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Andrew Lloyd Webber with scenes from, clockwise from left, Starlight Express, Evita, Jesus Christ Superstar, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Cats and Phantom of the Opera.
Andrew Lloyd Webber with scenes from, clockwise from left, Starlight Express, Evita, Jesus Christ Superstar, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Cats and Phantom of the Opera. Illustration: Want Some Studio
Andrew Lloyd Webber with scenes from, clockwise from left, Starlight Express, Evita, Jesus Christ Superstar, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Cats and Phantom of the Opera. Illustration: Want Some Studio

Andrew Lloyd Webber at 70: how a ruthless perfectionist became Mr Musical

This article is more than 6 years old

He took the shonky British musical and made it a global phenomenon. As the composer celebrates his birthday with a new memoir, our theatre critic looks back at the hits – and flops

I first became aware of the global reach of Andrew Lloyd Webber, who hits 70 this week, one afternoon in Tbilisi in 1988. I was there with a party of journalists accompanying a National Theatre tour of Shakespeare’s late plays. We were invited to the Georgian ministry of culture, then still nominally communist, and politely asked our hosts what other piece of high art they might like imported from Britain.

“Veber, Veber,” the Soviet suits all cried.

John Higgins, the opera buff in our group, assumed they meant Carl Maria von Weber and suggested a Covent Garden concert version of Der Freischütz or even Euryanthe could be arranged.

“No, no,” they shouted, banging the table ferociously. “We want Veber! Veber! Andrew Lloyd Veber!”

At that point, we realised that what they craved was Cats or Phantom and that, east or west, Andrew Lloyd Webber had become our greatest theatrical export. He took the British musical and turned a cottage industry into a global phenomenon.

It is true that shows such as Sandy Wilson’s The Boy Friend and Lionel Bart’s Oliver! had previously enjoyed success on Broadway. But, before the ascent of Lloyd Webber, the British musical was very much a homegrown affair catering for a specific local market. I have a nostalgic fondness for the work of David Heneker, especially the long-forgotten Make Me an Offer (1959), as directed by Joan Littlewood, and Half a Sixpence (1963), recently revived in Chichester and the West End. But I also remember our capacity to take decent middlebrow novels such as HG Wells’s Ann Veronica or Somerset Maugham’s Liza of Lambeth and turn them into dismal shows full of thumbs-in-waistcoat choreography.

Antoine Murray-Straughan, Nicole Scherzinger and Nicholas Pound in the 2014 London Palladium production of Cats. Photograph: David M Benett/Getty Images

Lloyd Webber, with the aid of an ever-changing band of lyricists (none of whom ever surpassed Tim Rice), changed all that: he took a local farm shop and turned it into an international factory. How did he do it?

The first thing to say is that Lloyd Webber is a total theatre animal. He has a nose for what will work on a stage, whether it be an odd collection of TS Eliot poems (Cats), a mad 19th-century melodrama (The Phantom of the Opera) or the inspirational anarchy of a scruffy teacher (School of Rock). Sometimes, as with the superfluous Stephen Ward (about the man at the centre of the Profumo scandal), the nose seems badly blocked. But reading Lloyd Webber’s recently published mammoth memoir, Unmasked, you realise where this instinct comes from. As a pre-pubescent boy, he was not only whisked off to big West End musicals such as My Fair Lady and West Side Story, but created, with his brother Julian, a toy theatre where he staged elaborate shows. One, based on The Importance of Being Earnest, was prophetically entitled A Musical of Gigantic Importance. You could say he’s been rewriting that one ever since.

Lloyd Webber’s lust for theatre is evident in the gradual gestation of Cats. It started with the idea of setting four of the poems from Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats to music for the Sydmonton festival, which takes place on the estate of Lloyd Webber’s country home. The whole concept was transmogrified – or even transmoggified – when Eliot’s widow, Valerie, handed over a set of unpublished poems including Grizabella, the Glamour Cat, which added a tragic dimension and The Song of the Jellicles, which prompted Lloyd Webber to see the show’s potential for dance. A whole team of people – including Cameron Mackintosh as producer, Gillian Lynne as choreographer and Trevor Nunn as director – contributed to the success of the show. But it says everything about Lloyd Webber that, while his career was being celebrated in a recording of TV’s This Is Your Life at the New London theatre, his mind was not on the joy of reunion with long-lost relatives, but on the venue’s potential as a future home for Cats.

A sharp-witted lyricist to balance his innate romanticism … Andrew Lloyd Webber with Tim Rice in the early 70s. Photograph: Hulton Deutsch/Corbis via Getty Images

Along with Lloyd Webber’s passion for theatre goes a temperament I would call essentially romantic that enables him to write lush, soaring melodies: it’s that aspect of him some people can’t stand, but which has made him a wealthy man. In his book he reveals that hearing Tosca on the radio and then seeing a famous Zeffirelli production with Maria Callas and Tito Gobbi was a life-changing experience. The sounds of Puccini echo through much of his work. Interestingly, Franz Lehár, who wrote The Merry Widow, was called “the Puccini of operetta”; Mark Steyn, in his book Broadway Babies Say Goodnight, quotes an Austrian conductor, Caspar Richter, saying: “I believe Andrew Lloyd Webber is the Lehár of today in that his orchestration, heavily based on strings, isn’t far from the Viennese tradition.” Lloyd Webber can write rock, but his debt to operetta can be heard in Aspects of Love, where an ageing bohemian does a silky foxtrot with his teenage daughter and sings, “I want to be the first man you remember, I want to be the last man you forget.”

If I had to pick out a third quality that explains Lloyd Webber’s extraordinary career, it would be a ruthless perfectionism. I scarcely know the man: I’ve been writing about his work for over four decades and interviewed him twice, but he passes me on first nights without visible recognition. Fair enough. Intriguingly, it was that single-mindedness that led Miloš Forman to try to persuade him to play Mozart in the movie of Amadeus. “You are a hot-headed perfectionist who can be extremely obnoxious,” Forman told him. “I want you to play yourself.” Unsurprisingly, Lloyd Webber did not swallow the bait.

Very much of its moment … Lloyd Webber promoting School of Rock Photograph: Joel Ryan/AP

Looking back at my last interview with Lloyd Webber, shortly before the opening of The Phantom of the Opera in 1986, I too was struck by the obsessive nature of his talent. Fourteen drafts of Phantom lay about his office at the Palace theatre, and time and again Lloyd Webber came back to the need for the perfect musical structure. But what exactly did that mean? “Is the libretto right?” he explained. “Is the music right for that particular bit of the story? Are echoes of the music to be heard in other parts of the score? Nobody, I hope, notices that the beginning of Cats is fugue and that the middle of the Jellicle Ball is fugue and that the resolution comes in a later theme. But, for me, it’s the crucial thing on which the score depends, just as the whole of Evita is based on a tritone and goes round in a complete circle.”

For all his skill and accomplishment, a big question remains: “Did Andrew Lloyd Webber,” as a recent New Yorker profile asked, “ruin the musical or rescue it?” In other words, did he take it back to European operetta or push it in new directions?

I’d have thought his work is too varied and interesting to be easily pigeonholed: The Phantom of the Opera, which is a sort of Metro-Goldwyn-Meyerbeer, and Sunset Boulevard may look backwards, while Starlight Express and School of Rock are very much of their moment. If I have any qualm about Lloyd Webber’s oeuvre, it is to do with his faith in the through-composed score. Mark Steyn has talked of the precise tension of a musical consisting of “the raising of the stakes as dialogue turns to underscored speech, then to verse, then to chorus”. Lloyd Webber hasn’t entirely abolished that, but he doesn’t favour it, either.

Lloyd Webber with TS Eliot’s widow Valerie, who gave him a set of unpublished poems that inspired Cats. Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty Images

I can only say that the musicals I cherish, from Guys and Dolls to Gypsy, from Wonderful Town to West Side Story, each have dialogue that matches the music and a libretto that provides a strong spine for the score.

I’d also argue that Lloyd Webber works best when he has a sharp-witted lyricist to balance his innate romanticism: he had it with Tim Rice on Joseph, Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita and, more fitfully, with Charles Hart and Richard Stilgoe on The Phantom of the Opera. Even a good director such as Hal Prince or Trevor Nunn can act as a vital counterweight to the composer-dominated musical that is Lloyd Webber’s forte. For all his attempts to encourage new talent, he also looks like a swimming instructor in a largely empty pool: George Stiles and Anthony Drewe (Honk!, Betty Blue Eyes) are the only team to have left their imprint on the British musical post-Lloyd Webber.

Yet much of the hostility Lloyd Webber seems to attract can be put down to snobbery: the curious British belief that anything truly popular can’t really be any good. Looking at his career over a long span, I’d also say he deserves credit both for his careful stewardship of the theatres he owns and for taking the British musical out of its cosy backwater and, by choosing a range of unlikely subjects, sending it spinning round the globe. You don’t have to like all his shows – I could cheerfully live without seeing Starlight Express again – but postwar British theatre without him would have been a duller place. Those Georgian apparatchiks desperate for “Andrew Lloyd Veber” were not entirely wrong.

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