I still remember hearing about the stage version as it opened in London to rave reviews - especially for it's star, Michael Crawford and how any eventual movie version would fail without his inclusion. Fast forward 20 years, and Gerard Butler proves them wrong.
Don't get me wrong, Schumaker's take on The Phantom of the Opera is not perfect. Though it's fault cannot be found in any of its performers. From Butler and Emily Rossum, through Patrick Wilson, and even to Minnie Driver - all the actors do quality work. Wilson is unfortunately staged with the under-written and annoying Raoul - though that is more the fault of the writers than any shortcoming on his part.
The movie follows the stage version pretty closely, even mirroring some of the most iconic scenes almost identically. And therein lies one of the problems with this version. Schumaker had the freedom of film, yet the camera often times seems bolted down in order to preserve a concept from the theatrical telling. It's a shame, but those faults are mostly in the first 1/3 of the film.
The largest problem - again, partly Schumaker and partly his screenwriters, was to remove some of the singing and replace it with verbatim speech, speaking the lines of a song instead of singing. Directorially I can understand the reasoning, but the dialogue rings false and ultimately sounds flat. It either needs to be genuine dialogue and it needs to be sung. Probably a discussion about having too much "opera" in the movie caused the decision to be made - but it's called Phantom of the OPERA... any audience members bothered by excessive singing would never have sat down in the first place.
All in all - a capable telling of the stage version. A little short-handed given the possibilities of a true film version... but capable nonetheless. Schumaker didn't lay an egg on this one... but he also didn't climb very high.