After careful consideration of the Poe studio release and all the written accounts of those fortunate enough to attend the private performance of the musical in its entirety in Studio Two of Abbey Road, I have come to a rather unsurprising conclusion: Poe is a rare achievement in musical theatre!
And this is coming from someone who is seldom impressed with the pretzel logic most musicals grind a narrative through for the sake of convention. A good example is Tim Rice's CHESS. When a studio album that carried a disclaimer explaining it was a work in progress, it was brilliant! But by the time Broadway got a hold of it, the stage version was a tortured altering of Rice's originality in favor of love story convention.
Conventional musical theatre has proved it can parody and/or satirize something or someone else, but seldom is it truly original in its own right in the way the original version of CHESS was or the way POE _is_. This musical stands its own ground and goes through pains to be historically true to Poe's life, a concern few musicals ever even stop to consider.
While I was not one of those fortunate enough to attend the private performances in Abbey Road, I do hope that the rest of the English speaking world here in America as well as Australia will get the chance to see Eric Woolfson's Poe and witness musical theatre moved forward for themselves.
While the narrative of "Phantom of the Opera" is one that is almost completely incoherent, it is good to see the theatre alive and well. My hope is that the wild popularity of Phantom would also kindle interest in a truly original and lucid musical like POE. POE really deserves its share of the Limelight :)