Webber show off to rough start in UK
Last Updated: 11:59 AM, March 12, 2010
Posted: 3:53 AM, March 12, 2010
Michael Riedel
At the opening of Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Love Never Dies" Tuesday night, I ran right into the composer's wife, Madeleine.
Beautiful and clever, Madeleine's always quick with a quip.
"Michael," she said, smiling. "You've come a long way -- to trash us."
No, no, Madeleine. I'm just here to report on the premiere and dole out a little gossip. We'll leave the trashing to the Internet chatters -- whose early salvo, "Paint Never Dries," will haunt this show forever -- and the critics, some of whom have taken up their assignment with gusto. The Times of London, The Evening Standard and The New York Times dismissed this $12 million sequel to "The Phantom of the Opera" as an unsalvageable wreck.
But other critics enjoyed it. The Telegraph raved about the score and the creepy production; The Independent called it "phabulous."
Response among insiders was mixed as well. A New York investor announced, "I can kiss my 25,000-pound investment goodbye." Another said, "Great score, but there's a lot of tweaking to do." A top London producer added, "They've got to work on the story. It's so predictable."
"Love Never Dies," set to open on Broadway in November, takes the Phantom to Coney Island, where he runs a freak show. Still obsessed with Christine, he lures her to New York. She arrives with her husband, Raoul, who's a drunken gambler, and her son, Gustave, whose father may be Raoul or -- de-da-de-dum! -- the Phantom. (Said a wag, "They should call it 'Who's Your Daddy?' ")
That the musical's generating such a grab-bag response may be due to the fact that even some of the creators don't think it's ready yet. The Americans on board -- director Jack O'Brien ("Hairspray") and choreographer Jerry Mitchell ("Legally Blonde") -- were frustrated that they had only two weeks of previews to stage such a huge spectacle. They begged for more time, sources say, but Lloyd Webber's minions were concerned that postponing the opening would generate even more negative chatter.
And the previews were rocky. Anyone who works on a Lloyd Webber show will tell you there's always a moment when the Great Man throws a Great Fit. During a rehearsal of "Woman in White," the leading lady spoke a note instead of singing it and Lloyd Webber threatened to take his score home. (I'm told they now keep two copies of a Lloyd Webber score in the pits of his shows as a precaution.)
On "Love Never Dies," he reportedly became so frustrated, he muttered, "I'm just going to write a check for 10 million pounds and close the show."
He's also butted heads with O'Brien, who's no pushover. O'Brien once told the ensemble to play their parts subtly. Then Lloyd Webber came around and said everybody should play it up. An exasperated O'Brien, sources say, threw up his hands and said, "I don't know what he wants!"
There's a rumor swirling here that O'Brien and Mitchell may leave the show before it opens in New York. (It's said they took the job for the money, although I refuse to believe anyone would work on an Andrew Lloyd Webber show for anything but the art.) Hal Prince, who directed the original "Phantom," is whispered to be waiting in the wings.
I ran that by Andre Ptaszynski, who runs Lloyd Webber's empire, The Really Useful Group. He said, "The mention of Hal Prince is a stunner to Andrew and me. No such thing was anywhere on the radar. Why would it be? We love Jack and are very pleased with his work, though, as is often the case, there is a further mile to go."
Ptaszynski also said the creators met Wednesday to pore over the reviews and "discussed the work we and Jack would like to do before the show opens on Broadway."
A big issue, sources say, is the opening scene, which is slow and confusing.
Another, much deeper problem is the Phantom himself. In the original, he's mysterious, sensual and terrifying. This time around, he cries a lot. And his first entrance isn't an entrance. He's at a piano, scribbling. He's got a killer first song -- the soaring " 'Til I Hear You Sing Once More" -- but he needs a thrilling entrance. (In the original, he materializes in the mirror.) When I mentioned this to someone working on the show, he snapped, "Tell that to Jack O'Brien."
Ramin Karimloo, who plays the Phantom, sings beautifully, but as critics have mentioned, he's bland. You come expecting Michael Crawford and you get Gerard Butler's stand-in.
Nobody here thinks the mixed verdict will stop Lloyd Webber from bringing "Love Never Dies" to Broadway. He's the richest composer in theater history precisely because he's thumbed his nose at the critics and gone straight to the people who matter: the paying public.
But it's clear there's work to be done. And from what I'm hearing, it's going to be a white-knuckle ride. Just like the Cyclone at Coney Island.
michael.riedel@nypost.com
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/theater/webber_show_off_to_rough_start_in_ppIUFX4Nca3lULbFTAkZNN
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Andrew Lloyd Webber insists it’ll be all right on the night
From The Times
March 6, 2010
Ben Hoyle, Arts Correspondent
Some of the most successful musicals of all time would never have survived to become long-running favourites if they had premiered in the digital age, according to Andrew Lloyd Webber.
The Times reported yesterday that although Love Never Dies — his sequel to The Phantom of the Opera — does not open until Tuesday, it has already been denounced by so-called “phans” all over the globe. Some have seen the West End preview, but many have not.
Speaking yesterday during rehearsals at the Adelphi Theatre, on the Strand in London, he said that the internet had made life much more difficult for anyone trying to bring an ambitious new stage production to the public.
He says that Love Never Dies is one of the best things he has ever done. “It’s the score that I’ve put the most into,” he said. “Those people that have heard it think that we are trying to do something completely new. Tim [Rice, his writing partner on many of his early hits, but not this musical] thinks it’s one of the best librettos I’ve ever had. I don’t think anything like this has been created for a long while.”
Love Never Dies, which moves the action on ten years and transports it from Paris to Coney Island, New York, has been developing for years.
But with days to go until the opening night, it clearly irks him that the show is having to do battle with the internet, where fan sites and theatre chat rooms act as a global echo chamber for a minority of opinionated audience members, as well as providing an easy opportunity for industrial sabotage.
“What we really have to consider is all this stuff on the net,” he said. “It’s a very worrying situation for anybody now who’s opening any kind of play or musical.”
“Three years ago I was alerted [to the potential for sabotage] with somebody else’s musical theatre production. It was discovered by various machinery that another producer was knocking it [on the internet]. Everybody knows a little about this in the theatre.
“At that time I put a ban out to everybody who was working directly or indirectly with me that we will not post anything on the web to do with any production in the West End because it’s very dangerous.”
Does he believe that this practice is still widespread? “Yes.” Does it explain some of the comments aimed at Love Never Dies? “No.”
The evidence collected by Lloyd Webber’s digital team suggests that the critics with “vested interests” in this case are not rival producers but “phans”. He suspects that they are people who have seen the original Phantom hundreds of times and have developed an obsessive relationship with the show.
“What’s happening is that this small number of people have now got this marketplace where they can be the Benedict Nightingale [The Times’s veteran chief theatre critic] of the day.”
What they ignore is that previews are not the same thing as the finished article, Lloyd Webber added. Audiences should understand that they are watching a work in progress. “It is a problem now because if you go back in history, I dread to think what anybody would have said about the first preview of Cats, or, frankly, Les Misérables, which was a huge undertaking and wasn’t right at the beginning.
“Cameron [Mackintosh] and Trevor Nunn bravely got it through and, despite not very good reviews, it turned into one of the biggest musicals of all time. If anybody [with access to the internet] had seen the first preview of Cats I think it would have been closed.
The internet has changed the rules of the game and it has fallen to Love Never Dies to test the water. “Wicked, which is probably the biggest musical in the world right now, when that started there were a lot of Wizard of Oz fans who objected to it,” says Lloyd Webber.
“There’s a whole sad culture around the world of people who seem to only live by the old Phantom of the Opera,” he said. “But I suspect in a year’s time most of those, if they come to see thiss, will understand and enjoy it.”
Lloyd Webber is fully aware that a flop could tarnish his most successful creation, but he is quietly confident ahead of Tuesday night’s world premiere, whatever the critics decide.
“Phantom got some terrible reviews. The Sunday Times called it “masked balls” and that was it. But the point is that by opening night we knew we were away. I will know on Tuesday whether we’ve got a worldwide hit or not.”
Audiences might be best advised to hold off a little bit longer if they wish to see the new show at its best.
“There’s an old adage,” Lloyd Webber said, rather surprisingly. “Never go and see a musical until a month after it opens.”
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/article7052118.ece
March 6, 2010
Ben Hoyle, Arts Correspondent
Some of the most successful musicals of all time would never have survived to become long-running favourites if they had premiered in the digital age, according to Andrew Lloyd Webber.
The Times reported yesterday that although Love Never Dies — his sequel to The Phantom of the Opera — does not open until Tuesday, it has already been denounced by so-called “phans” all over the globe. Some have seen the West End preview, but many have not.
Speaking yesterday during rehearsals at the Adelphi Theatre, on the Strand in London, he said that the internet had made life much more difficult for anyone trying to bring an ambitious new stage production to the public.
He says that Love Never Dies is one of the best things he has ever done. “It’s the score that I’ve put the most into,” he said. “Those people that have heard it think that we are trying to do something completely new. Tim [Rice, his writing partner on many of his early hits, but not this musical] thinks it’s one of the best librettos I’ve ever had. I don’t think anything like this has been created for a long while.”
Love Never Dies, which moves the action on ten years and transports it from Paris to Coney Island, New York, has been developing for years.
But with days to go until the opening night, it clearly irks him that the show is having to do battle with the internet, where fan sites and theatre chat rooms act as a global echo chamber for a minority of opinionated audience members, as well as providing an easy opportunity for industrial sabotage.
“What we really have to consider is all this stuff on the net,” he said. “It’s a very worrying situation for anybody now who’s opening any kind of play or musical.”
“Three years ago I was alerted [to the potential for sabotage] with somebody else’s musical theatre production. It was discovered by various machinery that another producer was knocking it [on the internet]. Everybody knows a little about this in the theatre.
“At that time I put a ban out to everybody who was working directly or indirectly with me that we will not post anything on the web to do with any production in the West End because it’s very dangerous.”
Does he believe that this practice is still widespread? “Yes.” Does it explain some of the comments aimed at Love Never Dies? “No.”
The evidence collected by Lloyd Webber’s digital team suggests that the critics with “vested interests” in this case are not rival producers but “phans”. He suspects that they are people who have seen the original Phantom hundreds of times and have developed an obsessive relationship with the show.
“What’s happening is that this small number of people have now got this marketplace where they can be the Benedict Nightingale [The Times’s veteran chief theatre critic] of the day.”
What they ignore is that previews are not the same thing as the finished article, Lloyd Webber added. Audiences should understand that they are watching a work in progress. “It is a problem now because if you go back in history, I dread to think what anybody would have said about the first preview of Cats, or, frankly, Les Misérables, which was a huge undertaking and wasn’t right at the beginning.
“Cameron [Mackintosh] and Trevor Nunn bravely got it through and, despite not very good reviews, it turned into one of the biggest musicals of all time. If anybody [with access to the internet] had seen the first preview of Cats I think it would have been closed.
The internet has changed the rules of the game and it has fallen to Love Never Dies to test the water. “Wicked, which is probably the biggest musical in the world right now, when that started there were a lot of Wizard of Oz fans who objected to it,” says Lloyd Webber.
“There’s a whole sad culture around the world of people who seem to only live by the old Phantom of the Opera,” he said. “But I suspect in a year’s time most of those, if they come to see thiss, will understand and enjoy it.”
Lloyd Webber is fully aware that a flop could tarnish his most successful creation, but he is quietly confident ahead of Tuesday night’s world premiere, whatever the critics decide.
“Phantom got some terrible reviews. The Sunday Times called it “masked balls” and that was it. But the point is that by opening night we knew we were away. I will know on Tuesday whether we’ve got a worldwide hit or not.”
Audiences might be best advised to hold off a little bit longer if they wish to see the new show at its best.
“There’s an old adage,” Lloyd Webber said, rather surprisingly. “Never go and see a musical until a month after it opens.”
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/article7052118.ece
Lloyd Webber sequel incurs scorn of online ‘phans’
From The Times
March 5, 2010
Ben Hoyle, Arts Correspondent
Opening night is still four days away but Andrew Lloyd Webber’s sequel to The Phantom of the Opera is already threatening to stake an unwanted claim to theatre history.
Love Never Dies may well be the most pre-emptively vilified show yet. Vicious verdicts began popping up online immediately after previews started at the Adelphi in London on February 22. They have kept coming, attacking the singing, the music, the lyrics, the story by Ben Elton and Frederick Forsyth, the set, the ticket prices and various endings tried so far.
Perhaps the internet and the borderline obsessive protectiveness that many people feel towards the original musical made that inevitable. Before anyone had seen the show, die-hard “phans” were bombarding the inboxes of theatre critics and reporters in London and New York with complaints about its very existence.
One influential theatre blog parodied the show as “Paint Never Dries”, describing it as tedious and gloomy with inaudible singing and an “interminably drawn-out finale”. The discussion boards of the theatre news website What’s On Stage (owned by Lloyd Webber’s company The Really Useful Group) had 62 pages of comments as of yesterday afternoon, viewed more than 70,000 times. The most recent posting, from someone who declared themself to be a “big fan” of the original, called the show “appalling, appalling, appalling”.
Alistair Smith, news editor of The Stage, said that the industry has been taken aback by the criticism. “I think this is a genuine new phenomenon and we can’t yet tell what effect it will have [on the show’s prospects]. There are probably only two shows that people are this obsessed with: Phantom and Les Misérables. These people develop a sense of ownership and feel it’s their show, not the composer’s.”
Those obsessive audiences are the bedrock of the original Phantom’s success. As the publicity material puts it, Phantom is “the most succesful single piece of entertainment of all time” with a box office gross of more than £2 billion. Lloyd Webber has not had a hit on anything like that scale since but neither has anybody else. He is sufficiently aware of the threat posed to the global target market by the criticism to have a team of people analysing the online chatter for him.
Andre Ptaszynski, chief executive of The Really Useful Group and a producer for Love Never Dies, said that negative online reviews “probably can be really damaging” but after a difficult start 80 per cent of the total comment was favourable.“All the online comment was confirming what we knew was wrong,” he said. “On Monday two weeks ago they were saying, ‘the last scene is really dreadful’. It was the first time we’d done it in front of an audience . But we have tried at least three versions since and now it really works.” The show has taken advance bookings of £9 million on a production cost of £6 million. Dates are pencilled in for the US, Asia and Australia, pending a decision likely to be based “more on popular reaction than critical reaction”, he said. “Andrew has been one of the easiest targets in popular cultural life for decades. Critics often take the high ground and ignore that his work is incredibly popular.”
Previous Lloyd Webber premieres
Jesus Christ Superstar, New York, October 14, 1971: “It all rather resembled one’s first sight of the Empire State Building. Not at all uninteresting but somewhat unsurprising and of minimal artistic value. The total effect is brilliant but cheap”
Aspects of Love, London, April 17, 1989: “The opening number, Love Changes Everything, consists of a blandly repeated six-note phrase over two chords. Another innocuous little phrase accompanies George’s favourite slogan, ‘Life goes on, love is free’. Lloyd Webber then goes on to exploit this as if he had hit on the Grail motif from Parsifal”
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/article7050528.ece
March 5, 2010
Ben Hoyle, Arts Correspondent
Opening night is still four days away but Andrew Lloyd Webber’s sequel to The Phantom of the Opera is already threatening to stake an unwanted claim to theatre history.
Love Never Dies may well be the most pre-emptively vilified show yet. Vicious verdicts began popping up online immediately after previews started at the Adelphi in London on February 22. They have kept coming, attacking the singing, the music, the lyrics, the story by Ben Elton and Frederick Forsyth, the set, the ticket prices and various endings tried so far.
Perhaps the internet and the borderline obsessive protectiveness that many people feel towards the original musical made that inevitable. Before anyone had seen the show, die-hard “phans” were bombarding the inboxes of theatre critics and reporters in London and New York with complaints about its very existence.
One influential theatre blog parodied the show as “Paint Never Dries”, describing it as tedious and gloomy with inaudible singing and an “interminably drawn-out finale”. The discussion boards of the theatre news website What’s On Stage (owned by Lloyd Webber’s company The Really Useful Group) had 62 pages of comments as of yesterday afternoon, viewed more than 70,000 times. The most recent posting, from someone who declared themself to be a “big fan” of the original, called the show “appalling, appalling, appalling”.
Alistair Smith, news editor of The Stage, said that the industry has been taken aback by the criticism. “I think this is a genuine new phenomenon and we can’t yet tell what effect it will have [on the show’s prospects]. There are probably only two shows that people are this obsessed with: Phantom and Les Misérables. These people develop a sense of ownership and feel it’s their show, not the composer’s.”
Those obsessive audiences are the bedrock of the original Phantom’s success. As the publicity material puts it, Phantom is “the most succesful single piece of entertainment of all time” with a box office gross of more than £2 billion. Lloyd Webber has not had a hit on anything like that scale since but neither has anybody else. He is sufficiently aware of the threat posed to the global target market by the criticism to have a team of people analysing the online chatter for him.
Andre Ptaszynski, chief executive of The Really Useful Group and a producer for Love Never Dies, said that negative online reviews “probably can be really damaging” but after a difficult start 80 per cent of the total comment was favourable.“All the online comment was confirming what we knew was wrong,” he said. “On Monday two weeks ago they were saying, ‘the last scene is really dreadful’. It was the first time we’d done it in front of an audience . But we have tried at least three versions since and now it really works.” The show has taken advance bookings of £9 million on a production cost of £6 million. Dates are pencilled in for the US, Asia and Australia, pending a decision likely to be based “more on popular reaction than critical reaction”, he said. “Andrew has been one of the easiest targets in popular cultural life for decades. Critics often take the high ground and ignore that his work is incredibly popular.”
Previous Lloyd Webber premieres
Jesus Christ Superstar, New York, October 14, 1971: “It all rather resembled one’s first sight of the Empire State Building. Not at all uninteresting but somewhat unsurprising and of minimal artistic value. The total effect is brilliant but cheap”
Aspects of Love, London, April 17, 1989: “The opening number, Love Changes Everything, consists of a blandly repeated six-note phrase over two chords. Another innocuous little phrase accompanies George’s favourite slogan, ‘Life goes on, love is free’. Lloyd Webber then goes on to exploit this as if he had hit on the Grail motif from Parsifal”
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/article7050528.ece
Phantom phone calls
Michael Coveney:
Everyone I know seeems to have seen Love Never Dies already, and comment on the score is flowing freely through the newspapers and on the blogosphere.
Critics have listened to the score and the Press previews are starting on Saturday.
So once again the whole idea of a First Night next Tuesday is a wash-out. And the peculiar thrill of being able to say “I was there” when the show opened is blown away on the wind.
I know from reliable colleagues like Baz Bamigboye and Edward Seckerson that the new score is a peach, Well, I know it for myself and, without preempting later critical comment, I am intensely looking forward to hearing “live” the eerie dissonance of the song the Phantom can’t express until, ten years after they parted, he hears Christine sing again.
The title song of “Love Never Dies” is in its third incarnation. I first heard it at Lloyd Webber’s fiftieth birthday party, when Kiri Te Kanawa sang it to lyrics by Don Black (”The Heart is Slow to Learn”).
Then it cropped up again in The Beautiful Game, lyrics by Ben Elton, as “Our Kind of Love.” And now Glenn Slater’s lyrics return the song to the dramatic context is was written for, when the Phantom sequel was a twinkle in the composer’s eye.
All great composers re-write their main material. Prokofiev’s opera The Fiery Angel comes back as his brilliant Third Symphony. Beethoven and Rossini never wasted and wanted not.
So Lloyd Webber is merely following some familiar precedents. Making a joke of this, someone spots Oscar Hammerstein in the popular throng at the fairground.
But he’s also been liberated, I think, by this new fairground setting on Coney Island, with hurdy-gurdies and lovely girlies, a fantatstically complex and interesting quartet deep into the second act, and the pounding rock of “Beauty Underneath” that sounds like a Bonnie Tyler song, very much in Whistle Down the Wind mode.
I’m a bit worried by the crude melodrama of the denouement, and disappointed to learn that Bob Crowley’s design is based on projections rather than mechanical structures, but one can only judge that sort of thing in performance.
But the revelation of the Phantom’s tryst with Christine on her wedding eve in the opera house, their one night of guilty passion, is beautifully unravelled in “Beneath a Moonless Sky.”
I agree with those who don’t think much of the title, and the absence of star names could still hurt the show. Mind you, what show, I asked myself when I stood outside the Adelphi last night before the opening of Private Lives next door at the Vaudeville.
There’s no front of house, no buzz, no-one buying tickets, no sign of anything.
It wasn’t like that first time round. The Phantom of the Opera opened at Her Majesty’s on Thursday 9 October 1986, with a thrilling star performance by Michael Crawford in the title role; it was a night of sex, glamour, wonderful costumes and soaring melody, something missing from the West End for quite some time back then.
Even before Crawford was announced — on a lunchtime radio news programme, I seem to recall - the title song had been recorded as a video by Ken Russell and launched on Terry Wogan’s television chat show. The recording was made by Sarah Brightman and Steve Harley, of Cockney Rebel fame, and it climbed to Number Seven in the charts.
Simultaneously, Cliff Richard joined Sarah in releasing “All I Ask of You” as a single. Then Crawford — who really was a very big star — was announced, and the box office went crazy, and stayed that way for twenty years.
The late, much lamented designer Maria Bjornson, who has been touchingly evoked by Lloyd Webber in the pre-publicity, always maintained that the power of Phantom as a love story was down to the fact that Lloyd Webber never possessed Sarah completely.
He loved her, of course, and they were married probably in order for him to write the show. There was also the ghost of his dead father in there somewhere, the angel of music, perhaps.
It remains to be seen if the composer has reactivated that inspiration in quite the same way, or perhaps even gone beyond it. We shan’t know for sure till the middle of next week.
http://blogs.whatsonstage.com/2010/03/04/phantom-phone-calls/
Everyone I know seeems to have seen Love Never Dies already, and comment on the score is flowing freely through the newspapers and on the blogosphere.
Critics have listened to the score and the Press previews are starting on Saturday.
So once again the whole idea of a First Night next Tuesday is a wash-out. And the peculiar thrill of being able to say “I was there” when the show opened is blown away on the wind.
I know from reliable colleagues like Baz Bamigboye and Edward Seckerson that the new score is a peach, Well, I know it for myself and, without preempting later critical comment, I am intensely looking forward to hearing “live” the eerie dissonance of the song the Phantom can’t express until, ten years after they parted, he hears Christine sing again.
The title song of “Love Never Dies” is in its third incarnation. I first heard it at Lloyd Webber’s fiftieth birthday party, when Kiri Te Kanawa sang it to lyrics by Don Black (”The Heart is Slow to Learn”).
Then it cropped up again in The Beautiful Game, lyrics by Ben Elton, as “Our Kind of Love.” And now Glenn Slater’s lyrics return the song to the dramatic context is was written for, when the Phantom sequel was a twinkle in the composer’s eye.
All great composers re-write their main material. Prokofiev’s opera The Fiery Angel comes back as his brilliant Third Symphony. Beethoven and Rossini never wasted and wanted not.
So Lloyd Webber is merely following some familiar precedents. Making a joke of this, someone spots Oscar Hammerstein in the popular throng at the fairground.
But he’s also been liberated, I think, by this new fairground setting on Coney Island, with hurdy-gurdies and lovely girlies, a fantatstically complex and interesting quartet deep into the second act, and the pounding rock of “Beauty Underneath” that sounds like a Bonnie Tyler song, very much in Whistle Down the Wind mode.
I’m a bit worried by the crude melodrama of the denouement, and disappointed to learn that Bob Crowley’s design is based on projections rather than mechanical structures, but one can only judge that sort of thing in performance.
But the revelation of the Phantom’s tryst with Christine on her wedding eve in the opera house, their one night of guilty passion, is beautifully unravelled in “Beneath a Moonless Sky.”
I agree with those who don’t think much of the title, and the absence of star names could still hurt the show. Mind you, what show, I asked myself when I stood outside the Adelphi last night before the opening of Private Lives next door at the Vaudeville.
There’s no front of house, no buzz, no-one buying tickets, no sign of anything.
It wasn’t like that first time round. The Phantom of the Opera opened at Her Majesty’s on Thursday 9 October 1986, with a thrilling star performance by Michael Crawford in the title role; it was a night of sex, glamour, wonderful costumes and soaring melody, something missing from the West End for quite some time back then.
Even before Crawford was announced — on a lunchtime radio news programme, I seem to recall - the title song had been recorded as a video by Ken Russell and launched on Terry Wogan’s television chat show. The recording was made by Sarah Brightman and Steve Harley, of Cockney Rebel fame, and it climbed to Number Seven in the charts.
Simultaneously, Cliff Richard joined Sarah in releasing “All I Ask of You” as a single. Then Crawford — who really was a very big star — was announced, and the box office went crazy, and stayed that way for twenty years.
The late, much lamented designer Maria Bjornson, who has been touchingly evoked by Lloyd Webber in the pre-publicity, always maintained that the power of Phantom as a love story was down to the fact that Lloyd Webber never possessed Sarah completely.
He loved her, of course, and they were married probably in order for him to write the show. There was also the ghost of his dead father in there somewhere, the angel of music, perhaps.
It remains to be seen if the composer has reactivated that inspiration in quite the same way, or perhaps even gone beyond it. We shan’t know for sure till the middle of next week.
http://blogs.whatsonstage.com/2010/03/04/phantom-phone-calls/
ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER: I STILL TAKE RISKS
Friday March 5,2010
By Simon Edge
THE feverish atmosphere is almost unprecedented but not quite in the way the marketing people wanted. Next Tuesday sees the official opening of Love Never Dies, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s massively hyped sequel to his stage musical The Phantom Of The Opera, and it’s clear the show has a maze of dripping catacombs to wade through if it’s to win critical or commercial success.
The first preview was cancelled due to “technical demands” and since then advance audiences have clogged internet bulletin boards with negative feedback. Much of this comes not from Lord Lloyd-Webber’s usual detractors but from diehard Phantom fans who think a sequel is sacrilege. One reviewer reports getting daily e-mails as part of a guerrilla campaign to influence the notices, saying: “This has never happened to me in 26 years as a professional critic.”
There’s no doubt that the 61-year-old Lord Lloyd-Webber of Sydmonton is taking a big risk with the new show. But for someone who has just stared death in the face during a successful battle with prostate cancer the gamble is perhaps not such a big deal.
Lloyd Webber himself stresses that writing Love Never Dies predates his brush with death. “I had completed the score before I learned that I had prostate cancer,” he tells me. “I had long wanted to do a sequel to Phantom and not to any other of my shows because I felt that the way the original show ends is an unfinished story waiting to be told.”
But it’s not hard to relate the steely defiance that characterises his current project with the gritty determination to triumph over a form of cancer that kills one man every 13 minutes.
The original Phantom, which opened in London in 1986, has notched up more than 9,500 performances in the West End alone. It’s also Broadway’s longest-ever running show, has been seen by 100 million people worldwide in 149 cities across 25 countries and can claim to be the most successful single piece of entertainment of all time, surpassing ET, Titanic and Star Wars.
While film studios are always quick to trot out sequels to successful movies the stage musical equivalent is much rarer. Why bother when you can just roll out more productions across the globe? And whereas fans of Star Wars or Batman can be guaranteed to queue up for the next instalments in the franchise, musical theatre obsessives prefer to see the same show over and over – and they don’t want to see it dragged down by a potentially sub-standard follow-up.
SDLqWe feel strongly that Love Never Dies is a completely misguided venture that is a detriment to the story of the original Phantom Of The Opera,” say the organisers of a Facebook group cheekily called Love Should Die.
“It is not in the interest of or desired by the story’s many fans. Virtually everything about the show strikes us as illogical, irrational, offensive and frankly stupid. While there is little that can be done at this stage to stop the show from reaching the stage at all we aim to provide a platform for the many people out there who maintain that this should never have been given the green light.”
But it’s not surprising that such criticism does not deter a man who has just fought off a life-threatening illness.
The first sign that something was wrong came during the winter of 2008. The father-of-five was rehearsing and recording the score of Love Never Dies at his home in Majorca when he noticed he had a weak bladder. “Throughout the night I was desperate to go to the bathroom,” he recalls. “It was little but far too often. I had an irritating burning sensation, which I put down to a mild infection.”
Back in London he went to his GP for tests but no infection showed up. Only after reading an article about the symptoms of prostate cancer did he go for a specialist consultation and was referred to the private London Clinic for a biopsy. There followed a surreal episode where he was advised to leave by a back door to avoid a gaggle of paparazzi. He assumed they were waiting for him and it was only when he opened the papers the next morning that he realised they really wanted Amy Winehouse, who was suspected of having a boob job at the same clinic.
W hen he did finally get his cancer diagnosis he was urged by his PR team to hush it up and say he was simply run down. But he dismissed this secretive instinct. “Why? I thought. I have prostate cancer. Women talk about breast cancer. Look at Kylie.
“I suspect men are deeply embarrassed about any problem that suggests it affects their libido or masculinity. My specialist is certain that lives are lost because the symptoms can be the kind of stuff that the average macho male is embarrassed by. This is barmy. If the cancer is only in the prostate it is not going to kill you. But once it is big enough to take a trip out of your prostate, walk around your bones, your liver, your spinal cord, other complications begin.”
He decided to have surgery rather than laser treatment but a string of complications, including scarring from a botched appendicitis procedure when he was three years old, meant a relatively simple operation became a painful saga.
But he was eventually given the all-clear. “It is the hugest relief,” he says. “We have arrived at the end of a long journey at the best possible outcome.”
Although he was urged to take things easy he has plunged back into his work, including his latest series for the small screen. “I think the BBC casting series have proved that using television to find stars can work very well for the theatre,” he tells me, referring to the TV talent contests to cast productions of The Sound Of Music, Joseph and Oliver! in which he has emerged as a cuddlier, less scathing version of Simon Cowell.
“Five of our finalists for I’d Do Anything [the Oliver! contest] went on to star in West End productions and I hope we can repeat that success with the new series Over The Rainbow, which will search for a Dorothy to star in a new production of The Wizard Of Oz,” he says.
But his main energies have been channelled into Love Never Dies.
“He’s on a hiding to nothing because how do you improve on the most successful work in entertainment history?” says Mark Shenton, theatre critic of the Sunday Express and the West End’s most influential blogger. “I suspect he’s doing it because Phantom is such a personal story for him. There are obvious autobiographical echoes in a composer becoming obsessed with a soprano, particularly given that Christine in the original show was first played by Sarah Brightman, who was his wife at the time.”
The composer could easily rest on his extraordinary global successes, including Evita, Cats and Starlight Express as well as Phantom, rather than risk the jibes that will accompany failure.
“People judge him by a unique standard,” says Shenton. “The Beautiful Game was considered a flop but it ran for a year. So was Sunset Boulevard, which ran for two years, and Whistle Down The Wind, which ran for three. He has been so successful that people expect him to have huge hits but the truth is the last time he had a blockbuster that went global was Phantom.”
However the sequel, or “continuation” as Lloyd Webber calls it, shapes up on opening night, his willingness to expose himself to failure continues to impress admirers and critics alike. “It takes a lot to write a musical and I think he wants to prove he can still do it,” says one insider, who describes the score of the new show as “amazingly good”, while holding reservations about some of the casting.
“Andrew is remarkable for remaining the same throughout the months of anxiety and pain that his illness has caused him and it’s entirely in character that his determination to triumph over cancer is mirrored in his willingness to take on those who say he can’t do a successful sequel to Phantom,” he says.
Love Never Dies is at the Adelphi Theatre, London. For tickets call 0844 412 4651 or visit www.loveneverdies.com
http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/161742/Andrew-Lloyd-Webber-I-still-take-risks-
By Simon Edge
THE feverish atmosphere is almost unprecedented but not quite in the way the marketing people wanted. Next Tuesday sees the official opening of Love Never Dies, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s massively hyped sequel to his stage musical The Phantom Of The Opera, and it’s clear the show has a maze of dripping catacombs to wade through if it’s to win critical or commercial success.
The first preview was cancelled due to “technical demands” and since then advance audiences have clogged internet bulletin boards with negative feedback. Much of this comes not from Lord Lloyd-Webber’s usual detractors but from diehard Phantom fans who think a sequel is sacrilege. One reviewer reports getting daily e-mails as part of a guerrilla campaign to influence the notices, saying: “This has never happened to me in 26 years as a professional critic.”
There’s no doubt that the 61-year-old Lord Lloyd-Webber of Sydmonton is taking a big risk with the new show. But for someone who has just stared death in the face during a successful battle with prostate cancer the gamble is perhaps not such a big deal.
Lloyd Webber himself stresses that writing Love Never Dies predates his brush with death. “I had completed the score before I learned that I had prostate cancer,” he tells me. “I had long wanted to do a sequel to Phantom and not to any other of my shows because I felt that the way the original show ends is an unfinished story waiting to be told.”
But it’s not hard to relate the steely defiance that characterises his current project with the gritty determination to triumph over a form of cancer that kills one man every 13 minutes.
The original Phantom, which opened in London in 1986, has notched up more than 9,500 performances in the West End alone. It’s also Broadway’s longest-ever running show, has been seen by 100 million people worldwide in 149 cities across 25 countries and can claim to be the most successful single piece of entertainment of all time, surpassing ET, Titanic and Star Wars.
While film studios are always quick to trot out sequels to successful movies the stage musical equivalent is much rarer. Why bother when you can just roll out more productions across the globe? And whereas fans of Star Wars or Batman can be guaranteed to queue up for the next instalments in the franchise, musical theatre obsessives prefer to see the same show over and over – and they don’t want to see it dragged down by a potentially sub-standard follow-up.
SDLqWe feel strongly that Love Never Dies is a completely misguided venture that is a detriment to the story of the original Phantom Of The Opera,” say the organisers of a Facebook group cheekily called Love Should Die.
“It is not in the interest of or desired by the story’s many fans. Virtually everything about the show strikes us as illogical, irrational, offensive and frankly stupid. While there is little that can be done at this stage to stop the show from reaching the stage at all we aim to provide a platform for the many people out there who maintain that this should never have been given the green light.”
But it’s not surprising that such criticism does not deter a man who has just fought off a life-threatening illness.
The first sign that something was wrong came during the winter of 2008. The father-of-five was rehearsing and recording the score of Love Never Dies at his home in Majorca when he noticed he had a weak bladder. “Throughout the night I was desperate to go to the bathroom,” he recalls. “It was little but far too often. I had an irritating burning sensation, which I put down to a mild infection.”
Back in London he went to his GP for tests but no infection showed up. Only after reading an article about the symptoms of prostate cancer did he go for a specialist consultation and was referred to the private London Clinic for a biopsy. There followed a surreal episode where he was advised to leave by a back door to avoid a gaggle of paparazzi. He assumed they were waiting for him and it was only when he opened the papers the next morning that he realised they really wanted Amy Winehouse, who was suspected of having a boob job at the same clinic.
W hen he did finally get his cancer diagnosis he was urged by his PR team to hush it up and say he was simply run down. But he dismissed this secretive instinct. “Why? I thought. I have prostate cancer. Women talk about breast cancer. Look at Kylie.
“I suspect men are deeply embarrassed about any problem that suggests it affects their libido or masculinity. My specialist is certain that lives are lost because the symptoms can be the kind of stuff that the average macho male is embarrassed by. This is barmy. If the cancer is only in the prostate it is not going to kill you. But once it is big enough to take a trip out of your prostate, walk around your bones, your liver, your spinal cord, other complications begin.”
He decided to have surgery rather than laser treatment but a string of complications, including scarring from a botched appendicitis procedure when he was three years old, meant a relatively simple operation became a painful saga.
But he was eventually given the all-clear. “It is the hugest relief,” he says. “We have arrived at the end of a long journey at the best possible outcome.”
Although he was urged to take things easy he has plunged back into his work, including his latest series for the small screen. “I think the BBC casting series have proved that using television to find stars can work very well for the theatre,” he tells me, referring to the TV talent contests to cast productions of The Sound Of Music, Joseph and Oliver! in which he has emerged as a cuddlier, less scathing version of Simon Cowell.
“Five of our finalists for I’d Do Anything [the Oliver! contest] went on to star in West End productions and I hope we can repeat that success with the new series Over The Rainbow, which will search for a Dorothy to star in a new production of The Wizard Of Oz,” he says.
But his main energies have been channelled into Love Never Dies.
“He’s on a hiding to nothing because how do you improve on the most successful work in entertainment history?” says Mark Shenton, theatre critic of the Sunday Express and the West End’s most influential blogger. “I suspect he’s doing it because Phantom is such a personal story for him. There are obvious autobiographical echoes in a composer becoming obsessed with a soprano, particularly given that Christine in the original show was first played by Sarah Brightman, who was his wife at the time.”
The composer could easily rest on his extraordinary global successes, including Evita, Cats and Starlight Express as well as Phantom, rather than risk the jibes that will accompany failure.
“People judge him by a unique standard,” says Shenton. “The Beautiful Game was considered a flop but it ran for a year. So was Sunset Boulevard, which ran for two years, and Whistle Down The Wind, which ran for three. He has been so successful that people expect him to have huge hits but the truth is the last time he had a blockbuster that went global was Phantom.”
However the sequel, or “continuation” as Lloyd Webber calls it, shapes up on opening night, his willingness to expose himself to failure continues to impress admirers and critics alike. “It takes a lot to write a musical and I think he wants to prove he can still do it,” says one insider, who describes the score of the new show as “amazingly good”, while holding reservations about some of the casting.
“Andrew is remarkable for remaining the same throughout the months of anxiety and pain that his illness has caused him and it’s entirely in character that his determination to triumph over cancer is mirrored in his willingness to take on those who say he can’t do a successful sequel to Phantom,” he says.
Love Never Dies is at the Adelphi Theatre, London. For tickets call 0844 412 4651 or visit www.loveneverdies.com
http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/161742/Andrew-Lloyd-Webber-I-still-take-risks-
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