On Thursday, Andrew Lloyd Webber, the most commercially successful British composer of musicals of modern times, turns 70.
He has not been shy about marking the moment. He has just published a memoir, Unmasked, detailing his life up to his mega-hit The Phantom of the Opera, which is still running in the West End (along with School of Rock), and has also released a substantial album of fresh interpretations of some of his best-loved songs (Unmasked: the Platinum Collection). Tonight, he is the subject of a major BBC retrospective of his career, Imagine: Andrew Lloyd Webber: Memories (BBC One, 10.45pm).
As a way of celebrating his remarkable contribution to theatre, chief critic Dominic Cavendish runs...
For a career in music you couldn’t want a better start in life than Andrew Lloyd Webber’s. As was described in Imagine… Andrew Lloyd Webber: Memories (BBC One), what his family lacked in funds, they made up for in ambition (his mother was a piano teacher, his father a teacher at the Royal College of Music), talent and self-belief. They even had a feline pet called Perseus that inspired in young Lloyd Webber such a love of T S Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats that he eventually turned it into a worldwide smash hit musical.
This was a film that offered occasional moments of bright illumination. Of how the memory of a drunk Judy Garland getting a bad reception on stage gave Lloyd Webber the emotional key to the character of Eva Peron when lyricist Tim Rice put the idea for Evita to him. Or the tantalising fact that Judi Dench was originally lined up to star in Cats. Would her version of Memory have flown as high as last-minute replacement Elaine Paige’s did?
While the film focused on Lloyd Webber’s commercial success, it was disappointingly thin in terms of artistic appraisal. Though plenty of time was given to his early successes with Tim Rice, nothing was mentioned of why this celebrated writing partnership came to an end. And while much was made of his abiding love of theatres (he owns seven), there was little serious attempt to explore his musical influences, or legacy.
Even the string of musicals (Aspects of Love, Sunset Boulevard, The Woman in White) Lloyd Webber created in the 20 years following his phenomenally popular The Phantom of the Opera was simply reeled off as a list until something with a more impressive balance sheet – School of Rock – came along to celebrate at length.
In the end, you couldn’t help feeling that even Lloyd Webber might have been happier with a less blandly box office-oriented assessment of his 50-year contribution to musical theatre.
Poring over pictures of Andrew Lloyd Webber has never been a pet perve of mine, but you wouldn’t have guessed it from the fevered manner in which I pawed through this tome on its arrival, desperate to find some photographical representation of him – the more the better. But it was dismay rather than lust that drove my actions; weighing in at a whopping 500 pages, the book is the size of the Bible. So imagine my astonishment on reading the prologue to discover that this is by no means the end of it – this volume of memoirs ends on the opening night of The Phantom of the Opera. Never have the phrases “merciful release” and “fear of the future” come together in one instant.
The size apart, I’ll admit I started this book with beef against ALW; I love musicals, but only those big overblown beauties which came from Broadway via Hollywood in the middle decades of the 20th century. When a musical gets out its library steps, it loses its soul; when it dresses people up as cats, it becomes musical theatre. And from there it’s a short step, spiritually, to doilies and antimacassars, because while musicals high-kick, musical theatre sticks out its pinky.
But before I had finished the first page, I was already warming to his bright and breezy, slightly spivvy writing style, which contrasted pleasingly with both the size of the book and my preconceptions about him: “Quite how I have managed to be so verbose about the most boring person I have ever written about eludes me.” Imagine my amazement when the pre-teen Lloyd Webber becomes spellbound by those very musicals that I declared the antithesis of his work: South Pacific, Carousel, West Side Story. I ploughed on, hoping that this was a momentary accord, but to my horror I found myself smirking in amusement or “Mmm!”-ing in agreement on damn near every page.
ALW came from an enviably colourful family: a grandmother who was the founder of the somewhat niche Christian Communist Party; a great-aunt who was a member of the Bloomsbury Set and ran a transport cafe; an ancestor who wrote “Casabianca” (“The boy stood on the burning deck…”); a working-class father who won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music and had such a fear of authority that after accidentally calling the fire brigade he hid in a cupboard; a mother who became variously obsessed with a Gibraltan tenor, a vicious monkey named Mimi and a boy genius who she insisted on bringing into the household and glorifying to the distress of her husband; and, most of all, his adored Auntie Vi. The latter was, apparently, the author of the first-ever gay cookbook, one chapter of which – titled “Coq & Game Meat” – was headlined “Too Many Cocks Spoil the Breath”.
Then into this glorious Cold Comfort Farm-like ménage, Tim Rice turns up with his shockingly poor lyrics – “And when Joseph tried it on/He knew his sheepskin days were gone/His astounding clothing took the biscuit/Quite the smoothest person in the district” – and we’re back with a whimper in the horrendous middlebrow hinterland of musical theatre. Happily, the introduction of Rice brings out Lloyd Webber’s subtly bitchy side, which has so far lain dormant. “Like so many of Tim’s songs, it told a pessimistic story,” he remarks of an early lyric. Later he can barely conceal his glee when Rice becomes understandably cross because Melvyn Bragg gets a screenplay credit for the film of Jesus Christ Superstar due to the insertion of the words “Cool it, man.” Their song “Christmas Dream” gets limited American radio play due to Rice’s couplet, “Watch me now, here I go/All I need’s a little snow.” Indeed, the reprinting of Rice’s lyrics throughout the book could be seen less as a tribute to a long-time collaborator than as the ultimate clever throwing of shade, achieved solely by turning the other party’s conceit on themselves.
You can’t spend five decades in show business without seeing the seedy side of people, thankfully, and the drop-dead walk-ons are a highlight of our hero’s sashay through the bazaars of Thespus. Impresario Robert Stigwood “was holding court as if the fabric of Manhattan society would rend asunder without him”; the singer Dana Gillespie “was rumoured to have organized a cock measuring contest in her dressing room. I didn’t enter… bad form to enter a contest you know you’re going to win”; Prince Edward was “stage-struck and hadn’t a clue what to do about it”; a good divorce lawyer “should be firm but sympathetic. Mine turned out to be a right pig”.
He writes without special pleading or shame about his adultery; “Whatever else money can’t buy, it can buy you freedom and with freedom comes the chance to play.” His account of his meeting with Sarah Brightman – both of them married to other people and already putting it about elsewhere when they first connect – is pleasing in its simplicity and lack of bogus romanticism: “I was in love and I proposed to Sarah – well, in truth it wasn’t so much a proposal as a ‘we’re in love, we’re both married, what the fuck do we do about it?’’’
It does – of course, at 500 pages – go on a bit. He trowels on the heterosexuality to an extent he probably wouldn’t had he not chosen the theatre as a profession – and perhaps because he looked so much like gay-bait when young – to the extent that ALW even comes across as a dirty old man when writing of himself as a 21-year-old, with a fair bit of drooling over “schoolgirls”. It’s hard to warm to anyone who buys their first flat on the back of a trust fund from “Granny”. And his obsession with big houses, which he portrays as a fascination with architecture, seemed to my cynical eye to have more to do with simply wanting to own a succession of ever bigger houses.
But the image of the lonely little boy creating a toy theatre based on the London Palladium becoming the man who wakes up every morning marvelling that he owns the actual London Palladium is the stuff of beautiful theatre – far more magical than anything he has actually staged. I found myself pleasantly surprised by this book, but having said that, I’ll be swerving the next one. Life’s too short to take a liking to people whose work you loathe, let alone to do it over the course of a three-volume memoir.
Unmasked: a Memoir
Andrew Lloyd Webber
HarperCollins, 517pp, £20
