The Phantom Of The Opera has won the first ever Olivier Audience Award for
Most Popular Show. Voting took place on this website and from a television phone poll on this week’s daily A Week In The West End programme on BBC TWO.
Current Chicago star Claire Sweeney, who has been fronting the television show this week, rather fittingly presented the bronze award to the show’s producers, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Cameron Mackintosh. Lord Lloyd Webber, whose musical has played over 6,000 performances and has won 20 major theatre awards including two Oliviers and seven Tony Awards, said on receiving this latest accolade, “after Cats closes, we’re out of a job, so we’ll be guesting in The Play What I Wrote.”
The romantic musical, based on Gaston Leroux's gothic novel of life beneath the stage of the Paris Opera House, won the most votes from a top four which included Mamma Mia!, Cats and the Reduced Shakespeare Company. Throughout its sixteen-year history Phantom’s perennial popularity has never been in question. The original cast recording was the first in British musical history to enter the charts at number one. Since then it has gone gold and platinum in the UK and US, selling over two million copies. Plans for a feature film of the musical are currently being developed.
