What should have been Batman 3 became Batman Forever, and it happened without Tim Burton and Michael Keaton. Here's why.
David Crow
Aug 25, 2017
Nowadays with no shortage of cape-and-cowl movies being released each year, it’s easy to take for granted what filmmakers like Richard Donner and Tim Burton did for the superhero genre. Prior to their decade-apart DC superhero epics, the form was largely viewed by the mainstream as stuff meant to distract the little ones and shut-ins. This seemed especially true for Batman.
But if Donner made people believe a man could fly, Burton made them believe he could also be psychotic enough to dress up like a bat and beat up crazed clowns. Batman was more than a hit movie in 1989; it was a pop culture phenomenon that could be felt on every T-shirt, poster, and trading card being hawked that summer. As the film that buried the Adam West image of the Caped Crusader, Batman proved to a global audience that the story of Bruce Wayne could be one filled with brooding trauma and fanciful daydreams that crept into our nightmares. It out-grossed Ghostbusters II and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade that summer, and went on to be the highest grossing film of all-time up to that point with over $400 million worldwide.
It's no surprise then that Warner Bros. fast-tracked a sequel (putting Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian on permanent vacation), and the dream team of Tim Burton and Michael Keaton were back for more with 1992’s Batman Returns. That movie was a saturating force in pop culture as well, appearing on lunchboxes, backpacks, and, of course, McDonald’s Happy Meals. It also grossed an undeniably profitable $266 million in worldwide box office receipts. Nevertheless, the hue of Batman’s signal in the sky experienced substantial and immediate changes.
Within the relatively short span of three years, which marked the distance between Batman Returns and Batman Forever, the series not only underwent a facelift, but had a full-on reboot before the word even existed in Hollywood lexicon. Michael Keaton became Val Kilmer, the Art Deco hellscape that was Anton Furst and Bo Welch’s Gotham City became an Andy Warhol inspired Las Vegas party on steroids, and Tim Burton’s tearful angst for the mythology’s rotating cast of freaks turned into Joel Schumacher‘s “toyetic” Happy Meal generator.
In fact, if it weren’t for the inclusions of Michael Gough as Alfred Pennyworth and Pat Hingle as the perpetually underused Commissioner Gordon, there would be nothing to connect Batman Forever with the two films that came before it. And that is exactly the way Warner Bros. wanted it.
Tim Burton’s Batman 3 never happened because of the reaction to Batman Returns, which was swift and brutal throughout the press.
The screenwriter of Batman Returns, Daniel Waters said he was aware of the potential backlash immediately. As a subversive voice who made his bones on the cult classic dark comedy about teen murder and suicide, Heathers, Waters was one of the driving forces that turned the sequel into a near fable about the sameness of freaks, be they cats or bats. And when recalling the first time he saw the movie with an average audience (for the 2005 documentary Shadow of the Bat – Part 4: Dark Side of the Knight), Waters said, “It’s great. The lights are coming up after Batman Returns, and it’s like kids crying, people acting like they’ve been punched in the stomach, and like they’ve been mugged. Part of me relished that reaction, and part of me to this day is like, ‘Oops.’”
For the same documentary, director Burton also seemed bemused and baffled by the mixed reactions 13 years later. Says Burton, “One person would come in and go, ‘This is so much lighter than the first movie.’ And then the next person would come in and go, ‘Oh, this is so much darker than the first movie.’ And it’s like, light and dark are opposites! But it was 50 percent passionately one way and 50 percent the other.”
The most infamous fallout from this bitter buzz came on the merchandizing side of Batman Returns, which like the box office took a noticeable hit. But the financials were the least of it when the PR for WB’s bat-shaped golden calf became factored in. And it started with those damn Happy Meals.
Batman Returns opened on June 19, 1992 and before the Fourth of July weekend, The Los Angeles Times was famously publishing angry letters over the content of the film and its connection to McDonald’s. One angry letter dated June 27, 1992 said, “Violence-loving adults may enjoy this film. But why on Earth is McDonald’s pushing this exploitative movie through the sales of its so-called ‘Happy Meals?’ Has McDonald’s no conscience?”
Putting such irony over faith in an international corporate conglomerate responsible for the McNugget aside for a moment, the backlash to the Happy Meals soon spanned all major media outlets.
An Entertainment Weekly article published in July of that year quoted the Dove Foundation, a Michigan-based nonsectarian Christian organization, as saying, “Parents…trust McDonald’s. So why is McDonald’s promoting a movie to little kids that’s filled with gratuitous graphic violence?”
The most humorous thing about this public relations nightmare was how both McDonald’s and Warner Bros. attempted to downplay the fiasco.
McDonald’s spokeswoman Rebecca Caruso said, “The objective of the [Happy Meal] program was to allow young people to experience the fun of Batman the character. It was not designed to promote attendance at the movie. It was certainly not our intent to confuse parents or disappoint children.”
Riiiight.
A Warner Bros. press release one-upped that by stating that the promotion is tied to the then-53-year-old character and not Batman Returns. “We were careful not to provide actual toys from the movie,” the statement read.
Judge for yourself by watching some of the vintage 1992 McDonald’s commercials for Batman Returns by clicking right here. Also, savor the following line for the Batman Returns themed cups: “With five Frisbee Bat-disc lids straight from the movie.”
For whatever it’s worth, McDonald’s did not pull the Happy Meal line early despite recent internet rumors, and maintained them until Sept. 7, 1992. However, discomfort over this reaction may have led to McDonald’s reportedly asking Steven Spielberg to tone down the most violent sequences of the following summer’s Jurassic Park in time for fast food tie-in deals.
Many years later for the aforementioned 2005 Shadows of the Bat documentary, scripter Sam Hamm, whose own screenplay for Batman Returns got thrown out for Waters’ work, graciously defended the movie from aggrieved parents. “The movie itself, apart from being a merchandizing machine, apart from all the toys sales it was supposed to generate, the movie itself was never presented as a child-friendly movie. And so, I just think it’s a mistake of perception. I think the parents who complained just got it wrong, but there was no attempt to deceive anyone.”
Be that as it may, it did not mean heads weren’t ready to roll at Warner Bros. As early as late July 1992, WB executives were allowing themselves to be anonymously quoted as unhappy with the diminished box office performance of Batman Returns, which cost $45 million more to make than the 1989 film (that cost $35 million unto itself).
“It’s too dark [and] it’s not a lot of fun,” one WB suit lamented to Entertainment Weekly. Meanwhile, smelling blood in the water, a rival studio chief said to the magazine, “If you bring back Burton and Keaton, you’re stuck with their vision. You can’t expect Honey, I Shrunk the Batman.”
Obviously, for any Batman fan over eight-years-old, it’s fabulous to hear what the industry perception of the character was even after Tim Burton’s two brooding flirtations with German Expressionism in gaudy costumes.
Initially Tim Burton was still expected to return to what was being called “Batman III” in the trades. There were even reports that Robin Williams was expected to play the Riddler for Burton’s third Batman film (more on that in a moment), as well as a return for Michelle Pfeiffer in her iconic role as Catwoman. However, all of these rumors should be taken with a grain of salt since Burton never made it to the scripting stage for Batman 3.
In the Shadows of the Bat documentary, Burton recollected his exit from the franchise.
“I remember toying with the idea of doing another one. And I remember going into Warner Bros. and having a meeting. And I’m going, ‘I could do this or we could do that.’ And they go like, ‘Tim, don’t you want to do a smaller movie now? Just something that’s more [you]?’ About half an hour into the meeting, I go, ‘You don’t want me to make another one, do you?’ And they go, ‘Oh, no, no, no, no, no!’ And I just said, ‘No, I know you!’ So, we just stopped it right there.”
And with Tim Burton out, Warner Bros. was free to tap Joel Schumacher to helm the next Batman movie with the understanding that it would be much more toy (and Happy Meal) friendly. For the children and their parents. Of course.
However, Michael Keaton did not leave immediately with Tim Burton. Indeed, he was slated to return to what became Batman Forever rather late into its 1994 production. And yes, Robin Williams, who was famously shafted by WB when they used him as a negotiating chip against Jack Nicholson for the role of the Joker in the 1989 film, was in line to play the Riddler going into 1994. According to a 1995 Variety article, Williams dithered too long after the role was offered, and rising star Jim Carrey (coming off Ace Ventura and The Mask) “stepped into the role.” It has never been clarified if Williams disliked the script and direction Schumacher was developing or if Carrey and his agent pulled one over on the legendary actor, but quite honestly, Mr. Williams’ legacy probably benefitted from it.
Also of note for not appearing in Batman Forever were actors Billy Dee Williams and Marlon Wayans. Williams had famously been cast as Harvey Dent in the original 1989 Batman film with the expectation to play Dent’s twisted and tragic alter-ego, Two-Face, in a later installment. On the 2005 DVD edition of Batman, Williams said, “I really wanted desperately to obviously do Two-Face… I wanted to see what I could do with it. It would have been different from Tommy Lee’s. I’ve got my own kind of madness.”
This led to an internet rumor that Williams was paid for the part in Batman Forever due to his 1988 contract. Williams has recently denied this. Comicbook.com quoted Williams from a Nashville Comic Con in 2013 as saying, “You only get paid if you do the movie. I had a two-picture deal with Star Wars. They paid me for that. But I only had a one-picture deal for Batman.”
However, Wayans did get paid for not appearing in Batman Forever. Having originally been cast by Burton to appear as Robin in Batman Returns, Wayans was cut from an already crowded film. However, when Schumacher came in for the third Batman movie, the decision came down for Robin to be played by Chris O’Donnell, despite Wayans already having a two-picture deal. In 2009, Wayans told io9, “I still get residual checks. Tim Burton didn’t wind up doing three, Joel Schumacher did it and he had a different vision for who Robin was. So, he hired Chris O’Donnell.” And like that, there coincidentally were no more major parts played by African Americans in the Batman franchise.
Keaton, meanwhile, famously threw the movie into upheaval when he departed Batman Forever less than a year before its release. In a July 1994 Entertainment Weekly article, an “insider” said, “He wanted $15 million. He wanted a chunk of the gross, he wanted a chunk of merchandizing.” While possible, this seems like typical studio tactics of throwing shade on an individual during a messy break-up. Keaton’s producing partner, Harry Colomby, countered, “Money was never the issue. Not doing this movie means he probably gave up $30 million based on his back-end deal.”
According to EW, Keaton was unhappy that Schumacher replaced his pal Tim Burton. Further, “[After one meeting with Schumacher] Michael was not feeling confident.” He reportedly disliked that his input about making it more of Batman’s story (as opposed to the villains’) had been ignored, and that he was not consulted once during the script writing.
During his appearance on a 2013 WTF Podcast with comedian Marc Maron, Keaton maintained his position nearly 20 years later. “The guy who’s doing them now, Chris Nolan, he’s so talented, it’s crazy,” Keaton said. “[Christian Bale] is so talented. It’s so good….You look at where he went, which is exactly what I wanted to do when I was having meetings about the third one. I said, ‘You want to see how this guy started. We’ve got a chance here to fix whatever we kind of maybe went off. This could be brilliant!’” Keaton added that after Burton left and Schumacher came aboard, “I could see that was going south.”
After Keaton departed, Rene Russo, who was cast only one week prior to Keaton’s exit, was replaced with Nicole Kidman in the role of Dr. Chase Meridian, because she was perceived as too old to be Val Kilmer’s love interest.
The rest, as they say, is history. But perhaps it was for the best? A third Tim Burton Batman movie could, in theory, have starred Robin Williams in a role just as depraved as Jack Nicholson’s Joker and Danny DeVito’s Penguin, and opposite a returning Pfeiffer who’s so puuurfect for the part of Catwoman that I couldn’t resist the pun. Maybe Keaton would have had more to do, as well.
Then again, if not for Batman Forever’s successor, the infamous Batman & Robin mega-flop, the series would not have so embarrassingly and spectacularly imploded. Ergo, there might not have been something brilliant but dormant for Christopher Nolan to reboot in 2005 into the masterful The Dark Knight Trilogy. In that sense, it may have been for the best. But it never hurts to wonder in lieu of a neon-backlit Jim Carrey and Tommy Lee Jones doing a Benny Hill routine.
Read and download the full Den of Geek Special Edition magazine here!
This article first ran in September of 2014.
http://www.denofgeek.com/us/movies/batman/239632/why-tim-burtons-batman-3-never-happened
Friday, March 9, 2018
Did Andrew Lloyd Webber Ruin the Musical or Rescue It?
A new memoir shows how the composer brought back the masses by returning the musical to an earlier form.
By Adam Gopnik
American lovers of musical theatre who blame Andrew Lloyd Webber for pretty much everything that went wrong on its stages, starting in the early seventies, will be chagrined to discover that he has written an autobiography that has all the virtues his music always seemed to lack: wit, surprise, contemporaneity, audacity, and an appealingly shrewd sense of the occasion. There is nothing pompous or pallid about his prose, which makes it all the odder that so much of the music that he wrote seems to have no other qualities. Given his reputation as the guy who dragged the Broadway musical from its vitality and idiomatic urgency back to its melodramatic roots in European operetta—while also degrading rock music to a mere rhythm track—is it possible that, as his memoir indicates, his work might be more varied and interesting than we had known? Could we, terrible thought, have been unfair to Andrew Lloyd Webber? The answer turns out, on inspection, to be a complicated and qualified Yes. Certainly, no artist as hugely successful as he has been can have struck a chord without owning a piece of his time.
Lloyd Webber, as his memoir, “Unmasked” (HarperCollins), reveals, was caught in a wrinkle within that time. Though his music may often sound as if it were written by a man locked in the basement of the Paris opera—hearing late-nineteenth-century music, muffled, from a couple of floors down—he turns out to be very much a boy of the Monty Python generation, his ears full of rock and British comedy. Born in 1948, Lloyd Webber as a child was an Elvis nut who played “Jailhouse Rock” until his parents were numbed by it, and later led a school celebration for the duo Peter and Gordon, recent alumni who had had a pop hit. He knows his instruments, ready to whip out a twelve-string Rickenbacker for the right effect in a recording session.
But he also had, from early on, a Betjemanian love of Englishness: he tells, touchingly, of schoolboy trips to see old churches and abbeys and of a keen love for Pre-Raphaelite art, that wistful-whimsical mode of nineteenth-century British painting. (He later amassed one of the world’s best private collections of the school.) He loved pantomime, a distinctly English holiday entertainment that mixed spectacle, parody, nostalgia, and pastiche. As a child, he operated a toy musical theatre with his brother, in which they put on full-scale shows, Andrew pulling all the strings and arranging all the music. You have a sense that this is still the theatre where he puts on shows; one of those infant musicals was billed as “A Musical of Gigantic Importance,” and several well-known later tunes emerged from them. You get good at this stuff early, or probably not at all.
Rising from the English upper crust—that school he shared with Peter and Gordon was Westminster, a famous London one—he absorbed many of its attitudes, although, the English crust having as many layers as a mille-feuille, one has the sense that he comes from somewhere in the more insecure upper middle, rather than from the very creamy top. He emerged with, among other things, a passion for P. G. Wodehouse (one of his rare flops was a Wodehouse musical). Indeed, his memoir is written in a sort of Bertie Wooster pastiche, a little disconcertingly given that its material is the very un-Woosterish one of drive and success. At one point, Lloyd Webber even recycles a Wodehouse joke in a way that may puzzle outsiders to the Wodehouse cult, calling people “gruntled.” (It’s from “The Code of the Woosters”: “If not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.”)
His father, perhaps most significant of all, was a composer of a distinctly English variety—happily obscure, making a living writing old-fashioned organ and choral music for amateur church choirs. He was one of a group of British composers for whom it was still possible to write straight, melodic music that wasn’t pop and somehow make a living. It was his parents who introduced him to Puccini, and then one day his father played “Some Enchanted Evening,” the ballad from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “South Pacific,” saying, “If you ever write a tune half as good as this, I shall be very, very proud of you.” Ah! If only Dad had played “The Lady Is a Tramp” or “Where or When” or another angular and elegant Rodgers and Hart ballad, the history of musical theatre might have been different, and better. (To be fair, whenever Lloyd Webber does write at his best, he writes at Rodgers’s best; the influence flows in and then out, as in the genuinely beautiful “All I Ask of You,” from “The Phantom of the Opera.”)
A kind of admirably defensive attitude got embedded in him from his youth: old things could be nice things, and the tastes of awkward schoolboys might be made into entertainment. Those tastes were always what the Brits call “naff”—lame, tacky, uncool. But he knew that naff could be beautiful. The basic formula that lit up the pop cantatas that first made him famous was apparent early on: something old, something new, something borrowed, nothing blue. “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” (1968), which in some ways remains the most vivid thing Lloyd Webber ever wrote, was pushed along by a music master at a prestigious junior school who wanted “something for the whole school to sing.” Using Tim Rice’s words, which had, instead of sixties piety, a jaunty Python playfulness, he managed to write a school play from Scripture which no one had to take too seriously. Its famous follow-up, “Jesus Christ Superstar” (1970), was a rock album, played on progressive FM before it was a show. Those of us with snobby tastes in Hendrix and the Dead thought it was a terrible rock album, but a rock album is what it was.
So, though his music isn’t often grouped with the “prog rock” of the early seventies—the highly tutored, self-consciously arty music of Yes and early Genesis and Procol Harum and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and so on—the spirit is very much the same: educated British musicians with classical training, inherited rock rhythm sections, minimal blues feeling, and a taste for the grandiose and bombastic. The famous “Phantom of the Opera” theme, with the organ’s quaver accompanied by funereal electric bass and foreboding percussion, is pure prog rock, almost to the point of “Spinal Tap”-style parody. What Lloyd Webber added to the mix was a feeling for pathos and melody—putting Puccini rather than Bach into the prog-rock cauldron. (These connections prove to be fairly direct: the first Jesus in “Jesus Christ Superstar” was the lead singer of Deep Purple, and a subsequent Jesus tried out for Black Sabbath, both groups slightly demented children of prog rock.)
Every biography or memoir set in the world of popular music turns out to be a book about music publishing. You wince as you read the opening chapters, knowing that, with the fateful inevitability of Greek tragedy, the composer-songwriter-singer is going to sign a deal with a rapacious music publisher as a dewy-eyed youngster and then spend the rest of his life regretting it. Springsteen, the Beatles, most notoriously John Fogerty—the story varies only in the details.
Lloyd Webber reverses the rules. Even before he had written a single hit song, he had spotted in the publisher’s contracts something called Grand Rights, meaning the ongoing financial control over theatrical productions. No one in the sixties much cared about these—who was going to mount a theatrical production of a pop cantata?—but Lloyd Webber did, and miraculously managed to hold on to his, or, at least, to eighty per cent of them. (Having to give up twenty per cent “rankles with me to this day,” he confides.) Lloyd Webber is ferociously smart about everything to do with money and marketing; every small real-estate transaction he has ever taken part in is recounted in detail and its value offered both in the original sum and, in parenthesis, in the equivalent now—e.g., “£2,000 per year was a lot of money in those days (today approximately £32,000).” Cynics know the price of everything and the value of nothing; a smart popular artist like Lloyd Webber knows the price of everything and the value of everything and can never decide which matters more.
Or, rather, he made the decision, long ago, while still knowing the alternative. For him, calculation and composition go hand in hand—as they did, let it be said, for Irving Berlin and for Richard Rodgers, too. You learn how Lloyd Webber composed “Cats” and “Chess” and the rest; you also learn about the composition of the licensing and merchandising choices. Selecting posters and crafting ads get as much attention as making music. There’s even a fascinating digression on how the grooves on the “Evita” LP had to be widened so that when “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” appeared on the radio it would have sufficient volume to compete with the other pop songs.
In truth, Lloyd Webber’s genius was always more theatrical than musical—more about putting on a big show than about writing startling or original music. That’s not to say he doesn’t care about the music: he talks, fairly, about his pride in the orchestration of the second verse of “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina.” But the value of the music is determined exclusively by how many people choose to listen to it, and by the “Wow!” factor it presents to a seated audience. The ill-natured regularly insist that Lloyd Webber “stole” music from the classics. Online, one can find fiendishly self-satisfied chat boards detailing the supposed lifts. But if someone can find a pop song (“I Don’t Know How to Love Him”) in a Mendelssohn violin concerto, more power, and royalties, to him. Lloyd Webber was working his marionettes, with anything that he could find to move them.
At a deeper level, Lloyd Webber’s memoir exposes a central fault line in the history of popular music. In the late fifties, not only was the “My Fair Lady” cast album the biggest seller of its time but spinoff jazz albums with musicians playing “My Fair Lady” material were huge sellers, too. Sinatra’s great albums of the mid-fifties were heavy with theatre songs. By 1964, all that had altered for good; a successful original-cast album went from the place where hits always happened to a place where they rarely did. When the Beatles and the rest arrived, the line between pop music and theatre music became almost absolute; the circumstance in which a Broadway musical was the natural home of a hit tune began to break up more rapidly than anyone had thought possible, even though the previous connection had been so long-lasting that the Beatles felt obliged to play, as their second song before the American public, “Till There Was You,” from Meredith Willson’s “The Music Man.” An ironic sign of obeisance to a dying order.
When the plates move and shake in a genre of entertainment, you survive by getting either smarter or more spectacular. This was true of the early-seventeenth-century theatre, when, as playgoing moved indoors, away from the giant popular amphitheatres, the special effects got more elaborate and the drama got more daring. It was true of Hollywood after the arrival of television, where some went for Cinerama and others went for a more pointedly adult and arty direction. And it was true of musical theatre after rock. Sondheim became the god of smart, Lloyd Webber of spectacular.
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. Rock having taken the street, the salon was left vacant. With ordinary emotion sung in idiomatic English having been reclaimed by the singer-songwriters, theatrical music could borrow rock style but move backward in form, toward operetta and melodrama. Lloyd Webber and Sondheim both wrote their best work around the subject of “night music”—what it might sound like and what it might mean. Sondheim’s night music occupied a single house in wry waltz time; Lloyd Webber’s the operatic basement in melodramatic swellings—musicals, still, of Gigantic Importance.
The return to operetta is a surprising but not unnatural development. The history of musical theatre can be seen as a race—like Eliza across the ice—against the bloodhounds of operetta, with the European formula always lying in wait to recapture the runaway, twirling a mustache and wearing a top hat. The Princess Theatre musicals of Kern, Wodehouse, and Bolton are usually thought to have been the first to make a real break with the European model, offering casual interchange, light-footed melody, and contemporary romance in place of the old Viennese pastry.
The odd thing is that, while the “book shows” that sprang from this transformation produced the greatest body of songs since the German Romantics, and more varied than those, the shows that produced those songs were so slight as to be unrevivable, except as nostalgia pieces. The songs have depth and surprise; the shows don’t. Of the Rodgers and Hart productions, only one or two stand up, and of the Cole Porter shows hardly more: you have to go right from Rodgers and Hart’s “On Your Toes” to Porter’s “High Society,” with a brief summer-stock stop at “Kiss Me, Kate.” (Lloyd Webber, to his credit, produced a revival of “On Your Toes,” in London, in the nineteen-eighties, but, he says ruefully, it “cost me my shirt.” Though one knows that there was a shirt beneath the shirt, and one beneath that.)
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. The Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals have been revived so successfully in the past two decades, in impeccably posh corners like the National Theatre in London and Lincoln Center Theatre here, that it’s hard to recall that not so long ago they were considered very déclassé—taken for granted by an earlier generation to have been part of the suburban middlebrow descent of Broadway theatre in the nineteen-fifties, especially when it came to the quality of the music. Alec Wilder, in “American Popular Song: The Great Innovators,” still the best book on the topic, could hardly find six Rodgers and Hammerstein songs that he thought were equal to Rodgers’s work with Hart, calling “Some Enchanted Evening,” which so enchanted the Lloyd Webbers, “pale and pompous and bland.” Yet the Rodgers and Hammerstein shows survive because they keep intact the crucial discovery of the American form, the thing that really separated it from the opera tradition and its dependencies: extraordinary emotion sung by ordinary people, rather than extraordinary emotion sung by extraordinary people.
Lloyd Webber’s musicals are all operetta in that simple sense. They are filled with extraordinary people—whether Evita or Jesus—singing big stuff; the excitement gained by the spectacle is paid for by the loss of soul, pious aspiration replacing spice and street savvy. (Today, one listens to a now forgotten show like Phil Silvers and Johnny Mercer’s 1951 “Top Banana” with astonishment at its energy and its urban moxie.) A good book holds up even bathetic music—a lesson not lost on Lloyd Webber. The closest thing he has achieved to the older style of musical is “Cats,” from 1981, a show that had street wisdoms within its Eliotian measures. (The often maligned “Cats” is doubtless in part a victim of an ugly kind of reverse snobbery: had it appeared for a month at the National Theatre, instead of for all our lifetimes in the West End and on Broadway, it would have had a choicer reputation.)
Theatricality is the key to Lloyd Webber’s success, and theatre is conflict. Not surprisingly, he tells many fine theatre stories, most of them, as is the way in the history of the musical, tales of rage, resentment, and growing mutual mistrust, all in the cause of making two and a half hours of middlebrow entertainment. The stories are good, and sometimes violent. He tells of the time that the actor Michael Crawford and the producer Cameron Mackintosh got out of a London car and started a fistfight on the street because Crawford wanted to use a recording of one of his “Phantom” songs in performance. We learn that Lloyd Webber’s longtime partner Tim Rice once became so enraged that he threatened a lawsuit to have his words removed from “Memory”—to be sure, something any honest man would want to do. (Rice and Lloyd Webber have only recently seemed to reconcile.) Given the scale of Lloyd Webber’s successes, one is startled by the vitriol that accompanies his productions. He even reproduces catty letters that he wrote to Patti LuPone during the run of “Evita,” despairing of her ability to sing the words clearly enough for them to be understood by the audience. (She never really did, and it never really mattered.)
“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.” How, one wonders, could people have nearly come to blows, with lawsuits and friendships ripped apart, over “Cats”? If the rule in the movie industry is that nobody knows anything, the rule in musical theatre is more fiendish: everybody does know something, but nobody knows what bit of what’s known will count, and everybody hates the next person for thinking he or she does. That’s one theory for why the history of the musical is a history of men and women shouting at one another. The incomparable composer and lyricist Frank Loesser once ordered a director to tell an actor not to sing a song the wrong way, and, after the director obligingly did so, Loesser yelled at him anyway: “You didn’t hit him, you son of a bitch!” The producer Cy Feuer tells of how, during a Philadelphia tryout of a harmless musical called “Little Me,” the wonderful lyricist Carolyn Leigh actually went outside and asked a police officer to arrest him for cutting one of her songs.
But my own theory for why musical comedies make people miserable, richly borne out by Lloyd Webber’s memoir, is that there is no natural author of a musical—that is, no one who assumes authority, more or less inevitably, owing to the nature of the form. The director, by contrast, is the natural author of a movie. He coaxes out the performances, allows the improvs, and makes the cuts. A choreographer, similarly, is the natural author of the dance. Most of the time, the natural author is the actual author, and the exceptions leave us grumbling. Authors write books, even if editors mightily assist.
But a musical has no natural author. It has five or six or seven. The composer is the actual author of the most powerful emotional beats in the piece—we remember Richard Rodgers’s music in “Carousel” far better than any other element—but composers tend to be inarticulate and are often outtalked. The book writer, as he is archaically still called—elsewhere, simply, the playwright—is the most important maker; but though he provides the structure in which the songs may take place, no one recalls the structure, only the songs. The director is often powerful to the point of omnipotence, but no one except special groups of insiders will ever think of the show as his. The lyricist, meanwhile, has a reasonable claim to being the true author of the show—the music’s emotional force takes on specific meaning only through the words it accompanies—but he often ends up the most invisible of all. Meanwhile, the choreographer believes himself to be the natural author of all the things the director is doing badly, but is also sure that the director will get the credit even if the choreographer fixes them. Add to this the truth that songs that delighted salons of backers bore audiences silly, and that the things that worked perfectly in rehearsal die a dog’s death onstage, and you have a natural abyss of authority. You need only bring in the panic of pure ignorance to produce an atmosphere like that of a third-world country after the President has left the palace and the mobs are surging in the streets.
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. It was quite a typical tangle: “I feared that both Trevor and Cameron would think it was the reviews”—for “Les Mis,” at that point, amazingly, was considered a failure—“that were the reason for my insisting that the director must be Hal. Cameron seemed curiously disturbed when I stood my ground. Years later, I discovered the reason. Although I still presumed that Hal was to be our director, in fact he had been stood down. I also learned that Hal blamed me for this and was appalled.” He concludes, “It’s best left at that,” unintentionally echoing the famous words of the Spinal Tap guitarist about one of the group’s dying drummers. Lloyd Webber’s stories, far from being tales of aims accomplished, remain tales of aims gone wrong and of mountains not quite climbed. Even the most powerful auteur of musicals can never quite become their author.
“Phantom of the Opera” is probably the closest thing we will have to a complete expression of Lloyd Webber’s vision, and here it is on Broadway, still playing thirty years on, likely, as he says himself, the single most successful piece of theatrical entertainment ever engineered. As a recent visit confirms, it remains today, for the audience of tourists and kids who flock to it, as impressive as it was when it débuted. The show manages to be both absolutely terrible and sort of great. The action makes no sense, it takes forever for the story to get going, the characters are made of cardboard, and the music is made of bits and pieces. But theatre is brutally binary; it either works or it doesn’t, and no one with a fair mind and a taste for the theatrical can deny that this show works.
It is pure, unadulterated operetta: the entire first twenty minutes of the show are given over to a bit of self-amused nineteenth-century pastiche, and then twenty minutes later we get an extended Mozart parody that must be lost on nine-tenths of the audience. But its theatricality, both of the showy, expensive kind (rising and falling chandeliers, mysterious mirrors and underground lagoons) and of the more potent, elemental kind (obsessive love and beautiful sopranos and virtuous aristocrats), remains intact.
Spectacular is, in the end, a species of smart. Popular artists find solutions to problems presented by the circumstances of their time which no one else was aware of until the artist solved them. Lloyd Webber solved the problem of how to make a credible spectacle from recycled material. Using fresher material to make something spectacular on its own terms remains the job that needs doing. Every good art form needs a phantom or two in the basement to haunt it. They just shouldn’t be allowed the run of the house.
This article appears in the print edition of the March 12, 2018, issue, with the headline “Night Music.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/12/did-andrew-lloyd-webber-ruin-the-musical-or-rescue-it
By Adam Gopnik
American lovers of musical theatre who blame Andrew Lloyd Webber for pretty much everything that went wrong on its stages, starting in the early seventies, will be chagrined to discover that he has written an autobiography that has all the virtues his music always seemed to lack: wit, surprise, contemporaneity, audacity, and an appealingly shrewd sense of the occasion. There is nothing pompous or pallid about his prose, which makes it all the odder that so much of the music that he wrote seems to have no other qualities. Given his reputation as the guy who dragged the Broadway musical from its vitality and idiomatic urgency back to its melodramatic roots in European operetta—while also degrading rock music to a mere rhythm track—is it possible that, as his memoir indicates, his work might be more varied and interesting than we had known? Could we, terrible thought, have been unfair to Andrew Lloyd Webber? The answer turns out, on inspection, to be a complicated and qualified Yes. Certainly, no artist as hugely successful as he has been can have struck a chord without owning a piece of his time.
Lloyd Webber, as his memoir, “Unmasked” (HarperCollins), reveals, was caught in a wrinkle within that time. Though his music may often sound as if it were written by a man locked in the basement of the Paris opera—hearing late-nineteenth-century music, muffled, from a couple of floors down—he turns out to be very much a boy of the Monty Python generation, his ears full of rock and British comedy. Born in 1948, Lloyd Webber as a child was an Elvis nut who played “Jailhouse Rock” until his parents were numbed by it, and later led a school celebration for the duo Peter and Gordon, recent alumni who had had a pop hit. He knows his instruments, ready to whip out a twelve-string Rickenbacker for the right effect in a recording session.
But he also had, from early on, a Betjemanian love of Englishness: he tells, touchingly, of schoolboy trips to see old churches and abbeys and of a keen love for Pre-Raphaelite art, that wistful-whimsical mode of nineteenth-century British painting. (He later amassed one of the world’s best private collections of the school.) He loved pantomime, a distinctly English holiday entertainment that mixed spectacle, parody, nostalgia, and pastiche. As a child, he operated a toy musical theatre with his brother, in which they put on full-scale shows, Andrew pulling all the strings and arranging all the music. You have a sense that this is still the theatre where he puts on shows; one of those infant musicals was billed as “A Musical of Gigantic Importance,” and several well-known later tunes emerged from them. You get good at this stuff early, or probably not at all.
Rising from the English upper crust—that school he shared with Peter and Gordon was Westminster, a famous London one—he absorbed many of its attitudes, although, the English crust having as many layers as a mille-feuille, one has the sense that he comes from somewhere in the more insecure upper middle, rather than from the very creamy top. He emerged with, among other things, a passion for P. G. Wodehouse (one of his rare flops was a Wodehouse musical). Indeed, his memoir is written in a sort of Bertie Wooster pastiche, a little disconcertingly given that its material is the very un-Woosterish one of drive and success. At one point, Lloyd Webber even recycles a Wodehouse joke in a way that may puzzle outsiders to the Wodehouse cult, calling people “gruntled.” (It’s from “The Code of the Woosters”: “If not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.”)
His father, perhaps most significant of all, was a composer of a distinctly English variety—happily obscure, making a living writing old-fashioned organ and choral music for amateur church choirs. He was one of a group of British composers for whom it was still possible to write straight, melodic music that wasn’t pop and somehow make a living. It was his parents who introduced him to Puccini, and then one day his father played “Some Enchanted Evening,” the ballad from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “South Pacific,” saying, “If you ever write a tune half as good as this, I shall be very, very proud of you.” Ah! If only Dad had played “The Lady Is a Tramp” or “Where or When” or another angular and elegant Rodgers and Hart ballad, the history of musical theatre might have been different, and better. (To be fair, whenever Lloyd Webber does write at his best, he writes at Rodgers’s best; the influence flows in and then out, as in the genuinely beautiful “All I Ask of You,” from “The Phantom of the Opera.”)
A kind of admirably defensive attitude got embedded in him from his youth: old things could be nice things, and the tastes of awkward schoolboys might be made into entertainment. Those tastes were always what the Brits call “naff”—lame, tacky, uncool. But he knew that naff could be beautiful. The basic formula that lit up the pop cantatas that first made him famous was apparent early on: something old, something new, something borrowed, nothing blue. “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” (1968), which in some ways remains the most vivid thing Lloyd Webber ever wrote, was pushed along by a music master at a prestigious junior school who wanted “something for the whole school to sing.” Using Tim Rice’s words, which had, instead of sixties piety, a jaunty Python playfulness, he managed to write a school play from Scripture which no one had to take too seriously. Its famous follow-up, “Jesus Christ Superstar” (1970), was a rock album, played on progressive FM before it was a show. Those of us with snobby tastes in Hendrix and the Dead thought it was a terrible rock album, but a rock album is what it was.
So, though his music isn’t often grouped with the “prog rock” of the early seventies—the highly tutored, self-consciously arty music of Yes and early Genesis and Procol Harum and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and so on—the spirit is very much the same: educated British musicians with classical training, inherited rock rhythm sections, minimal blues feeling, and a taste for the grandiose and bombastic. The famous “Phantom of the Opera” theme, with the organ’s quaver accompanied by funereal electric bass and foreboding percussion, is pure prog rock, almost to the point of “Spinal Tap”-style parody. What Lloyd Webber added to the mix was a feeling for pathos and melody—putting Puccini rather than Bach into the prog-rock cauldron. (These connections prove to be fairly direct: the first Jesus in “Jesus Christ Superstar” was the lead singer of Deep Purple, and a subsequent Jesus tried out for Black Sabbath, both groups slightly demented children of prog rock.)
Every biography or memoir set in the world of popular music turns out to be a book about music publishing. You wince as you read the opening chapters, knowing that, with the fateful inevitability of Greek tragedy, the composer-songwriter-singer is going to sign a deal with a rapacious music publisher as a dewy-eyed youngster and then spend the rest of his life regretting it. Springsteen, the Beatles, most notoriously John Fogerty—the story varies only in the details.
Lloyd Webber reverses the rules. Even before he had written a single hit song, he had spotted in the publisher’s contracts something called Grand Rights, meaning the ongoing financial control over theatrical productions. No one in the sixties much cared about these—who was going to mount a theatrical production of a pop cantata?—but Lloyd Webber did, and miraculously managed to hold on to his, or, at least, to eighty per cent of them. (Having to give up twenty per cent “rankles with me to this day,” he confides.) Lloyd Webber is ferociously smart about everything to do with money and marketing; every small real-estate transaction he has ever taken part in is recounted in detail and its value offered both in the original sum and, in parenthesis, in the equivalent now—e.g., “£2,000 per year was a lot of money in those days (today approximately £32,000).” Cynics know the price of everything and the value of nothing; a smart popular artist like Lloyd Webber knows the price of everything and the value of everything and can never decide which matters more.
Or, rather, he made the decision, long ago, while still knowing the alternative. For him, calculation and composition go hand in hand—as they did, let it be said, for Irving Berlin and for Richard Rodgers, too. You learn how Lloyd Webber composed “Cats” and “Chess” and the rest; you also learn about the composition of the licensing and merchandising choices. Selecting posters and crafting ads get as much attention as making music. There’s even a fascinating digression on how the grooves on the “Evita” LP had to be widened so that when “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” appeared on the radio it would have sufficient volume to compete with the other pop songs.
In truth, Lloyd Webber’s genius was always more theatrical than musical—more about putting on a big show than about writing startling or original music. That’s not to say he doesn’t care about the music: he talks, fairly, about his pride in the orchestration of the second verse of “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina.” But the value of the music is determined exclusively by how many people choose to listen to it, and by the “Wow!” factor it presents to a seated audience. The ill-natured regularly insist that Lloyd Webber “stole” music from the classics. Online, one can find fiendishly self-satisfied chat boards detailing the supposed lifts. But if someone can find a pop song (“I Don’t Know How to Love Him”) in a Mendelssohn violin concerto, more power, and royalties, to him. Lloyd Webber was working his marionettes, with anything that he could find to move them.
At a deeper level, Lloyd Webber’s memoir exposes a central fault line in the history of popular music. In the late fifties, not only was the “My Fair Lady” cast album the biggest seller of its time but spinoff jazz albums with musicians playing “My Fair Lady” material were huge sellers, too. Sinatra’s great albums of the mid-fifties were heavy with theatre songs. By 1964, all that had altered for good; a successful original-cast album went from the place where hits always happened to a place where they rarely did. When the Beatles and the rest arrived, the line between pop music and theatre music became almost absolute; the circumstance in which a Broadway musical was the natural home of a hit tune began to break up more rapidly than anyone had thought possible, even though the previous connection had been so long-lasting that the Beatles felt obliged to play, as their second song before the American public, “Till There Was You,” from Meredith Willson’s “The Music Man.” An ironic sign of obeisance to a dying order.
When the plates move and shake in a genre of entertainment, you survive by getting either smarter or more spectacular. This was true of the early-seventeenth-century theatre, when, as playgoing moved indoors, away from the giant popular amphitheatres, the special effects got more elaborate and the drama got more daring. It was true of Hollywood after the arrival of television, where some went for Cinerama and others went for a more pointedly adult and arty direction. And it was true of musical theatre after rock. Sondheim became the god of smart, Lloyd Webber of spectacular.
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. Rock having taken the street, the salon was left vacant. With ordinary emotion sung in idiomatic English having been reclaimed by the singer-songwriters, theatrical music could borrow rock style but move backward in form, toward operetta and melodrama. Lloyd Webber and Sondheim both wrote their best work around the subject of “night music”—what it might sound like and what it might mean. Sondheim’s night music occupied a single house in wry waltz time; Lloyd Webber’s the operatic basement in melodramatic swellings—musicals, still, of Gigantic Importance.
The return to operetta is a surprising but not unnatural development. The history of musical theatre can be seen as a race—like Eliza across the ice—against the bloodhounds of operetta, with the European formula always lying in wait to recapture the runaway, twirling a mustache and wearing a top hat. The Princess Theatre musicals of Kern, Wodehouse, and Bolton are usually thought to have been the first to make a real break with the European model, offering casual interchange, light-footed melody, and contemporary romance in place of the old Viennese pastry.
The odd thing is that, while the “book shows” that sprang from this transformation produced the greatest body of songs since the German Romantics, and more varied than those, the shows that produced those songs were so slight as to be unrevivable, except as nostalgia pieces. The songs have depth and surprise; the shows don’t. Of the Rodgers and Hart productions, only one or two stand up, and of the Cole Porter shows hardly more: you have to go right from Rodgers and Hart’s “On Your Toes” to Porter’s “High Society,” with a brief summer-stock stop at “Kiss Me, Kate.” (Lloyd Webber, to his credit, produced a revival of “On Your Toes,” in London, in the nineteen-eighties, but, he says ruefully, it “cost me my shirt.” Though one knows that there was a shirt beneath the shirt, and one beneath that.)
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. The Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals have been revived so successfully in the past two decades, in impeccably posh corners like the National Theatre in London and Lincoln Center Theatre here, that it’s hard to recall that not so long ago they were considered very déclassé—taken for granted by an earlier generation to have been part of the suburban middlebrow descent of Broadway theatre in the nineteen-fifties, especially when it came to the quality of the music. Alec Wilder, in “American Popular Song: The Great Innovators,” still the best book on the topic, could hardly find six Rodgers and Hammerstein songs that he thought were equal to Rodgers’s work with Hart, calling “Some Enchanted Evening,” which so enchanted the Lloyd Webbers, “pale and pompous and bland.” Yet the Rodgers and Hammerstein shows survive because they keep intact the crucial discovery of the American form, the thing that really separated it from the opera tradition and its dependencies: extraordinary emotion sung by ordinary people, rather than extraordinary emotion sung by extraordinary people.
Lloyd Webber’s musicals are all operetta in that simple sense. They are filled with extraordinary people—whether Evita or Jesus—singing big stuff; the excitement gained by the spectacle is paid for by the loss of soul, pious aspiration replacing spice and street savvy. (Today, one listens to a now forgotten show like Phil Silvers and Johnny Mercer’s 1951 “Top Banana” with astonishment at its energy and its urban moxie.) A good book holds up even bathetic music—a lesson not lost on Lloyd Webber. The closest thing he has achieved to the older style of musical is “Cats,” from 1981, a show that had street wisdoms within its Eliotian measures. (The often maligned “Cats” is doubtless in part a victim of an ugly kind of reverse snobbery: had it appeared for a month at the National Theatre, instead of for all our lifetimes in the West End and on Broadway, it would have had a choicer reputation.)
Theatricality is the key to Lloyd Webber’s success, and theatre is conflict. Not surprisingly, he tells many fine theatre stories, most of them, as is the way in the history of the musical, tales of rage, resentment, and growing mutual mistrust, all in the cause of making two and a half hours of middlebrow entertainment. The stories are good, and sometimes violent. He tells of the time that the actor Michael Crawford and the producer Cameron Mackintosh got out of a London car and started a fistfight on the street because Crawford wanted to use a recording of one of his “Phantom” songs in performance. We learn that Lloyd Webber’s longtime partner Tim Rice once became so enraged that he threatened a lawsuit to have his words removed from “Memory”—to be sure, something any honest man would want to do. (Rice and Lloyd Webber have only recently seemed to reconcile.) Given the scale of Lloyd Webber’s successes, one is startled by the vitriol that accompanies his productions. He even reproduces catty letters that he wrote to Patti LuPone during the run of “Evita,” despairing of her ability to sing the words clearly enough for them to be understood by the audience. (She never really did, and it never really mattered.)
“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.” How, one wonders, could people have nearly come to blows, with lawsuits and friendships ripped apart, over “Cats”? If the rule in the movie industry is that nobody knows anything, the rule in musical theatre is more fiendish: everybody does know something, but nobody knows what bit of what’s known will count, and everybody hates the next person for thinking he or she does. That’s one theory for why the history of the musical is a history of men and women shouting at one another. The incomparable composer and lyricist Frank Loesser once ordered a director to tell an actor not to sing a song the wrong way, and, after the director obligingly did so, Loesser yelled at him anyway: “You didn’t hit him, you son of a bitch!” The producer Cy Feuer tells of how, during a Philadelphia tryout of a harmless musical called “Little Me,” the wonderful lyricist Carolyn Leigh actually went outside and asked a police officer to arrest him for cutting one of her songs.
But my own theory for why musical comedies make people miserable, richly borne out by Lloyd Webber’s memoir, is that there is no natural author of a musical—that is, no one who assumes authority, more or less inevitably, owing to the nature of the form. The director, by contrast, is the natural author of a movie. He coaxes out the performances, allows the improvs, and makes the cuts. A choreographer, similarly, is the natural author of the dance. Most of the time, the natural author is the actual author, and the exceptions leave us grumbling. Authors write books, even if editors mightily assist.
But a musical has no natural author. It has five or six or seven. The composer is the actual author of the most powerful emotional beats in the piece—we remember Richard Rodgers’s music in “Carousel” far better than any other element—but composers tend to be inarticulate and are often outtalked. The book writer, as he is archaically still called—elsewhere, simply, the playwright—is the most important maker; but though he provides the structure in which the songs may take place, no one recalls the structure, only the songs. The director is often powerful to the point of omnipotence, but no one except special groups of insiders will ever think of the show as his. The lyricist, meanwhile, has a reasonable claim to being the true author of the show—the music’s emotional force takes on specific meaning only through the words it accompanies—but he often ends up the most invisible of all. Meanwhile, the choreographer believes himself to be the natural author of all the things the director is doing badly, but is also sure that the director will get the credit even if the choreographer fixes them. Add to this the truth that songs that delighted salons of backers bore audiences silly, and that the things that worked perfectly in rehearsal die a dog’s death onstage, and you have a natural abyss of authority. You need only bring in the panic of pure ignorance to produce an atmosphere like that of a third-world country after the President has left the palace and the mobs are surging in the streets.
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. It was quite a typical tangle: “I feared that both Trevor and Cameron would think it was the reviews”—for “Les Mis,” at that point, amazingly, was considered a failure—“that were the reason for my insisting that the director must be Hal. Cameron seemed curiously disturbed when I stood my ground. Years later, I discovered the reason. Although I still presumed that Hal was to be our director, in fact he had been stood down. I also learned that Hal blamed me for this and was appalled.” He concludes, “It’s best left at that,” unintentionally echoing the famous words of the Spinal Tap guitarist about one of the group’s dying drummers. Lloyd Webber’s stories, far from being tales of aims accomplished, remain tales of aims gone wrong and of mountains not quite climbed. Even the most powerful auteur of musicals can never quite become their author.
“Phantom of the Opera” is probably the closest thing we will have to a complete expression of Lloyd Webber’s vision, and here it is on Broadway, still playing thirty years on, likely, as he says himself, the single most successful piece of theatrical entertainment ever engineered. As a recent visit confirms, it remains today, for the audience of tourists and kids who flock to it, as impressive as it was when it débuted. The show manages to be both absolutely terrible and sort of great. The action makes no sense, it takes forever for the story to get going, the characters are made of cardboard, and the music is made of bits and pieces. But theatre is brutally binary; it either works or it doesn’t, and no one with a fair mind and a taste for the theatrical can deny that this show works.
It is pure, unadulterated operetta: the entire first twenty minutes of the show are given over to a bit of self-amused nineteenth-century pastiche, and then twenty minutes later we get an extended Mozart parody that must be lost on nine-tenths of the audience. But its theatricality, both of the showy, expensive kind (rising and falling chandeliers, mysterious mirrors and underground lagoons) and of the more potent, elemental kind (obsessive love and beautiful sopranos and virtuous aristocrats), remains intact.
Spectacular is, in the end, a species of smart. Popular artists find solutions to problems presented by the circumstances of their time which no one else was aware of until the artist solved them. Lloyd Webber solved the problem of how to make a credible spectacle from recycled material. Using fresher material to make something spectacular on its own terms remains the job that needs doing. Every good art form needs a phantom or two in the basement to haunt it. They just shouldn’t be allowed the run of the house.
This article appears in the print edition of the March 12, 2018, issue, with the headline “Night Music.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/12/did-andrew-lloyd-webber-ruin-the-musical-or-rescue-it
The sweet girl who made my heart sing until I strayed with a beauty from Cats: Three marriages to three VERY different women - and a lot of drama along the way. Andrew Lloyd Webber lifts the curtain on his OWN Aspects of Love
By Andrew Lloyd Webber
PUBLISHED: 09:46 AEDT, 25 February 2018 | UPDATED: 12:26 AEDT, 25 February 2018
Last week, Britain’s most famous composer recounted his dazzling rise to the musical stratosphere and, in moving detail, the dark moments which pulled him to the brink of suicide. Today, in the second and final extract of a gripping autobiography, he reveals his heartfelt regret at leaving his young family – and recounts the explosive romance with stage star Sarah Brightman which changed his world for ever.
The 1980s had dawned, Cats was on its way to becoming the kind of global hit you can only dream of. Yet what happened next in my private life would lead to a musical that not only eclipsed Cats but changed the path of my life – and the fortunes of the vast battalion of theatre-owners and producers, City financiers, shysters, lawyers and executives who have profited handsomely out of The Phantom Of The Opera. Quite simply, I fell in love with a member of the cast of Cats.
Some friends counselled that I was an incurable romantic who poured affairs of the heart in double measures. Almost everyone was appalled by what I did next – publicly confirming that, after nearly 12 years of marriage, I was leaving my wife and my children, then aged five and three.
This is one of the parts of my life that I have been dreading writing about the most. What you are reading is the umpteenth rewrite. That is the best I can say.
I had met my first wife, Sarah Hugill, at a party thrown by a friend in Christ Church, Oxford – I was only 21 and she was even younger, a slip of a 16-year-old schoolgirl.
Sarah’s father Tony had individually won the Croix de Guerre for bluffing a German commander into surrendering an entire French village. He had served in the 30 Assault Unit set up by James Bond author Ian Fleming. Tony wasn’t over-keen on Fleming. Nonetheless he gets a big name-check in Casino Royale and is supposed to be one of the role models for James Bond himself.
Falling in love with Sarah didn’t take long. I asked her to dinner at a bistro. I thought she was ordering ludicrously small, simple things. She didn’t know whether she was supposed to pay her share of the bill. That did it. I had to see her again.
I had bought an Earls Court flat and – just a few hundred yards from Sarah’s school – it came in very handy. Since she was supposed to be revising for her summer exams, she had loads of free time, and most days she would clock into school and promptly come round to me. Fairly soon I gave her a spare key. There are worse things when you’re 21 than a pretty schoolgirl waking you up in the morning.
Come March, it was time to meet her parents. Thanks to the manners Auntie Vi drilled into me, I got on well with my elders and Tony and Fanny Hugill were no exception.
Love may well change everything but in my case it had me writing fast and even more furiously. Superstar’s structure was advanced enough for me to break the score down into record sides. I proposed to Sarah in late 1970, which was a stupid formality; we had long presumed we would get hitched as soon as she legally could.
I had the cash to buy a smart BMW 2002 so, as an unofficial engagement present to Sarah, I gave her my old Mini, which she promptly drove into the back of a lorry on Earls Court Road.
Our wedding service was simple and beautiful. Despite the fact I managed to spill champagne all over her wedding dress, Sarah glowed with incandescent triumph. We were insanely in love, and we drove away from the reception to great cheers from the guests. It was only halfway to our honeymoon hotel that I noticed Sarah was crying. I pulled the car over and took her in my arms as the reality of what I had done hit me. I had taken a girl aged barely 18, straight out of school, and propelled her away from her family into a new life that happened to include being the wife of the composer of the first British musical to premiere on Broadway – a debut that was now just weeks away.
Sarah had never even been to America. All I could think of to say was how much I loved her. For the first time in my life I felt responsible for something whose outcome I could not control. Despite this, the first years of marriage were joyful. Sarah proved a supermum to the two children we had together, allowing me to grasp every career opportunity thrown at me. Unfortunately it wasn’t the only opportunity I grasped. Whatever else money can’t buy, it can buy you freedom and with freedom comes the chance to play. By 1981 and aged 33 I found myself feted for the smash-hit musical Cats – which happened to feature some of the most attractive girls in London.
I loved having fun with our gorgeous-looking singers, but it wasn’t with them that I strayed. During the summer I began an affair with a girl who was teaching at, of all places, Westminster School. She was a distinct improvement on the master who had taken a shine to me years ago. I wasn’t in love and I truly hope she wasn’t with me.
It never crossed my mind that I would leave Sarah, but she found out about it and I was devastated, not so much for myself, as for what I had done.
Looking back, I suppose it was inevitable that I was going to have a serious affair at some point.
Sarah and I were so young when we married and, with all that was happening, it was as if I was going through my adolescence in my early 30s.
It was choreographer Arlene Phillips who, four years earlier, prophesied that Sarah Brightman would have an impact my life. Arlene – who also directed the dance troupe Hot Gossip – had eyeballed me and said: ‘There’s a girl in Hot Gossip who’s going to change your life. She has a voice from heaven. Her name is Sarah Brightman.’
Sarah was cast in Cats yet it was almost four years before I realised just how incredible her singing was when I went to see a children’s opera she was starring in.
I was poleaxed by a captivating soprano voice and magnetic stage presence, gifts that would see her cast as the star of Phantom Of The Opera just a few years later.
Afterwards, I aimed for her dressing room, which she was sharing with both a hamster she was looking after for some sibling or other and with Mike Moran, a sought-after keyboard player. They were clearly an item and were going back into town to the Zanzibar club. Sarah suggested I joined them – and I did, a split-second decision that changed my life.
At the Zanzibar I discovered that Sarah’s real ambition was not to dance but sing. She told me she was married to the son of an eminent brain surgeon. However, marriage hadn’t stopped her having an affair with one of the Cats keyboard players. Sarah was fondling Mike’s hand; clearly she liked keyboard players with flying digits.
Our relationship was sealed on a brief trip together to northern Italy, where Cupid beckoned on an autostrada in the sheeting rain. We were driving from Milan to the coast at Portofino and I planned to stop off for a decent lunch en route. But the rain was so gruesome that the autostrada was virtually closed and there was nothing for it but to stop in a motorway cafe for congealed chicken cacciatore. It would be 4pm before we left, but neither of us noticed time pass. We talked and talked about music, and about each other. Her father Gren was a property developer. Her family was not rich but well off enough that she and her two younger brothers and three sisters were educated privately.
Sarah’s mum Paula had been a dancer who once graced the stage (properly clothed, I stress) of Murray’s Club, today remembered as the Soho haunt where Stephen Ward met Christine Keeler. Apparently she kept baby Sarah in a carrycot backstage. By the time we got to Portofino, I knew there was no alternative: I was in love. We stayed at the empty Splendido Hotel, where Sarah wore a white miniskirt that elicited whistles from windows of houses that I swore were uninhabited. I was a little embarrassed but I loved talking music and I loved the looks I got from the waiters in our deserted hotel. And of course I loved the sex.
By the time we left, I had proposed. Well, in truth it wasn’t so much a proposal as a ‘we’re in love, we’re both married, what the f*** do we do about it?’ We decided Sarah would meet my mother, I would meet her parents and if we survived that test I would break the news to my wife. I don’t think my mother was surprised. Ever the bohemian, I suspect she thought homespun family life had overtaken me too young and that a bit of turmoil would do me good. Most importantly, Sarah liked cats which meant she had to be all right. Sarah B’s parents were a bit nonplussed but I guess resigned to the fact that their eldest daughter might get up to anything.
It took two false starts before I told my wife I was leaving her. If someone can be both devastated yet resigned, that’s what she was. There were moments when I wavered. My wife even suggested she turned a blind eye and let me lead a double life to keep the marriage intact. But I couldn’t lead my life like that. I’m not the sort of person who can duck and dive. Besides, I was head over heels in love with Sarah B, as my friends now called her.
I decided against everyone’s advice to come clean publicly, openly taking Sarah B to the post-opening party of Daisy Pulls It Off – a play I’d seen, bought and revamped that ran for 1,180 performances, toured for two years and is still staged all over Britain – and letting a press statement hit the fan.
Sarah 1 (as my ex became known) stayed with the children at our home in Sydmonton, Hampshire, while Sarah B moved into the flat in London. A good divorce lawyer should be firm but sympathetic. Mine turned out to be a right pig. But by mid-March 1984, our respective divorces were finalised and on March 22, my 36th birthday, Sarah and I quietly married at the register office in Kingsclere, the village next to Sydmonton.
Our plan was to get through the first night of Starlight Express a week later and then break the news.
There was a particular reason for keeping schtum. That night the Queen, Prince Philip, Prince Charles and Princess Diana were all coming to a charity gala of Starlight Express in aid of the Centre for World Development Education. To have both the Queen and the heir to the throne come to the theatre was virtually unprecedented, and we didn’t want anything to overshadow that.
Over the coming years, our careers continued to thrive but our marriage was not without its problems, and it was while it was going through a rocky patch that friends introduced me to Madeleine Gurdon. Madeleine is the daughter of an Army brigadier and was coming to the end of a career as a professional equestrian when I met her. She had – still has – a mind like a razor, and I adored spending time with her. There had been publicity about Sarah’s affair with the original Phantom keyboard player, and hugely fond of her as I still am, things weren’t the same for me after that. Sarah was shattered when I said I was leaving her but we continued to work together.
As for Madeleine, she and I have been married now for 27 years and counting. She has stood by me like a rock through some grisly career moments and four missing years thanks to health problems that took me to a pretty dark place. It is no secret that most people assumed I would not compose again. Then I turned the corner. I decided to give up alcohol and went back to my roots with a new work, School Of Rock, based on the Jack Black/Mike White movie. It is the first of my musicals to premiere on Broadway since Jesus Christ Superstar.
As I approach my 70th birthday, I look back and think again how lucky I have been. You are very lucky if you know what you want to do in life. I am doubly lucky that I not only have made a living out of my passion but a hugely rewarding one.
As I write this, I haven’t found a subject for a new show. But I’ll find it. I have to get back to workshops and rewrites, out-of-tune rehearsal pianos and sweaty rehearsal rooms, dodgy previews and the blind panic of opening nights.
I am having dire withdrawal symptoms. Even if I haven’t got near to writing Some Enchanted Evening, I hope I’ve given a few people some reasonably OK ones. I’d like to give them some more.
Unmasked is published by HarperCollins on March 8 at £20. Offer price £16 until March 25. Pre-order at mailshop.co.uk/books or call 0844 571 0640; p&p is free on orders over £15.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5431243/Andrew-Lloyd-Webber-Aspects-Love.html
PUBLISHED: 09:46 AEDT, 25 February 2018 | UPDATED: 12:26 AEDT, 25 February 2018
Last week, Britain’s most famous composer recounted his dazzling rise to the musical stratosphere and, in moving detail, the dark moments which pulled him to the brink of suicide. Today, in the second and final extract of a gripping autobiography, he reveals his heartfelt regret at leaving his young family – and recounts the explosive romance with stage star Sarah Brightman which changed his world for ever.
The 1980s had dawned, Cats was on its way to becoming the kind of global hit you can only dream of. Yet what happened next in my private life would lead to a musical that not only eclipsed Cats but changed the path of my life – and the fortunes of the vast battalion of theatre-owners and producers, City financiers, shysters, lawyers and executives who have profited handsomely out of The Phantom Of The Opera. Quite simply, I fell in love with a member of the cast of Cats.
Some friends counselled that I was an incurable romantic who poured affairs of the heart in double measures. Almost everyone was appalled by what I did next – publicly confirming that, after nearly 12 years of marriage, I was leaving my wife and my children, then aged five and three.
This is one of the parts of my life that I have been dreading writing about the most. What you are reading is the umpteenth rewrite. That is the best I can say.
I had met my first wife, Sarah Hugill, at a party thrown by a friend in Christ Church, Oxford – I was only 21 and she was even younger, a slip of a 16-year-old schoolgirl.
Sarah’s father Tony had individually won the Croix de Guerre for bluffing a German commander into surrendering an entire French village. He had served in the 30 Assault Unit set up by James Bond author Ian Fleming. Tony wasn’t over-keen on Fleming. Nonetheless he gets a big name-check in Casino Royale and is supposed to be one of the role models for James Bond himself.
Falling in love with Sarah didn’t take long. I asked her to dinner at a bistro. I thought she was ordering ludicrously small, simple things. She didn’t know whether she was supposed to pay her share of the bill. That did it. I had to see her again.
I had bought an Earls Court flat and – just a few hundred yards from Sarah’s school – it came in very handy. Since she was supposed to be revising for her summer exams, she had loads of free time, and most days she would clock into school and promptly come round to me. Fairly soon I gave her a spare key. There are worse things when you’re 21 than a pretty schoolgirl waking you up in the morning.
Come March, it was time to meet her parents. Thanks to the manners Auntie Vi drilled into me, I got on well with my elders and Tony and Fanny Hugill were no exception.
Love may well change everything but in my case it had me writing fast and even more furiously. Superstar’s structure was advanced enough for me to break the score down into record sides. I proposed to Sarah in late 1970, which was a stupid formality; we had long presumed we would get hitched as soon as she legally could.
I had the cash to buy a smart BMW 2002 so, as an unofficial engagement present to Sarah, I gave her my old Mini, which she promptly drove into the back of a lorry on Earls Court Road.
Our wedding service was simple and beautiful. Despite the fact I managed to spill champagne all over her wedding dress, Sarah glowed with incandescent triumph. We were insanely in love, and we drove away from the reception to great cheers from the guests. It was only halfway to our honeymoon hotel that I noticed Sarah was crying. I pulled the car over and took her in my arms as the reality of what I had done hit me. I had taken a girl aged barely 18, straight out of school, and propelled her away from her family into a new life that happened to include being the wife of the composer of the first British musical to premiere on Broadway – a debut that was now just weeks away.
Sarah had never even been to America. All I could think of to say was how much I loved her. For the first time in my life I felt responsible for something whose outcome I could not control. Despite this, the first years of marriage were joyful. Sarah proved a supermum to the two children we had together, allowing me to grasp every career opportunity thrown at me. Unfortunately it wasn’t the only opportunity I grasped. Whatever else money can’t buy, it can buy you freedom and with freedom comes the chance to play. By 1981 and aged 33 I found myself feted for the smash-hit musical Cats – which happened to feature some of the most attractive girls in London.
I loved having fun with our gorgeous-looking singers, but it wasn’t with them that I strayed. During the summer I began an affair with a girl who was teaching at, of all places, Westminster School. She was a distinct improvement on the master who had taken a shine to me years ago. I wasn’t in love and I truly hope she wasn’t with me.
It never crossed my mind that I would leave Sarah, but she found out about it and I was devastated, not so much for myself, as for what I had done.
Looking back, I suppose it was inevitable that I was going to have a serious affair at some point.
Sarah and I were so young when we married and, with all that was happening, it was as if I was going through my adolescence in my early 30s.
It was choreographer Arlene Phillips who, four years earlier, prophesied that Sarah Brightman would have an impact my life. Arlene – who also directed the dance troupe Hot Gossip – had eyeballed me and said: ‘There’s a girl in Hot Gossip who’s going to change your life. She has a voice from heaven. Her name is Sarah Brightman.’
Sarah was cast in Cats yet it was almost four years before I realised just how incredible her singing was when I went to see a children’s opera she was starring in.
I was poleaxed by a captivating soprano voice and magnetic stage presence, gifts that would see her cast as the star of Phantom Of The Opera just a few years later.
Afterwards, I aimed for her dressing room, which she was sharing with both a hamster she was looking after for some sibling or other and with Mike Moran, a sought-after keyboard player. They were clearly an item and were going back into town to the Zanzibar club. Sarah suggested I joined them – and I did, a split-second decision that changed my life.
At the Zanzibar I discovered that Sarah’s real ambition was not to dance but sing. She told me she was married to the son of an eminent brain surgeon. However, marriage hadn’t stopped her having an affair with one of the Cats keyboard players. Sarah was fondling Mike’s hand; clearly she liked keyboard players with flying digits.
Our relationship was sealed on a brief trip together to northern Italy, where Cupid beckoned on an autostrada in the sheeting rain. We were driving from Milan to the coast at Portofino and I planned to stop off for a decent lunch en route. But the rain was so gruesome that the autostrada was virtually closed and there was nothing for it but to stop in a motorway cafe for congealed chicken cacciatore. It would be 4pm before we left, but neither of us noticed time pass. We talked and talked about music, and about each other. Her father Gren was a property developer. Her family was not rich but well off enough that she and her two younger brothers and three sisters were educated privately.
Sarah’s mum Paula had been a dancer who once graced the stage (properly clothed, I stress) of Murray’s Club, today remembered as the Soho haunt where Stephen Ward met Christine Keeler. Apparently she kept baby Sarah in a carrycot backstage. By the time we got to Portofino, I knew there was no alternative: I was in love. We stayed at the empty Splendido Hotel, where Sarah wore a white miniskirt that elicited whistles from windows of houses that I swore were uninhabited. I was a little embarrassed but I loved talking music and I loved the looks I got from the waiters in our deserted hotel. And of course I loved the sex.
By the time we left, I had proposed. Well, in truth it wasn’t so much a proposal as a ‘we’re in love, we’re both married, what the f*** do we do about it?’ We decided Sarah would meet my mother, I would meet her parents and if we survived that test I would break the news to my wife. I don’t think my mother was surprised. Ever the bohemian, I suspect she thought homespun family life had overtaken me too young and that a bit of turmoil would do me good. Most importantly, Sarah liked cats which meant she had to be all right. Sarah B’s parents were a bit nonplussed but I guess resigned to the fact that their eldest daughter might get up to anything.
It took two false starts before I told my wife I was leaving her. If someone can be both devastated yet resigned, that’s what she was. There were moments when I wavered. My wife even suggested she turned a blind eye and let me lead a double life to keep the marriage intact. But I couldn’t lead my life like that. I’m not the sort of person who can duck and dive. Besides, I was head over heels in love with Sarah B, as my friends now called her.
I decided against everyone’s advice to come clean publicly, openly taking Sarah B to the post-opening party of Daisy Pulls It Off – a play I’d seen, bought and revamped that ran for 1,180 performances, toured for two years and is still staged all over Britain – and letting a press statement hit the fan.
Sarah 1 (as my ex became known) stayed with the children at our home in Sydmonton, Hampshire, while Sarah B moved into the flat in London. A good divorce lawyer should be firm but sympathetic. Mine turned out to be a right pig. But by mid-March 1984, our respective divorces were finalised and on March 22, my 36th birthday, Sarah and I quietly married at the register office in Kingsclere, the village next to Sydmonton.
Our plan was to get through the first night of Starlight Express a week later and then break the news.
There was a particular reason for keeping schtum. That night the Queen, Prince Philip, Prince Charles and Princess Diana were all coming to a charity gala of Starlight Express in aid of the Centre for World Development Education. To have both the Queen and the heir to the throne come to the theatre was virtually unprecedented, and we didn’t want anything to overshadow that.
Over the coming years, our careers continued to thrive but our marriage was not without its problems, and it was while it was going through a rocky patch that friends introduced me to Madeleine Gurdon. Madeleine is the daughter of an Army brigadier and was coming to the end of a career as a professional equestrian when I met her. She had – still has – a mind like a razor, and I adored spending time with her. There had been publicity about Sarah’s affair with the original Phantom keyboard player, and hugely fond of her as I still am, things weren’t the same for me after that. Sarah was shattered when I said I was leaving her but we continued to work together.
As for Madeleine, she and I have been married now for 27 years and counting. She has stood by me like a rock through some grisly career moments and four missing years thanks to health problems that took me to a pretty dark place. It is no secret that most people assumed I would not compose again. Then I turned the corner. I decided to give up alcohol and went back to my roots with a new work, School Of Rock, based on the Jack Black/Mike White movie. It is the first of my musicals to premiere on Broadway since Jesus Christ Superstar.
As I approach my 70th birthday, I look back and think again how lucky I have been. You are very lucky if you know what you want to do in life. I am doubly lucky that I not only have made a living out of my passion but a hugely rewarding one.
As I write this, I haven’t found a subject for a new show. But I’ll find it. I have to get back to workshops and rewrites, out-of-tune rehearsal pianos and sweaty rehearsal rooms, dodgy previews and the blind panic of opening nights.
I am having dire withdrawal symptoms. Even if I haven’t got near to writing Some Enchanted Evening, I hope I’ve given a few people some reasonably OK ones. I’d like to give them some more.
Unmasked is published by HarperCollins on March 8 at £20. Offer price £16 until March 25. Pre-order at mailshop.co.uk/books or call 0844 571 0640; p&p is free on orders over £15.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5431243/Andrew-Lloyd-Webber-Aspects-Love.html
The day I went to take my own life: Andrew Lloyd Webber reveals how he twice planned to kill himself as a boy and says his wife saved him from more recent suicidal thoughts
By Geordie Greig, Editor Of The Mail On Sunday
PUBLISHED: 09:15 AEDT, 18 February 2018 | UPDATED: 11:05 AEDT, 18 February 2018
Andrew Lloyd Webber knows a thing or two about theatrical surprises but when Frankie Howerd gave him a lovebite he was caught completely unawares. ‘It did rather take my breath away,’ he says, sitting quietly in the foyer cafe of one of his London theatres.
The Grand Old Man of Musical Theatre nonchalantly delivers this first extraordinary revelation while discussing his memoir, Unmasked, which he insists he never really wanted to write. ‘I didn’t want to hurt anybody, but I wanted to be truthful. I particularly didn’t want to write anything that was dissing people, but wanted it to be relatively amusing.’
Well, his encounter with the former Carry On star more than ticks those boxes: ‘Frankie just lunged, bit me on my neck and said, “Take that home to your wife.” ’
For almost 50 years he has kept secret this #MeToo moment.
‘I was 23 and Jesus Christ Superstar was about to happen in London and I didn’t want to be remembered then as the man who complained about Frankie Howerd. So I said nothing. In the end I just thought he was a sad old man.’
On the cusp of turning 70, Lloyd Webber could not be more cheerful or optimistic as he relays this startling encounter. But he also reveals darker moments in his past: he has contemplated killing himself at least three times, most recently just three years ago.
Crippling health difficulties – prostate cancer followed by agonising back pain – took him to the very edge of endurance. ‘It was absolute agony and utterly despairing,’ he recalls. ‘I did think of suicide. It was so painful and I couldn’t sleep and you go on thinking about it.
‘You have all those ridiculous painkillers and none of them working and you just think, “I shall take the whole lot of them.” ’
It was a bleak temptation he had not experienced since his troubled teenage years.
As a very young boy at Westminster junior school, and uncertain of his place in the world, he had feared that he might never succeed as a songwriter. ‘I got quite depressed; it’s something that possibly affects artists. It was one of those moments where I thought everything had got on top of me. These things are illogical,’ he recalls.
He stole Veganin painkiller tablets from his parents’ bathroom cupboard, withdrew all £7 of his Post Office savings and bought aspirin from two different chemists, plus a bottle of Lucozade, and set off for what he planned to be a terminal journey on the London Underground.
‘I felt very alone at the time. It was pretty much at the end of the line, quite literally because I went to the end of the Central Line, but then took a bus to Lavenham,’ he says.
Miraculously, when he got out at Lavenham station, he was overawed by the beauty of the Suffolk market town (architecture remains a passion) and wandered around dazzled. ‘It sorted me out and I simply got on the train back. It was probably all started by the combination of not really feeling happy at home, wanting to get away from school … all that sort of thing,’ he said.
His second suicidal episode was in the 1960s when he failed the basic army test in the school corps and was accused of ‘sowing seeds of mutiny’. His troop commander punished him by stopping him going to a breakthrough appointment to have a song recorded, and Lloyd Webber plunged into despair again. This time he took an overdose of aspirin. ‘I woke to find a doctor’s face pressed close to mine, demanding what the hell I was doing frightening my parents like this.’
Such melancholic moments seem at odds with the most successful composer alive, whose success has brought him a string of West End theatres, the finest pre-Raphaelite collection in Britain, a glorious estate on the Hampshire/Berkshire border, and a back catalogue of songs to which the whole world taps their feet. On the whole, like his memoir, Lloyd Webber talks in fast, open bursts. Unmasked records a colourful London childhood with his bohemian family, most notably his ‘fabulously un-PC’ Auntie Vi, to whom the book is dedicated. An actress and a cook, she wrote the first gay recipe book – one chapter headed ‘Too many c*cks spoil the breath’.
She was a friend of Tony Hancock, who Andrew met while the comedian was trying to teach his parrot to say “F*** Mrs Warren” to the cleaner he despised. ‘A perfect introduction to the theatre really,’ he suggests.
The journey to stardom is lightly told – writing the main Superstar song on the back of a napkin after sharing his parents’ home with a monkey called Mimi (who hated him). He also partly credits the genesis of Cats to his ‘walking South Kensington with a Siamese cat called Perseus on a lead’.
He even takes some of the blame for being persecuted at school. ‘Considering I was smaller than the other boys, useless at sport, still played classical music and was the school swot, it’s not surprising I was bullied.’ He hints, too, at a relationship with his headmaster that would raise more than a few eyebrows in our hyper-aware age, and not only because it began over a shared bottle of claret, though that was deemed unusual even at that time. ‘I valued my time with him, even if it did sometimes mean sitting very close to him on his sofa.’
Indeed he credits another inappropriate incident – this time with a stranger on the Underground – with kick-starting his entire musical career. ‘On the morning in question a saddo tried to fondle me undercover of the tight standing crush on the Underground train.
‘I was too shocked to make a fuss. But I was furious, so furious that it gave me an idea that may be was big enough to call an epiphany.’ His reaction was to charge into the school and play six short piano pieces teasingly dedicated to the masters, causing amusement and uproar among the boys.
‘I was no longer the little school swot. I was Andrew, and I had become Andrew through music.’
The book describes the genesis of many of his best-loved works – Jesus Christ Superstar, Cats, Evita, Starlight Express – but this first volume stops after Phantom in 1986. Lucky for some, he thinks: ‘So the dodgy art dealers who tried to screw me can sleep peacefully.’
He remains ambivalent about his memoir and its repercussions. ‘I always want to do new work and not look back.’ But it was a cathartic process, none the less.
‘I kept asking questions of myself and I’ve never really done that before.’ That includes discussing the creative tension with his collaborator Tim Rice, who he teases for his unstoppable wandering eye for girls. ‘There have been quite a lot in his life and a few children as well, not that I can say that I haven’t any!’ (He has five children and has had three wives).
They met when Lloyd Webber was at school, with Rice being five years older. Just as Paul McCartney wanted his name before John Lennon so, we learn, did Rice with Lloyd Webber. ‘The fact is Lloyd Webber and Rice is easier to say than Rice and Lloyd Webber. Just as Sullivan and Gilbert would have sounded awful!’
And their tensions? ‘I think he will say that I was a nagging perfectionist and worried too much about the sound – a worrier by nature – and Tim was sometimes too much of an easy-going guy. He wouldn’t know what I was worrying about.’
Such perfectionism could lead to pique, and the composer is frank about his temper and tirades. ‘I’ve learnt to tame it now, but I always used to get very concerned in those days that theatre sound was terrible and orchestral playing wasn’t as good as it is now. When I started out there was some pretty ropey playing and pretty second-division players. I’d scream and say, “Look, we’ve got to make this better.” ’
But that was all then. Now, he is something of a changed man. For a start he has become teetotal and sold off an astonishing wine cellar.
He realised he was drinking too much and, four years ago, stopped completely. He shed two stone and now feels ‘101 per cent better, firing on all cylinders. The funny thing is that wine now tastes toxic like acid to me. I can’t touch it.’ The bags under his eyes disappeared and he embraced a new fitness regime, swimming almost daily.
His cancer scare was undoubtedly a traumatic experience that has made him a fervent advocate for all men to have prostate checks – one saved his life.
Almost as a joke he had kept an old set of blood tests, as he was amused that his liver was shown to be perfect even though he was then a heavy drinker. ‘I kept it by my bed with the intention of framing it and giving it to Madeleine [his third wife] for her birthday!
‘I had another blood test and I was flicking through to make sure everything’s normal and I looked at the prostate measurement and noticed that in eight months it had gone up staggeringly – like from two point something to six point six. It was 300 per cent up. I had a biopsy and it was cancerous. It was all a close thing as it was very virulent. They advised me to get it whipped out as soon as possible.’
The operation literally saved his life as the cancer had not yet burst beyond the prostate. ‘Prove the wretched cancer has not moved out of that prescribed area and then it is eminently solvable.’
It was just as he had turned a corner that he endured the appalling back pain which prompted those suicidal thoughts to return.
He believes that a chiropractor had stuck a needle in his side which nicked a vein that gave him sciatic symptoms. He had an operation on his back which he did not feel he had needed and his back prolapsed.
‘Then I ran into this extraordinary osteopath and he said I’m 99 per cent certain that I can get you back to 95 per cent and within three months he did,’ he says. ‘Very much thanks to Madeleine discovering what the cause of the whole thing was, it was sorted. She is absolutely a rock to everything in my life, and now hugely involved with the business.’
He is honest enough to admit he hasn’t always been a good or faithful husband. Andrew deals head-on with leaving his first wife, Sarah, with whom he had fallen in love when she was 17, marrying her when she was 18.
With success and money came temptation. An affair with a female teacher at his old school ‘was a distinct improvement on the master who had taken a shine to me’ but left him ‘devastated’ with guilt.
Not so devastated that he didn’t begin a subsequent affair with the soprano Sarah Brightman. Their relationship, he reveals, was sealed on a trip to Italy.
‘I loved the vicarious thrill I got from the waiters in our deserted hotel and of course I loved the sex,’ he writes candidly. In a bid to keep the marriage going, his wife even offered to turn a blind eye to the infidelity, but it was not to be. ‘I’m not the sort of person who can duck and dive,’ explains Lloyd Webber. ‘Besides, I was head over heels in love’.
It was the passages about his relationship with his first wife, Sarah, that he found hardest to write about. ‘There were several moments when I wondered whether to go on with this book and dealing with Sarah was one of them because I didn’t want to do anything that hurt her.’
As for Brightman, he is still misty-eyed about her voice. ‘There is something wonderfully fragile about it. Actually it’s very robust and an unusual musical instrument.
‘I find there are certain things of mine that she’s sung that nobody has done any better. Like a lot of performers she is really a gypsy, she likes going from place to place. I don’t think she wants to settle down. She is a slightly restless soul who is possibly always looking for something else to try.’
Certainly, their marriage was not without its well-publicised complications – including Brightman’s affair with a keyboard player. ‘We both realised as we became older that our life together would have been very difficult; she never could have coped with the kind of life that really began with Cats. She would say that now to anybody.’
In the end, though, it was Lloyd Webber who brought his second marriage to a close, having fallen in love with Madeleine Gurdon, a professional horsewoman.
‘A friend brought her round to Sydmonton [his country estate] which is how we met. I was asked to a huge amount of dinners and used to take Madeleine with me.
‘People started asking, “Who is this girl?” and I grew keener on her and she with me.’
She has been his wife for the past 27 years, bringing him a fulfilment he had almost forgotten existed.
‘When I met Madeleine it was almost like getting my life back; a door has been unlocked back into a world that I’d perhaps missed in the previous years – people outside the theatre. There is a world outside the Tony Awards and I think that’s what Madeleine brings to me.’
His life is blessed and he says he knows it. But if he had not hit the musical jackpot in the theatre? ‘I don’t think I would even have been number four in the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra because I don’t think I would have been good enough to get there.
‘I would be more likely playing in some bar somewhere.’
Unmasked by Andrew Lloyd Webber is published by HarperCollins on March 8 priced at £20. Offer price £16 (20 per cent discount) until March 25. Pre-order at www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 0844 571 0640, p&p is free on orders over £15.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5404041/Andrew-Lloyd-Webber-reveals-planned-kill-himself.html
PUBLISHED: 09:15 AEDT, 18 February 2018 | UPDATED: 11:05 AEDT, 18 February 2018
Andrew Lloyd Webber knows a thing or two about theatrical surprises but when Frankie Howerd gave him a lovebite he was caught completely unawares. ‘It did rather take my breath away,’ he says, sitting quietly in the foyer cafe of one of his London theatres.
The Grand Old Man of Musical Theatre nonchalantly delivers this first extraordinary revelation while discussing his memoir, Unmasked, which he insists he never really wanted to write. ‘I didn’t want to hurt anybody, but I wanted to be truthful. I particularly didn’t want to write anything that was dissing people, but wanted it to be relatively amusing.’
Well, his encounter with the former Carry On star more than ticks those boxes: ‘Frankie just lunged, bit me on my neck and said, “Take that home to your wife.” ’
For almost 50 years he has kept secret this #MeToo moment.
‘I was 23 and Jesus Christ Superstar was about to happen in London and I didn’t want to be remembered then as the man who complained about Frankie Howerd. So I said nothing. In the end I just thought he was a sad old man.’
On the cusp of turning 70, Lloyd Webber could not be more cheerful or optimistic as he relays this startling encounter. But he also reveals darker moments in his past: he has contemplated killing himself at least three times, most recently just three years ago.
Crippling health difficulties – prostate cancer followed by agonising back pain – took him to the very edge of endurance. ‘It was absolute agony and utterly despairing,’ he recalls. ‘I did think of suicide. It was so painful and I couldn’t sleep and you go on thinking about it.
‘You have all those ridiculous painkillers and none of them working and you just think, “I shall take the whole lot of them.” ’
It was a bleak temptation he had not experienced since his troubled teenage years.
As a very young boy at Westminster junior school, and uncertain of his place in the world, he had feared that he might never succeed as a songwriter. ‘I got quite depressed; it’s something that possibly affects artists. It was one of those moments where I thought everything had got on top of me. These things are illogical,’ he recalls.
He stole Veganin painkiller tablets from his parents’ bathroom cupboard, withdrew all £7 of his Post Office savings and bought aspirin from two different chemists, plus a bottle of Lucozade, and set off for what he planned to be a terminal journey on the London Underground.
‘I felt very alone at the time. It was pretty much at the end of the line, quite literally because I went to the end of the Central Line, but then took a bus to Lavenham,’ he says.
Miraculously, when he got out at Lavenham station, he was overawed by the beauty of the Suffolk market town (architecture remains a passion) and wandered around dazzled. ‘It sorted me out and I simply got on the train back. It was probably all started by the combination of not really feeling happy at home, wanting to get away from school … all that sort of thing,’ he said.
His second suicidal episode was in the 1960s when he failed the basic army test in the school corps and was accused of ‘sowing seeds of mutiny’. His troop commander punished him by stopping him going to a breakthrough appointment to have a song recorded, and Lloyd Webber plunged into despair again. This time he took an overdose of aspirin. ‘I woke to find a doctor’s face pressed close to mine, demanding what the hell I was doing frightening my parents like this.’
Such melancholic moments seem at odds with the most successful composer alive, whose success has brought him a string of West End theatres, the finest pre-Raphaelite collection in Britain, a glorious estate on the Hampshire/Berkshire border, and a back catalogue of songs to which the whole world taps their feet. On the whole, like his memoir, Lloyd Webber talks in fast, open bursts. Unmasked records a colourful London childhood with his bohemian family, most notably his ‘fabulously un-PC’ Auntie Vi, to whom the book is dedicated. An actress and a cook, she wrote the first gay recipe book – one chapter headed ‘Too many c*cks spoil the breath’.
She was a friend of Tony Hancock, who Andrew met while the comedian was trying to teach his parrot to say “F*** Mrs Warren” to the cleaner he despised. ‘A perfect introduction to the theatre really,’ he suggests.
The journey to stardom is lightly told – writing the main Superstar song on the back of a napkin after sharing his parents’ home with a monkey called Mimi (who hated him). He also partly credits the genesis of Cats to his ‘walking South Kensington with a Siamese cat called Perseus on a lead’.
He even takes some of the blame for being persecuted at school. ‘Considering I was smaller than the other boys, useless at sport, still played classical music and was the school swot, it’s not surprising I was bullied.’ He hints, too, at a relationship with his headmaster that would raise more than a few eyebrows in our hyper-aware age, and not only because it began over a shared bottle of claret, though that was deemed unusual even at that time. ‘I valued my time with him, even if it did sometimes mean sitting very close to him on his sofa.’
Indeed he credits another inappropriate incident – this time with a stranger on the Underground – with kick-starting his entire musical career. ‘On the morning in question a saddo tried to fondle me undercover of the tight standing crush on the Underground train.
‘I was too shocked to make a fuss. But I was furious, so furious that it gave me an idea that may be was big enough to call an epiphany.’ His reaction was to charge into the school and play six short piano pieces teasingly dedicated to the masters, causing amusement and uproar among the boys.
‘I was no longer the little school swot. I was Andrew, and I had become Andrew through music.’
The book describes the genesis of many of his best-loved works – Jesus Christ Superstar, Cats, Evita, Starlight Express – but this first volume stops after Phantom in 1986. Lucky for some, he thinks: ‘So the dodgy art dealers who tried to screw me can sleep peacefully.’
He remains ambivalent about his memoir and its repercussions. ‘I always want to do new work and not look back.’ But it was a cathartic process, none the less.
‘I kept asking questions of myself and I’ve never really done that before.’ That includes discussing the creative tension with his collaborator Tim Rice, who he teases for his unstoppable wandering eye for girls. ‘There have been quite a lot in his life and a few children as well, not that I can say that I haven’t any!’ (He has five children and has had three wives).
They met when Lloyd Webber was at school, with Rice being five years older. Just as Paul McCartney wanted his name before John Lennon so, we learn, did Rice with Lloyd Webber. ‘The fact is Lloyd Webber and Rice is easier to say than Rice and Lloyd Webber. Just as Sullivan and Gilbert would have sounded awful!’
And their tensions? ‘I think he will say that I was a nagging perfectionist and worried too much about the sound – a worrier by nature – and Tim was sometimes too much of an easy-going guy. He wouldn’t know what I was worrying about.’
Such perfectionism could lead to pique, and the composer is frank about his temper and tirades. ‘I’ve learnt to tame it now, but I always used to get very concerned in those days that theatre sound was terrible and orchestral playing wasn’t as good as it is now. When I started out there was some pretty ropey playing and pretty second-division players. I’d scream and say, “Look, we’ve got to make this better.” ’
But that was all then. Now, he is something of a changed man. For a start he has become teetotal and sold off an astonishing wine cellar.
He realised he was drinking too much and, four years ago, stopped completely. He shed two stone and now feels ‘101 per cent better, firing on all cylinders. The funny thing is that wine now tastes toxic like acid to me. I can’t touch it.’ The bags under his eyes disappeared and he embraced a new fitness regime, swimming almost daily.
His cancer scare was undoubtedly a traumatic experience that has made him a fervent advocate for all men to have prostate checks – one saved his life.
Almost as a joke he had kept an old set of blood tests, as he was amused that his liver was shown to be perfect even though he was then a heavy drinker. ‘I kept it by my bed with the intention of framing it and giving it to Madeleine [his third wife] for her birthday!
‘I had another blood test and I was flicking through to make sure everything’s normal and I looked at the prostate measurement and noticed that in eight months it had gone up staggeringly – like from two point something to six point six. It was 300 per cent up. I had a biopsy and it was cancerous. It was all a close thing as it was very virulent. They advised me to get it whipped out as soon as possible.’
The operation literally saved his life as the cancer had not yet burst beyond the prostate. ‘Prove the wretched cancer has not moved out of that prescribed area and then it is eminently solvable.’
It was just as he had turned a corner that he endured the appalling back pain which prompted those suicidal thoughts to return.
He believes that a chiropractor had stuck a needle in his side which nicked a vein that gave him sciatic symptoms. He had an operation on his back which he did not feel he had needed and his back prolapsed.
‘Then I ran into this extraordinary osteopath and he said I’m 99 per cent certain that I can get you back to 95 per cent and within three months he did,’ he says. ‘Very much thanks to Madeleine discovering what the cause of the whole thing was, it was sorted. She is absolutely a rock to everything in my life, and now hugely involved with the business.’
He is honest enough to admit he hasn’t always been a good or faithful husband. Andrew deals head-on with leaving his first wife, Sarah, with whom he had fallen in love when she was 17, marrying her when she was 18.
With success and money came temptation. An affair with a female teacher at his old school ‘was a distinct improvement on the master who had taken a shine to me’ but left him ‘devastated’ with guilt.
Not so devastated that he didn’t begin a subsequent affair with the soprano Sarah Brightman. Their relationship, he reveals, was sealed on a trip to Italy.
‘I loved the vicarious thrill I got from the waiters in our deserted hotel and of course I loved the sex,’ he writes candidly. In a bid to keep the marriage going, his wife even offered to turn a blind eye to the infidelity, but it was not to be. ‘I’m not the sort of person who can duck and dive,’ explains Lloyd Webber. ‘Besides, I was head over heels in love’.
It was the passages about his relationship with his first wife, Sarah, that he found hardest to write about. ‘There were several moments when I wondered whether to go on with this book and dealing with Sarah was one of them because I didn’t want to do anything that hurt her.’
As for Brightman, he is still misty-eyed about her voice. ‘There is something wonderfully fragile about it. Actually it’s very robust and an unusual musical instrument.
‘I find there are certain things of mine that she’s sung that nobody has done any better. Like a lot of performers she is really a gypsy, she likes going from place to place. I don’t think she wants to settle down. She is a slightly restless soul who is possibly always looking for something else to try.’
Certainly, their marriage was not without its well-publicised complications – including Brightman’s affair with a keyboard player. ‘We both realised as we became older that our life together would have been very difficult; she never could have coped with the kind of life that really began with Cats. She would say that now to anybody.’
In the end, though, it was Lloyd Webber who brought his second marriage to a close, having fallen in love with Madeleine Gurdon, a professional horsewoman.
‘A friend brought her round to Sydmonton [his country estate] which is how we met. I was asked to a huge amount of dinners and used to take Madeleine with me.
‘People started asking, “Who is this girl?” and I grew keener on her and she with me.’
She has been his wife for the past 27 years, bringing him a fulfilment he had almost forgotten existed.
‘When I met Madeleine it was almost like getting my life back; a door has been unlocked back into a world that I’d perhaps missed in the previous years – people outside the theatre. There is a world outside the Tony Awards and I think that’s what Madeleine brings to me.’
His life is blessed and he says he knows it. But if he had not hit the musical jackpot in the theatre? ‘I don’t think I would even have been number four in the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra because I don’t think I would have been good enough to get there.
‘I would be more likely playing in some bar somewhere.’
Unmasked by Andrew Lloyd Webber is published by HarperCollins on March 8 priced at £20. Offer price £16 (20 per cent discount) until March 25. Pre-order at www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 0844 571 0640, p&p is free on orders over £15.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5404041/Andrew-Lloyd-Webber-reveals-planned-kill-himself.html
Monday, February 8, 2016
Robert Englund - Phantom of Manhattan
Okay. I know you’re dying to tell me. What was it about?
Well, the sequel took place in the buried train graveyards beneath the “Belle Époque” superstructure of the original subways that the sand hogs built many, many layers below the current subways of New York. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the urban legend of the “mole people”… You’ll see it occasionally on LAW AND ORDER or a NEW YORK CSI, but there are people that live beneath the warming grates and the subway vents of New York. There’s entire little societies down there. And in the sequel, they have me, the Phantom, having come from Europe and living down there, and composing down there in an old robber baron’s train car. And he’s served by all these homeless kids. Think “Fagin” in OLIVER TWIST. So, my children will go up and work this surface, and I would stay below, and occasionally foray into the Metropolitan Opera in Manhattan. And once, while I’m going up, I hear a voice in the subway. Where the street performer’s play on the subway platform, I hear this voice. And, here’s the hitch, it’s a blind girl. The new Christine is blind. She’s Italian. Her name is Christina. Her father, think Gepetto in PINOCHHIO, even though it’s contemporary, we make him a new Italian immigrant to Am erica, perhaps Siciliano, and he accompanies her on violin, which is echoes of Claude Rains. Her voice is the perfect instrument for the opera I’m working on. Plus she’s blind, she doesn’t know what I look like. She just hears my soothing voice. So I school her and coach her. Well, she still has to play on the subways to make ends meet. Her father is killed by skinheads. I avenge her father… There you go. There you get your splatter quotient there… And then, at a decadent opera party that uses the subway trains for an opening night gala, they pull her station and they hear her singing. They discover her. She’s brought into the professional world of opera, and so my opera will never be made. Also, concurrently, they discover a physician who can correct her sight with laser surgery, so now she can see again. So now the third act is, Will the Phantom kill her? Will he kill the surgeon who restored her sight? Will he thwart her debut at the New York City Opera? Or, as it turns out, you see me sitting there in my box seat, with my face sewn together, and I listen to her perform, and that’s enough for me. And the last image is me walking down 5th Avenue in the snow with my footprints trailing. And I lift a manhole cover and go back underneath.
Wow. Can I see that movie now, please?
Exactly! And that’s what attracted me to do the film! I had a contract for a two picture deal! And that was going to be the backside. That’s why the Phantom that we did ended contemporarily in New York. So that we could bridge that. And yeah, it was a great script. Better than the first one. Phenomenal script. It had violence and sex and all of this wonderful Chaplinesque quality with the blind girl and her father. Just unfortunate that we never got that made.
Such a shame.
Interview at the link: http://www.upcominghorrormovies.com/shock/c13.php
Well, the sequel took place in the buried train graveyards beneath the “Belle Époque” superstructure of the original subways that the sand hogs built many, many layers below the current subways of New York. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the urban legend of the “mole people”… You’ll see it occasionally on LAW AND ORDER or a NEW YORK CSI, but there are people that live beneath the warming grates and the subway vents of New York. There’s entire little societies down there. And in the sequel, they have me, the Phantom, having come from Europe and living down there, and composing down there in an old robber baron’s train car. And he’s served by all these homeless kids. Think “Fagin” in OLIVER TWIST. So, my children will go up and work this surface, and I would stay below, and occasionally foray into the Metropolitan Opera in Manhattan. And once, while I’m going up, I hear a voice in the subway. Where the street performer’s play on the subway platform, I hear this voice. And, here’s the hitch, it’s a blind girl. The new Christine is blind. She’s Italian. Her name is Christina. Her father, think Gepetto in PINOCHHIO, even though it’s contemporary, we make him a new Italian immigrant to Am erica, perhaps Siciliano, and he accompanies her on violin, which is echoes of Claude Rains. Her voice is the perfect instrument for the opera I’m working on. Plus she’s blind, she doesn’t know what I look like. She just hears my soothing voice. So I school her and coach her. Well, she still has to play on the subways to make ends meet. Her father is killed by skinheads. I avenge her father… There you go. There you get your splatter quotient there… And then, at a decadent opera party that uses the subway trains for an opening night gala, they pull her station and they hear her singing. They discover her. She’s brought into the professional world of opera, and so my opera will never be made. Also, concurrently, they discover a physician who can correct her sight with laser surgery, so now she can see again. So now the third act is, Will the Phantom kill her? Will he kill the surgeon who restored her sight? Will he thwart her debut at the New York City Opera? Or, as it turns out, you see me sitting there in my box seat, with my face sewn together, and I listen to her perform, and that’s enough for me. And the last image is me walking down 5th Avenue in the snow with my footprints trailing. And I lift a manhole cover and go back underneath.
Wow. Can I see that movie now, please?
Exactly! And that’s what attracted me to do the film! I had a contract for a two picture deal! And that was going to be the backside. That’s why the Phantom that we did ended contemporarily in New York. So that we could bridge that. And yeah, it was a great script. Better than the first one. Phenomenal script. It had violence and sex and all of this wonderful Chaplinesque quality with the blind girl and her father. Just unfortunate that we never got that made.
Such a shame.
Interview at the link: http://www.upcominghorrormovies.com/shock/c13.php
Tuesday, February 2, 2016
Batman Triumphant
Proposals for fifth film
Batman Triumphant
During the filming of Batman & Robin, Warner Bros. was impressed with the dailies, prompting them to immediately hire Joel Schumacher to reprise his directing duties for a third film. Writer Akiva Goldsman, who worked on Batman Forever and Batman & Robin, turned down the chance to write the script.[36] In late 1996, Warner Bros. and Schumacher hired Mark Protosevich to write the script for a fifth Batman film. A projected mid-1999 release date was announced.[42] Titled Batman Triumphant, Protosevich's script had the Scarecrow as the main villain and the Joker would return as a hallucination in Batman's mind caused by the Scarecrow's fear toxin. Harley Quinn appeared as a supporting character, written as the Joker's daughter trying to kill Batman to avenge her father's death.[43] George Clooney, Chris O'Donnell and Alicia Silverstone were set to reprise the roles of Batman, Robin, and Batgirl.[44] Schumacher had also approached Nicolas Cage for the role of Scarecrow.[45] However, when Batman & Robin received negative reviews and failed to outgross any of its predecessors, Warner Bros. was unsure of their plans for Batman Triumphant. The studio decided it was best to consider a live-action Batman Beyond film and an adaptation of Frank Miller's Batman: Year One. Warner Bros. would then greenlight whichever idea suited them the most.[46] Schumacher felt he "owe[d] the Batman culture a real Batman movie. I would go back to the basics and make a dark portrayal of the Dark Knight."[47] He approached Warner Bros. to do Batman: Year One in mid-1998.[47]
Batman Triumphant
During the filming of Batman & Robin, Warner Bros. was impressed with the dailies, prompting them to immediately hire Joel Schumacher to reprise his directing duties for a third film. Writer Akiva Goldsman, who worked on Batman Forever and Batman & Robin, turned down the chance to write the script.[36] In late 1996, Warner Bros. and Schumacher hired Mark Protosevich to write the script for a fifth Batman film. A projected mid-1999 release date was announced.[42] Titled Batman Triumphant, Protosevich's script had the Scarecrow as the main villain and the Joker would return as a hallucination in Batman's mind caused by the Scarecrow's fear toxin. Harley Quinn appeared as a supporting character, written as the Joker's daughter trying to kill Batman to avenge her father's death.[43] George Clooney, Chris O'Donnell and Alicia Silverstone were set to reprise the roles of Batman, Robin, and Batgirl.[44] Schumacher had also approached Nicolas Cage for the role of Scarecrow.[45] However, when Batman & Robin received negative reviews and failed to outgross any of its predecessors, Warner Bros. was unsure of their plans for Batman Triumphant. The studio decided it was best to consider a live-action Batman Beyond film and an adaptation of Frank Miller's Batman: Year One. Warner Bros. would then greenlight whichever idea suited them the most.[46] Schumacher felt he "owe[d] the Batman culture a real Batman movie. I would go back to the basics and make a dark portrayal of the Dark Knight."[47] He approached Warner Bros. to do Batman: Year One in mid-1998.[47]
Sunday, November 30, 2014
Rocky Horror sequel set for London
Rocky Horror sequel set for London
27 November 2014 Last updated at 16:06
Richard O’Brien is to turn his flop sequel to The Rocky Horror Picture Show into a stage production in London.
Shock Treatment, originally filmed in 1981, was a satire of celebrity, with Rocky Horror characters Brad and Janet trapped in a sinister TV game show.
It was a commercial disaster - The Washington Post called it “ludicrous” - and it never gained a general release.
O’Brien has reworked the story for its stage debut, which will take place at London’s King’s Head Theatre in April.
“Shock Treatment has been waiting patiently in the wings for a stage premiere since the film was released in 1981,” said O’Brien.
“Just as Rocky began life upstairs at the Royal Court, it seems a perfect fit for Shock Treatment to start its stage life in the effervescent atmosphere of the astounding King’s Head Theatre.”
Before its DVD release in 2006, very few people had seen Shock Treatment. One exception was the BBC’s Mark Kermode, who called it the “perfect cult movie”.
“It’s arguable the soundtrack album is better than Rocky Horror,” he said.
“It’s also packed with cameo roles from people on the rise - not just Ruby Wax but Rik Mayall, long before he found big screen fame in Drop Dead Fred.
“But the best thing about Shock Treatment is it eerily predicts the rise of reality television,” he added.
Kermode’s opinion was in the minority, however. US reviewers lamented the loss of Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon, who played Brad and Janet in the original. and branded the film “tiresome” and “junk”.
“It’s a lesson for film-makers: You can’t force a cult film, they just happen,” wrote The Washington Post’s reviewer, Rita Kempley.
Shock Treatment is preceded at the King’s Head Theatre by the 21st anniversary revival of Trainspotting, which was first seen at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe.
Other highlights of the theatre’s new season include a new play by Richard Cameron, The Flannelettes, and a revival of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Ruddigore.
http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-30232106
27 November 2014 Last updated at 16:06
Richard O’Brien is to turn his flop sequel to The Rocky Horror Picture Show into a stage production in London.
Shock Treatment, originally filmed in 1981, was a satire of celebrity, with Rocky Horror characters Brad and Janet trapped in a sinister TV game show.
It was a commercial disaster - The Washington Post called it “ludicrous” - and it never gained a general release.
O’Brien has reworked the story for its stage debut, which will take place at London’s King’s Head Theatre in April.
“Shock Treatment has been waiting patiently in the wings for a stage premiere since the film was released in 1981,” said O’Brien.
“Just as Rocky began life upstairs at the Royal Court, it seems a perfect fit for Shock Treatment to start its stage life in the effervescent atmosphere of the astounding King’s Head Theatre.”
Before its DVD release in 2006, very few people had seen Shock Treatment. One exception was the BBC’s Mark Kermode, who called it the “perfect cult movie”.
“It’s arguable the soundtrack album is better than Rocky Horror,” he said.
“It’s also packed with cameo roles from people on the rise - not just Ruby Wax but Rik Mayall, long before he found big screen fame in Drop Dead Fred.
“But the best thing about Shock Treatment is it eerily predicts the rise of reality television,” he added.
Kermode’s opinion was in the minority, however. US reviewers lamented the loss of Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon, who played Brad and Janet in the original. and branded the film “tiresome” and “junk”.
“It’s a lesson for film-makers: You can’t force a cult film, they just happen,” wrote The Washington Post’s reviewer, Rita Kempley.
Shock Treatment is preceded at the King’s Head Theatre by the 21st anniversary revival of Trainspotting, which was first seen at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe.
Other highlights of the theatre’s new season include a new play by Richard Cameron, The Flannelettes, and a revival of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Ruddigore.
http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-30232106
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