In a way, OnStage Blog helped me prepare for this moment back in 2015. And yet, the news that it will close next winter, a few weeks after our birthdays (my 36th, its 35th), is not the devastating blow to my identity that it might have been. It’s a mere accident of timing, but so is everything, and that never stops people from making meaning. I have long joked that the Broadway production of The Phantom of the Opera was Andrew Lloyd Webber and Michael Crawford’s birthday present to me, and though I lived in complete ignorance of it for twelve years, finding out that we do, sort of, share a birthday and are, essentially, the same age, years after I first fell in love with the songs has, in its way, haunted me. That a production could open on Broadway on the eve of my first birthday and hang around long enough for me to become obsessed with it as a teenager, dive into the history and characters in college, and see it twice on Broadway after moving to New York City to pursue the career trajectory it started me on, almost makes one tempted to believe in destiny, but if destiny were a thing, surely there would have been a way forward for Christine and the Phantom. By Aaron Netsky, Guest on Twitter, on Instagram
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