Lloyd Webber — four hits?
Can Andrew Lloyd Webber do it again? On March 27, the young British composer’s latest musical, “Starlight Express,” opened in London. If it is a hit, Lloyd Webber will have four successful shows running simultaneously in the West End — and he is still only 36. ROBERT LOW reports from London.
When Andrew Lloyd Webber has hits, they really are hits. They seem to run forever. His first big smash was “Jesus Christ Superstar”; it ran for more than eight years in London and became the world’s biggest selling record album. Lloyd Webber wrote the music and Tim Rice the lyrics, and the pair combined again to produce “Evita,” based on the life of Eva Peron, first wife of the Argentine dictator. It opened in London in June 1978 and it’s still running. Then Lloyd Webber split with Rice and came up with his biggest money-spinner yet in “Cats,” the musical version of T. S. Eliot’s “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.” It opened in London on May 11,1981 and looks as if it will run forever — it still takes months to get a seat. By next year it will be playing in eight cities round the world, all under Lloyd Webber’s tight supervision. “I won’t let it go beyond that,” he told me recently. “It’s impossible to maintain standards beyond a certain number of venues.” On top of those, “Song and Dance,” a theatrical staging of two best-selling Lloyd Webber albums is nearing the end of a successful two-year stint at London’s Palace Theatre — which, incidentally, Lloyd Webber himself bought for ?2 million last year and plans to turn into the natural home of the British musical. “Starlight Express” is a lavish, original musical
whose story concerns a race to find the fastest steam engine in the old American West. The staging has necessitated ripping out the interior of the Apollo Victoria theatre and installing a roller-skating rink around which much of the action will take place, the cast on skates impersonating railway trains. It is costing more than $37 million to mount and it will have to run for 10 months to recover that investment. On the face of it it sounds like a recipe for theatrical disaster but Lloyd Webber’s record of hits with musicals based on unlikely stories is impossible to ignore. Whatever happens to “Starlight Express,” Lloyd Webber now dominates the British musical scene in the same way that Richard Rodgers did in the U.S.A, in the 1940 s and 50s. And it is Rodgers who has been Lloyd Webber’s idol since boyhood. Lloyd Webber embarked on the road to stardom at eight years old and has never deviated from it. He comes from a profoundly musical family (his brother Julian is one of Britain’s foremost cellists) and was taken to West End shows by an aunt who knew a lot of leading figures in the world
of British musicals. He built his own model theatre at home and staged 20 shows which he wrote himself, before he turned it into a model television studio, showing the commercial acumen he was to display in later life. At Westminster School a friend remembers him sitting at the piano trying to realise his greatest ambition: a hit for Roy Orbison. When the other boys were playing games, the unathletic Lloyd Webber was engaged in his other passion: tramping the streets of London in search of Victorian churches and buildings. To this day he says he can recite all the most important ones in London off by heart. He went to Oxford but
left after only one term: he was determined to write . musicals and there was no- ■ body there who could pro- I vide the words. Besides, he had already met Tim Rice in London. Together they wrote “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat,” a 40-minute oratorioi whose mixture of Biblical* theme and pop music was to be repeated shortly afterwards with ) stunning success in “Jesus Christ Superstar.” He retains an astonishing . facility to write strong, haunting melodies that ; linger in the memory long after you have heard them. Songs like “Don’t Cry for > Me, Argentina” and “Memory” are whistled all over the world. His work is his life. He is an obsessional perfectionist who continually keeps an eye on the many productions of his work, hauling cast and '. orchestra back into the rehearsal room if he thinks , standards are slipping. He is amused by the tales of his enormous wealth that circulate, particularly by the notion that he earns $1.5 .. million a week. His shows generate enormous revenue but they also cost a lot to put on and he tends to invest his money in projects like the Palace Theatre. But his friends say he understands money and how to make it earn more. What he needs most, he says, is a lyricist, to replace Rice with whom he has not worked since 1976. Britain’s Richard Rodgers, having found his Hart, is now looking for his Kammerstein.
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Press, 11 April 1984, Page 20
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834Lloyd Webber — four hits? Press, 11 April 1984, Page 20
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