Word: broadway
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...bright, man. Depressing, lacks an upbeat ending, and the opera- house setting is a major turnoff. Broadway audiences are not about to put out + big bucks to watch a downer like that, for crying out loud. Doesn't anybody here have an idea for a hit musical...
...give them in the theater." So it does. And on that basis the canniest show composer of our time has long since confirmed his standing. But the sure-to-be-smash opening of Phantom will doubtless confirm something else too. The awkward London youth has grown up, conquered Broadway and become what he once only envisioned: Andrew Lloyd Webber, Superstar...
When Lloyd Webber's latest show, The Phantom of the Opera, opens on Broadway the week after next, he will have three hits playing simultaneously in both London and New York City. It is only the second time a composer has ever pulled off such a double hat trick. The first was in 1983, and, of course, it was Lloyd Webber who did it. In New York, Evita ran for almost four years; Cats is still selling out five years after its opening...
...Manhattan aerie last week, Lloyd Webber worked with Lyricists Don Black and Charles Hart on his next musical, Aspects of Love, studied portfolios of photos in search of a female lead for Phantom's April production in Japan, and kept a watchful eye on the Broadway incarnation, which started previews on Saturday. "He monitors every word and orchestrates every aspect of the production," says Black. "He is good at casting, costumes, orchestration, design, marketing. Nothing slips through the net." When he does unwind, it is generally at his Steinway grand piano. "Want to hear some tunes?" he will...
Since 1971, when the iconoclastic Superstar shattered Broadway tradition with raucous electric guitars, grinding dissonances and a subject that was, to say the least, unorthodox, it has been fashionable to dismiss Lloyd Webber as a panderer to the basest melodic cravings of the mass audience, hammering home a few repetitive themes amid overblown orchestral climaxes and distracting technological gimmickry. His scores have been derided as derivative and too dependent on pastiche -- meretricious parrotings of his Broadway betters (Rodgers) and his operatic antecedents (Puccini...