Owner Comments:
Andrew Lloyd Webber’s stage musical adaptation of “The Phantom of the Opera” debuted on the West End of London during October 1986. It was incredibly popular and won Musical of the Year among other things. The show made its way to Broadway in 1988 and won several Tony Awards. It is now the 2nd longest running musical on the West End (behind Les Misérables) and the longest-running musical on Broadway. By some estimates the show has earned over $5 Billion, been performed in nearly 150 cities, and seen by over 130 Million people.
The significance of that for me / us is that my wife, a choir girl that loves musicals, loves the Phantom of the Opera and Les Misérables more than just about anything - other than maybe the US version of the Office and Big Brother lol - and she loves going to plays when we can get away with it. We’ve never been to a live showing of Phantom of the Opera together, but we have been to “The Mousetrap” and “Wicked.” She went to “Phantom” with her mother when she went to New York a few years ago in late 2019.
75% Copper, 25% Nickel (Cupronickel) over a pure copper center / core
Mintage: 473,326,970
2.27 grams
17.9 mm diameter
Designer: John R. Sinnock
Torch, Olive Branch and Oak Branch (1964-Date)
I no longer have access to information on exactly when this coin was purchased or how. But it wasn’t one of the coins we sent in to get graded ourselves. Choya might have the information - he has long kept the records of such things in spreadsheets on his computer that may or may not have been destroyed or lost through the years. It was probably bought through eBay though and it was added before the set won the Best in Category award in 2008 - so we replaced the coin we had graded with a better one pretty much immediately.
We actually upgraded / replaced 5 of the 9 coins submitted to NGC in that submission with better coins before we won the Best in Category in 2008, within months of sending them in, because the coins we sent in just graded out so poorly and we were able to go get better grades for cheap so easily. And then we didn’t upgrade or change the set again for 10 years, when we bought 2 upgrades for the set in November 2018.
That submission of those coins for these mint sets was all the proof I needed at the time that I didn’t need to be submitting coins myself until I learned more, and I didn’t submit coins to NGC again for about 10 or 12 years after that disaster.