It enabled me to focus on my school work 24/7, so I could get into college.
Of course, when I brought this issue up with my parents, they thought that having virtually zero contact with people my age outside of school (unless they had a perfect SAT score) was good for me. While I had superficial relationships with almost everyone at my school, I missed out on forming the authentic friendships that could only be forged outside a classroom setting. I was without an order, purpose and truly out of real friends. A floater is someone without a true “group” of friends who goes from one group to the next feeling like the awkward library book someone picked up, didn’t want and randomly shoved back into the shelf. Soon, the lies started catching up to me, and I became the dreaded floater. Instead of a real explanation that would be extremely lame, to spare myself from social suicide, I created the crazy fantasy that I already had other plans - not just with my biology textbook. When my Caucasian friends asked the dreaded question, “Well, why won’t they let you?” I never knew where to start because I didn’t even know why my parents wouldn’t let me go to the movies or go ice skating.
Go big or go home, as they say.īooking at Her Majesty’s theatre, London, until 13 February.I couldn’t even go to study session without an interview and a mock trial by my parents. But the late Maria Björnson’s maximalist designs, from vivid masquerade ball to Degas-style ballet dancers, set the tone for old-school fantasy. The show has a dedication to analogue theatrical effects, from trapdoors and smoke to a skull-topped cane shooting fireballs, and, sure, there’s something hokey about the Phantom playing gondolier in the boat to his subterranean lair. There’s a bit of Hugh Grant about him (the edgier real-life Grant, rather than foppish film version) and he’s rich-voiced in the soaringly romantic All I Ask of You.
Rhys Whitfield plays Christine’s more trad love interest, the dashing Raoul. No room to interrogate his status as an abusive incel here, just a good yarn. He’s a Frankenstein’s monster, sinister yet vulnerable, whose eyes “both threaten and adore” and who tells Christine “fear can turn to love”. He handles a tricky role, a stalker and kidnapper who is also an alternative romantic lead. She’s beatific, her tone bright with no harsh glare, all delicate vibrato, fine control and escalating power.Īs the Phantom, Killian Donnelly (a former Jean Valjean in Les Mis) finds a range of colours from a whisper to a roar. Lucy St Louis (who played Diana Ross in Motown the Musical) is an enchanting Christine, the object of the Phantom’s obsession. Winning formulas, of course, still need a refresh, so post-pandemic the show has returned with a new cast. Lucy St Louis and Killian Donnelly in The Phantom of the Opera.
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