The pigeons that nearly flew over the audience: Harold Prince’s unrealised plans for “The Phantom of the Opera” revealed

Forty years ago, when “The Phantom of the Opera” raised its curtain at His Majesty’s Theatre in London, the audience might have seen something quite different from the spectacle we know today — for example, white pigeons flying over their heads. This is revealed by a retrospective published on Monday in The Guardian for the 40th anniversary of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical, as BroadwayWorld reports.

According to the publication, the late director Harold Prince had planned to release white pigeons — played in fact by ordinary pigeons — that would fly up toward the theatre boxes. “It was a beautiful idea”, producer Cameron Mackintosh recalls, “except all they did was fly up to a roosting place and defecate all over the audience.”

But that was not the only animal idea that was never realised. Prince also wanted mice running beneath the stage of the Paris Opera, where the musical is set — but the artificial mice with glowing red eyes left the creative team “crying with laughter”. Meanwhile set designer Maria Björnson had proposed a white horse that would carry the Phantom to his lair, but that idea was also abandoned.

The retrospective also reveals that the Olivier Award-winning musical — which opened on October 9, 1986 in the West End before conquering Broadway — was in fact not intended at all for His Majesty’s Theatre. According to former Phantom John Owen-Jones, the show was planned for the Palace Theatre, but “Les Misérables” was still playing there, so it moved to the smaller theatre — which at the time was called Her Majesty’s, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth II.

“At the time, Her Majesty’s had the only working Victorian understage in London”, Owen-Jones recalls. “So the team could use it for things like the chandelier rising from the floor. People hadn’t seen something like that in the West End for a very long time.”