Yep...These are so blatant that one can name the show, and name the “hit”.
ALW did one thing in “Phantom” that I really admired. When he wrote fake operas for the musical, he wrote some really, really bad Saint-Saens and some superbad Rossini, and he wrote them convincingly and well. That’s extremely difficult to do! I was laughing through the “Hannibal” excerpt because I knew exactly what he was doing.