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American lovers of musical theatre who blame Andrew Lloyd Webber for pretty much everything that went wrong on its stages, starting in the early seventies, will be chagrined to discover that he has written an autobiography that has all the virtues his music always seemed to lack: wit, surprise, contemporaneity, audacity, and an appealingly shrewd sense of the occasion. There is nothing pompous or pallid about his prose, which makes it all the odder that so much of the music that he wrote seems to have no other qualities. Given his reputation as the guy who dragged the Broadway musical from its vitality and idiomatic urgency back to its melodramatic roots in European operetta—while also degrading rock music to a mere rhythm track—is it possible that, as his memoir indicates, his work might be more varied and interesting than we had known? Could we, terrible thought, have been unfair to Andrew Lloyd Webber? The answer turns out, on inspection, to be a complicated and qualified Yes. Certainly, no artist as hugely successful as he has been can have struck a chord without owning a piece of his time.
Lloyd Webber, as his memoir, “Unmasked” (HarperCollins), reveals, was caught in a wrinkle within that time. Though his music may often sound as if it were written by a man locked in the basement of the Paris opera—hearing late-nineteenth-century music, muffled, from a couple of floors down—he turns out to be very much a boy of the Monty Python generation, his ears full of rock and British comedy. Born in 1948, Lloyd Webber as a child was an Elvis nut who played “Jailhouse Rock” until his parents were numbed by it, and later led a school celebration for the duo Peter and Gordon, recent alumni who had had a pop hit. He knows his instruments, ready to whip out a twelve-string Rickenbacker for the right effect in a recording session.
But he also had, from early on, a Betjemanian love of Englishness: he tells, touchingly, of schoolboy trips to see old churches and abbeys and of a keen love for Pre-Raphaelite art, that wistful-whimsical mode of nineteenth-century British painting. (He later amassed one of the world’s best private collections of the school.) He loved pantomime, a distinctly English holiday entertainment that mixed spectacle, parody, nostalgia, and pastiche. As a child, he operated a toy musical theatre with his brother, in which they put on full-scale shows, Andrew pulling all the strings and arranging all the music. You have a sense that this is still the theatre where he puts on shows; one of those infant musicals was billed as “A Musical of Gigantic Importance,” and several well-known later tunes emerged from them. You get good at this stuff early, or probably not at all.
Rising from the English upper crust—that school he shared with Peter and Gordon was Westminster, a famous London one—he absorbed many of its attitudes, although, the English crust having as many layers as a mille-feuille, one has the sense that he comes from somewhere in the more insecure upper middle, rather than from the very creamy top. He emerged with, among other things, a passion for P. G. Wodehouse (one of his rare flops was a Wodehouse musical). Indeed, his memoir is written in a sort of Bertie Wooster pastiche, a little disconcertingly given that its material is the very un-Woosterish one of drive and success. At one point, Lloyd Webber even recycles a Wodehouse joke in a way that may puzzle outsiders to the Wodehouse cult, calling people “gruntled.” (It’s from “The Code of the Woosters”: “If not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.”)
His father, perhaps most significant of all, was a composer of a distinctly English variety—happily obscure, making a living writing old-fashioned organ and choral music for amateur church choirs. He was one of a group of British composers for whom it was still possible to write straight, melodic music that wasn’t pop and somehow make a living. It was his parents who introduced him to Puccini, and then one day his father played “Some Enchanted Evening,” the ballad from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “South Pacific,” saying, “If you ever write a tune half as good as this, I shall be very, very proud of you.” Ah! If only Dad had played “The Lady Is a Tramp” or “Where or When” or another angular and elegant Rodgers and Hart ballad, the history of musical theatre might have been different, and better. (To be fair, whenever Lloyd Webber does write at his best, he writes at Rodgers’s best; the influence flows in and then out, as in the genuinely beautiful “All I Ask of You,” from “The Phantom of the Opera.”)
A kind of admirably defensive attitude got embedded in him from his youth: old things could be nice things, and the tastes of awkward schoolboys might be made into entertainment. Those tastes were always what the Brits call “naff”—lame, tacky, uncool. But he knew that naff could be beautiful. The basic formula that lit up the pop cantatas that first made him famous was apparent early on: something old, something new, something borrowed, nothing blue. “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” (1968), which in some ways remains the most vivid thing Lloyd Webber ever wrote, was pushed along by a music master at a prestigious junior school who wanted “something for the whole school to sing.” Using Tim Rice’s words, which had, instead of sixties piety, a jaunty Python playfulness, he managed to write a school play from Scripture which no one had to take too seriously. Its famous follow-up, “Jesus Christ Superstar” (1970), was a rock album, played on progressive FM before it was a show. Those of us with snobby tastes in Hendrix and the Dead thought it was a terrible rock album, but a rock album is what it was.
So, though his music isn’t often grouped with the “prog rock” of the early seventies—the highly tutored, self-consciously arty music of Yes and early Genesis and Procol Harum and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and so on—the spirit is very much the same: educated British musicians with classical training, inherited rock rhythm sections, minimal blues feeling, and a taste for the grandiose and bombastic. The famous “Phantom of the Opera” theme, with the organ’s quaver accompanied by funereal electric bass and foreboding percussion, is pure prog rock, almost to the point of “Spinal Tap”-style parody. What Lloyd Webber added to the mix was a feeling for pathos and melody—putting Puccini rather than Bach into the prog-rock cauldron. (These connections prove to be fairly direct: the first Jesus in “Jesus Christ Superstar” was the lead singer of Deep Purple, and a subsequent Jesus tried out for Black Sabbath, both groups slightly demented children of prog rock.)
Every biography or memoir set in the world of popular music turns out to be a book about music publishing. You wince as you read the opening chapters, knowing that, with the fateful inevitability of Greek tragedy, the composer-songwriter-singer is going to sign a deal with a rapacious music publisher as a dewy-eyed youngster and then spend the rest of his life regretting it. Springsteen, the Beatles, most notoriously John Fogerty—the story varies only in the details.
Lloyd Webber reverses the rules. Even before he had written a single hit song, he had spotted in the publisher’s contracts something called Grand Rights, meaning the ongoing financial control over theatrical productions. No one in the sixties much cared about these—who was going to mount a theatrical production of a pop cantata?—but Lloyd Webber did, and miraculously managed to hold on to his, or, at least, to eighty per cent of them. (Having to give up twenty per cent “rankles with me to this day,” he confides.) Lloyd Webber is ferociously smart about everything to do with money and marketing; every small real-estate transaction he has ever taken part in is recounted in detail and its value offered both in the original sum and, in parenthesis, in the equivalent now—e.g., “£2,000 per year was a lot of money in those days (today approximately £32,000).” Cynics know the price of everything and the value of nothing; a smart popular artist like Lloyd Webber knows the price of everything and the value of everything and can never decide which matters more.
Or, rather, he made the decision, long ago, while still knowing the alternative. For him, calculation and composition go hand in hand—as they did, let it be said, for Irving Berlin and for Richard Rodgers, too. You learn how Lloyd Webber composed “Cats” and “Starlight Express” and the rest; you also learn about the composition of the licensing and merchandising choices. Selecting posters and crafting ads get as much attention as making music. There’s even a fascinating digression on how the grooves on the “Evita” LP had to be widened so that when “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” appeared on the radio it would have sufficient volume to compete with the other pop songs.
In truth, Lloyd Webber’s genius was always more theatrical than musical—more about putting on a big show than about writing startling or original music. That’s not to say he doesn’t care about the music: he talks, fairly, about his pride in the orchestration of the second verse of “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina.” But the value of the music is determined exclusively by how many people choose to listen to it, and by the “Wow!” factor it presents to a seated audience. The ill-natured regularly insist that Lloyd Webber “stole” music from the classics. Online, one can find fiendishly self-satisfied chat boards detailing the supposed lifts. But if someone can find a pop song (“I Don’t Know How to Love Him”) in a Mendelssohn violin concerto, more power, and royalties, to him. Lloyd Webber was working his marionettes, with anything that he could find to move them.
At a deeper level, Lloyd Webber’s memoir exposes a central fault line in the history of popular music. In the late fifties, not only was the “My Fair Lady” cast album the biggest seller of its time but spinoff jazz albums with musicians playing “My Fair Lady” material were huge sellers, too. Sinatra’s great albums of the mid-fifties were heavy with theatre songs. By 1964, all that had altered for good; a successful original-cast album went from the place where hits always happened to a place where they rarely did. When the Beatles and the rest arrived, the line between pop music and theatre music became almost absolute; the circumstance in which a Broadway musical was the natural home of a hit tune began to break up more rapidly than anyone had thought possible, even though the previous connection had been so long-lasting that the Beatles felt obliged to play, as their second song before the American public, “Till There Was You,” from Meredith Willson’s “The Music Man.” An ironic sign of obeisance to a dying order.
When the plates move and shake in a genre of entertainment, you survive by getting either smarter or more spectacular. This was true of the early-seventeenth-century theatre, when, as playgoing moved indoors, away from the giant popular amphitheatres, the special effects got more elaborate and the drama got more daring. It was true of Hollywood after the arrival of television, where some went for Cinerama and others went for a more pointedly adult and arty direction. And it was true of musical theatre after rock. Sondheim became the god of smart, Lloyd Webber of spectacular.
You could also, Lloyd Webber sensed instinctively, undertake what rock couldn’t do, or did only fitfully: a unified piece of classic storytelling. The Who’s “Tommy” is a wonderful rock album, but a very rickety piece of narrative. Lloyd Webber stumbled onto the truth that there was a range of stylized storytelling that lent itself to his music—that if you couldn’t tell street tales you could find old fables. All his successful shows have been fables and fairy tales and pageants and pantomimes. Rock having taken the street, the salon was left vacant. With ordinary emotion sung in idiomatic English having been reclaimed by the singer-songwriters, theatrical music could borrow rock style but move backward in form, toward operetta and melodrama. Lloyd Webber and Sondheim both wrote their best work around the subject of “night music”—what it might sound like and what it might mean. Sondheim’s night music occupied a single house in wry waltz time; Lloyd Webber’s the operatic basement in melodramatic swellings—musicals, still, of Gigantic Importance.
The return to operetta is a surprising but not unnatural development. The history of musical theatre can be seen as a race—like Eliza across the ice—against the bloodhounds of operetta, with the European formula always lying in wait to recapture the runaway, twirling a mustache and wearing a top hat. The Princess Theatre musicals of Kern, Wodehouse, and Bolton are usually thought to have been the first to make a real break with the European model, offering casual interchange, light-footed melody, and contemporary romance in place of the old Viennese pastry.
The odd thing is that, while the “book shows” that sprang from this transformation produced the greatest body of songs since the German Romantics, and more varied than those, the shows that produced those songs were so slight as to be unrevivable, except as nostalgia pieces. The songs have depth and surprise; the shows don’t. Of the Rodgers and Hart productions, only one or two stand up, and of the Cole Porter shows hardly more: you have to go right from Rodgers and Hart’s “On Your Toes” to Porter’s “High Society,” with a brief summer-stock stop at “Kiss Me, Kate.” (Lloyd Webber, to his credit, produced a revival of “On Your Toes,” in London, in the nineteen-eighties, but, he says ruefully, it “cost me my shirt.” Though one knows that there was a shirt beneath the shirt, and one beneath that.)
Better shows with lesser music have become more familiar than the shows with the very best stuff, which is mostly hived off to jazz and cabaret. The Rodgers and Hammerstein shows, which are unified and theatrical, are still in constant circulation, even though they don’t contain Rodgers’s best work. The Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals have been revived so successfully in the past two decades, in impeccably posh corners like the National Theatre in London and Lincoln Center Theatre here, that it’s hard to recall that not so long ago they were considered very déclassé—taken for granted by an earlier generation to have been part of the suburban middlebrow descent of Broadway theatre in the nineteen-fifties, especially when it came to the quality of the music. Alec Wilder, in “American Popular Song: The Great Innovators,” still the best book on the topic, could hardly find six Rodgers and Hammerstein songs that he thought were equal to Rodgers’s work with Hart, calling “Some Enchanted Evening,” which so enchanted the Lloyd Webbers, “pale and pompous and bland.” Yet the Rodgers and Hammerstein shows survive because they keep intact the crucial discovery of the American form, the thing that really separated it from the opera tradition and its dependencies: extraordinary emotion sung by ordinary people, rather than extraordinary emotion sung by extraordinary people.
Lloyd Webber’s musicals are all operetta in that simple sense. They are filled with extraordinary people—whether Evita or Jesus—singing big stuff; the excitement gained by the spectacle is paid for by the loss of soul, pious aspiration replacing spice and street savvy. (Today, one listens to a now forgotten show like Phil Silvers and Johnny Mercer’s 1951 “Top Banana” with astonishment at its energy and its urban moxie.) A good book holds up even bathetic music—a lesson not lost on Lloyd Webber. The closest thing he has achieved to the older style of musical is “Cats,” from 1981, a show that had street wisdoms within its Eliotian measures. (The often maligned “Cats” is doubtless in part a victim of an ugly kind of reverse snobbery: had it appeared for a month at the National Theatre, instead of for all our lifetimes in the West End and on Broadway, it would have had a choicer reputation.)
Theatricality is the key to Lloyd Webber’s success, and theatre is conflict. Not surprisingly, he tells many fine theatre stories, most of them, as is the way in the history of the musical, tales of rage, resentment, and growing mutual mistrust, all in the cause of making two and a half hours of middlebrow entertainment. The stories are good, and sometimes violent. He tells of the time that the actor Michael Crawford and the producer Cameron Mackintosh got out of a London car and started a fistfight on the street because Crawford wanted to use a recording of one of his “Phantom” songs in performance. We learn that Lloyd Webber’s longtime partner Tim Rice once became so enraged that he threatened a lawsuit to have his words removed from “Memory”—to be sure, something any honest man would want to do. (Rice and Lloyd Webber have only recently seemed to reconcile.) Given the scale of Lloyd Webber’s successes, one is startled by the vitriol that accompanies his productions. He even reproduces catty letters that he wrote to Patti LuPone during the run of “Evita,” despairing of her ability to sing the words clearly enough for them to be understood by the audience. (She never really did, and it never really mattered.)
“Understand some of my lyrics still in show despite your assurances to the contrary,” Rice telexed to his partner, in good Wodehousian telegraphic form. “Demand removal by tonight or legal action follows.” How, one wonders, could people have nearly come to blows, with lawsuits and friendships ripped apart, over “Cats”? If the rule in the movie industry is that nobody knows anything, the rule in musical theatre is more fiendish: everybody does know something, but nobody knows what bit of what’s known will count, and everybody hates the next person for thinking he or she does. That’s one theory for why the history of the musical is a history of men and women shouting at one another. The incomparable composer and lyricist Frank Loesser once ordered a director to tell an actor not to sing a song the wrong way, and, after the director obligingly did so, Loesser yelled at him anyway: “You didn’t hit him, you son of a bitch!” The producer Cy Feuer tells of how, during a Philadelphia tryout of a harmless musical called “Little Me,” the wonderful lyricist Carolyn Leigh actually went outside and asked a police officer to arrest him for cutting one of her songs.
But my own theory for why musical comedies make people miserable, richly borne out by Lloyd Webber’s memoir, is that there is no natural author of a musical—that is, no one who assumes authority, more or less inevitably, owing to the nature of the form. The director, by contrast, is the natural author of a movie. He coaxes out the performances, allows the improvs, and makes the cuts. A choreographer, similarly, is the natural author of the dance. Most of the time, the natural author is the actual author, and the exceptions leave us grumbling. Authors write books, even if editors mightily assist.
But a musical has no natural author. It has five or six or seven. The composer is the actual author of the most powerful emotional beats in the piece—we remember Richard Rodgers’s music in “Carousel” far better than any other element—but composers tend to be inarticulate and are often outtalked. The book writer, as he is archaically still called—elsewhere, simply, the playwright—is the most important maker; but though he provides the structure in which the songs may take place, no one recalls the structure, only the songs. The director is often powerful to the point of omnipotence, but no one except special groups of insiders will ever think of the show as his. The lyricist, meanwhile, has a reasonable claim to being the true author of the show—the music’s emotional force takes on specific meaning only through the words it accompanies—but he often ends up the most invisible of all. Meanwhile, the choreographer believes himself to be the natural author of all the things the director is doing badly, but is also sure that the director will get the credit even if the choreographer fixes them. Add to this the truth that songs that delighted salons of backers bore audiences silly, and that the things that worked perfectly in rehearsal die a dog’s death onstage, and you have a natural abyss of authority. You need only bring in the panic of pure ignorance to produce an atmosphere like that of a third-world country after the President has left the palace and the mobs are surging in the streets.
So it shouldn’t be surprising to discover that, even after Lloyd Webber had become a theatrical Godzilla, he was still entangled in the whims and the will of others. The stage design of “Phantom of the Opera” proposed by Trevor Nunn, Lloyd Webber thinks, would have damaged the show, and he’s probably right, but to fight off Nunn in favor of Hal Prince was brutal, friendship-ending work, wounding both would-be directors at once. It was quite a typical tangle: “I feared that both Trevor and Cameron would think it was the reviews”—for “Les Mis,” at that point, amazingly, was considered a failure—“that were the reason for my insisting that the director must be Hal. Cameron seemed curiously disturbed when I stood my ground. Years later, I discovered the reason. Although I still presumed that Hal was to be our director, in fact he had been stood down. I also learned that Hal blamed me for this and was appalled.” He concludes, “It’s best left at that,” unintentionally echoing the famous words of the Spinal Tap guitarist about one of the group’s dying drummers. Lloyd Webber’s stories, far from being tales of aims accomplished, remain tales of aims gone wrong and of mountains not quite climbed. Even the most powerful auteur of musicals can never quite become their author.
“Phantom of the Opera” is probably the closest thing we will have to a complete expression of Lloyd Webber’s vision, and here it is on Broadway, still playing thirty years on, likely, as he says himself, the single most successful piece of theatrical entertainment ever engineered. As a recent visit confirms, it remains today, for the audience of tourists and kids who flock to it, as impressive as it was when it débuted. The show manages to be both absolutely terrible and sort of great. The action makes no sense, it takes forever for the story to get going, the characters are made of cardboard, and the music is made of bits and pieces. But theatre is brutally binary; it either works or it doesn’t, and no one with a fair mind and a taste for the theatrical can deny that this show works.
It is pure, unadulterated operetta: the entire first twenty minutes of the show are given over to a bit of self-amused nineteenth-century pastiche, and then twenty minutes later we get an extended Mozart parody that must be lost on nine-tenths of the audience. But its theatricality, both of the showy, expensive kind (rising and falling chandeliers, mysterious mirrors and underground lagoons) and of the more potent, elemental kind (obsessive love and beautiful sopranos and virtuous aristocrats), remains intact.
Spectacular is, in the end, a species of smart. Popular artists find solutions to problems presented by the circumstances of their time which no one else was aware of until the artist solved them. Lloyd Webber solved the problem of how to make a credible spectacle from recycled material. Using fresher material to make something spectacular on its own terms remains the job that needs doing. Every good art form needs a phantom or two in the basement to haunt it. They just shouldn’t be allowed the run of the house. ♦
An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Lloyd Webber composed the musical “Chess.”
