Word: lloyd
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...have been Sandburg's "Hog Butcher," but there was also the Chicago school of architecture. None of the city's architects surpassed Louis Sullivan, whose buildings combined elegant ornament with a functional austerity that was to influence the imaginations of great 20th century builders like Frank Lloyd Wright...
...reason that O'Horgan's staging is a marathon exercise is that Lloyd Webber's music never stops?a rarity for Broadway musicals. The musical score has been criticized for being something less, or more, than rock. It is, in fact, an elegant pastiche, swiftly paced and highly styled, that does not sound like show music but has something for everybody: a curtain-raising blues number to loosen up the audience, a winsome torch song sung to the sleeping Jesus by an awed Mary Magdalene, and a campy Charleston-like piece that allows King Herod, outrageously turned...
With only two published works to their credit (the other is a children's musical play about Joseph in Egypt), the young team of Lloyd Webber and Rice have pushed forward the frontier possibilities of rock opera and made, just for starters, what Rice calls "a million quid" apiece ($2.4 million). They are becomingly modest about their talents, grateful for their extraordinary luck and sensibly reserved about future plans...
...Lloyd Webber, dark, slender and intense, likes to point out defensively that this is his first opera?a defense that only someone who knows Verdi's first opus can fully appreciate. Rice, tall and blond, finds inspiration in the rhyming dictionary, talks like a character out of a book by his favorite novelist, P.G. Wodehouse, and looks like somebody's kid brother home for the long hols. If fame and fortune have not yet disturbed them, it may be because so much of it has come in the U.S. "The LP record is an absolute dud in England," Rice explains...
Honest men may differ as to just how dreadful, hopeful or insignificant the commercial Jesus fad is, including Jesus Christ Superstar as its centerpiece. Balanced against the enduring metaphor, the bitter and sweet mystery that the life of Christ embodies, Lloyd Webber and Rice's rock opera seems sad enough. It is depressing to imagine what certainly is the case, that too many Americans, whether religious or not, will know no more of the Gospels and the Passion than Superstar presents. Yet with all its sins of omission and commission, the production very well dramatizes one transcendental meaning...