Andrew Lloyd Webber will unveil a sequel to the world’s most successful musical at the end of 2009, the famed compooser told the Times of London on Sunday.

Phantom: Love Never Dies will launch with a historic simultaneous opening in three cities – on New York’s Broadway, in London’s West End, and maybe even Shanghai.

“I don’t think you could do this if it wasn’t the sequel to Phantom,” Lloyd Webber told the paper. “We’ve been into the feasibility of rehearsing three companies at once and opening very fast in the three territories. The one which really interests me [in the Far East] would be China … I think to open ‘Love Never Dies’ in Shanghai would be an enormous thing.”

The Phantom of the Opera, based on a French novel by Gaston Leroux, is the longest-running Broadway show in history.

The follow-up to the 1986 Tony Award-winning production will take place a decade after the original, and unlike the original, instead of the French opera, the new story will take place on Brooklyn’s Coney Island.

“It was the place. Even Freud went because it was so extraordinary … people who were freaks and oddities were drawn towards it because it was a place where they could be themselves.”