secret, and then starts removing everyone standing between her and the leading role. It is a love triangle in which one corner is a threat, and it is played straight — the show never winks.
Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, lyrics by Charles Hart with additional lyrics by Richard Stilgoe, from Gaston Leroux's 1910 novel. The score is closer to sung-through than to a numbers musical, and it borrows the language of nineteenth-century opera on purpose: the show-within-the-show has to sound like the real thing for the sabotage to land.
What a ticket buys is scale and craft. Maria Björnson's design and Hal Prince's staging have been kept, restored and updated rather than replaced; Gillian Lynne's choreography is still the movement in it. The chandelier is the moment everybody knows, and it works because it belongs to the plot rather than to the budget.
If you know one song it is the title number. The others people leave humming are "The Music of the Night", "All I Ask of You" and "Masquerade", which puts almost the whole company on the stairs at once.