Andrew Lloyd Webber: 'My greatest regret'

Andrew Lloyd Webber: 'My greatest regret'

Andrew Lloyd Webber looks back on 40 years in show business in conversation with Charles Spencer.

By Charles Spencer

4:05PM GMT 26 Mar 2013

Things have been unusually quiet on Planet Lloyd Webber in recent months. He has been laid up with back problems – now on the mend – but the Lord, as Graham Norton called him on those telly talent shows, is now back with a vengeance. On Easter Sunday ITV is broadcasting a 90 minute special celebrating his continuous run of hits in the West End over the past 40 years. There hasn’t been a single week since Jesus Christ Superstar opened without at least one Lloyd Webber show in London, and at one point he had five playing simultaneously.

Michael Ball hosts the extravaganza, and as well as Lloyd Webber, those taking part include Michael Caine, Il Divo, Nicole Scherzinger, Melanie C, Tim Minchin and the egregious Simon Cowell. Classical guitarist Milos Karadaglic will also perform a number from Lloyd Webber’s eagerly awaited new musical, Stephen Ward, about the Profumo affair, that heady mix of politics, spies and good-time girls that engulfed the Macmillan Government in the early Sixties. It reunites him with lyricist Don Black and writer Christopher Hampton for the first time since Sunset Boulevard and is planned to open early next year.

CS: How have you seen the West End change in the last 40 years?

ALW: In the last few years, everything seems to have gone slightly away from music and more towards the comedy musicals, the Hairsprays and the Book of Mormons. I just don’t know if there’s a public for something now which is much more serious and is old fashioned in the sense that it is melodic.

CS: Does that make you feel out of place?

ALW: Somewhat, yes, because I’m quite frankly proud of the fact that there have only been three of my musicals that have not had a top three hit. It’s very difficult to get a hit song from a show nowadays. The songs are what I think musicals are about in the end. Of course they can be about something else and they can be fun and they can be, you know period and whatever, but for me, songs are what I do. I find it much more difficult not to write tunes than to write them.

CS: Have you ever been stumped for a tune?

ALW: I’ve sometimes found that they’ve taken a while, but then you get the ones where its so obvious that you think 'that must have been done before’ so you go through agonies and get musicologists and people to look at them.

CS: You’re currently working on a musical about Stephen Ward, the society osteopath at the centre of the Profumo Affair. What will that be like?

ALW: Well because of the period and everything, the Stephen Ward show is going to feature much more of my other side. This is going to be the antithesis of 'Love Never Dies’ or 'Phantom’

CS: What drew you to the story, apart from the sex, vice and sleaze?

ALW: I didn’t really know much about the character of Stephen Ward, apart from the fact that he was the one who was convicted, but then I happened to read an interview with him from 1962 which said he was a bore about the Cold War.

And then I read the Ludovic Kennedy book about the trial. He called it 'The Martyrdom of Dr Stephen Ward’ and so I thought 'this is getting very very interesting’.

CS: The lyrics are by Christopher Hampton and the book by Don Black, whom you worked with on Sunset Boulevard.

ALW: Yes, we talked over dinner and we concluded how extraordinary this man Stephen Ward was, probably the most sought after dinner guest in London, the world’s top osteopath and a man who knew absolutely everybody from Kennedy to Gandhi to Churchill and was great friends with Prince Philip.

The thing that really made Christopher think 'yes it’s a stage show’ is that Ward ended up as a waxwork at the chamber of horrors in Madame Tussauds. Next to the acid bath murderer.

Funnily enough Sarah Brightman [Lloyd Webber’s ex-wife] told me her mother Paula was one of the girls in Murray’s Cabaret Club [where Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice Davies worked]. I remember Sarah telling me this hysterical story about when she was about five or six years old, they were all asked at her school to bring pictures of what their parents did at work and she brought in a picture of her mum with the dancers of Murray’s Club which would have been with Mandy and Christine.

CS: What do you think when you look back over your career?

ALW: What strikes me is that there’s a very fine line between success and failure. Just one ingredient can make the difference.

A really good example of that is design and 'Love Never Dies.’ The London production didn’t have any consistency of style, so it would go from say art nouveau to art deco to straightforward, old-fashioned Broadway showbiz. The Australian production [which has been very successful] had its own language. It was more like Maria Bjornson’s original design for Phantom or the original design for Evita, it was at one with the piece.

Another example is Harold Prince [the great Broadway producer]. He wanted to direct Jesus Christ Superstar and I never got the telegram because I was in America and so it went to my father’s college of music and I never got it. I often think how different my career would have been if Harold Prince had directed it on Broadway.

I remember the telegram to this day. It was: 'I am the producer of Cabaret, Fiddler on the Roof and West Side Story and I’d like to do Jesus Christ Superstar,’ signed Harold Prince. I thought 'I know who you are!’ Instead the production was the most vulgar horror.

CS: Do you have any lasting regrets?

ALW: The regrets in the theatre have always been the shows that you know ought to have worked but for one reason or another haven’t. One of the things I am doing at the moment, slowly, is I’m going over, say The Woman in White which has a large plotting problem in it, and getting my musicals into as good a shape as they possibly can be in my view. Then if somebody wants to do them, I can say 'look there’s a better version’ . It’s amazing thought how many people do want to have a go at some of these old shows, some of the ones that haven’t worked so well.

I suppose if I had one real regret its that I would have loved to have had a long term writing partner like [Richard] Rodgers had with either Hart or Hammerstein. I was really hoping that the Tim Rice relationship would have gone on but my dad was the one who first pointed out to me that he thought it was unlikely.

I suppose the difference is that I’m obsessed with theatre and for Tim it’s something that he does enjoy doing, is very good at but it isn’t his whole life like it is with me.

The natural rhythm of our partnership fell apart because I never could figure out quite how dramatically you did the story of Chess, which was his baby, so he went off and did it with Bjorn [Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson, of Abba] . Bloody good songs it had in it, too. Of course then Cats happened [a musical to poems by TS Eliot] and that by definition didn’t need a lyricist.

That, I think, would be the biggest regret. I’m one of those people who likes the security of working with people they have worked with before, which is why I’m excited about working with Chris and Don again.

CS: What will be in the TV show on Sunday?

ALW: Nicole Scherzinger’s going to do 'Don’t cry for me Argentina’ which is going to be interesting because she’s really a musical theatre actress, and I’m going to be intrigued to see what she makes of it. I’ve been through it with her and she really thinks about what she’s saying, which is awkward in the case of 'Don’t cry for me Argentina’ because, when she asks me questions about it, it doesn’t really mean anything.

Because it was originally called 'It’s only your lover returning’, 'the truth is I never left you’ makes a great deal of sense. But the title got altered at the last minute and it’s one of those examples of, you know, you don’t ask, you don’t explain. So when she said immediately 'I’m trying to make sense of this’, I said 'actually don’t.’

'Andrew Lloyd Webber: 40 Musical Years’ will be shown on ITV on Easter Sunday

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-features/9955003/Andrew-Lloyd-Webber-My-greatest-regret.html