In an age when the musical was no longer a hit machine, Andrew Lloyd Webber, who was born on this day in 1948, returned the form to its origins in operetta.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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