Word: lloyds
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...Lloyd Webber was on his own in his next project, an audacious attempt to set T. S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats to music. He turned to the innovative director Trevor Nunn and the brilliant designer John Napier to transform his plotless feline frolic into the spectacular Cats. Nunn found that the increasingly confident composer's sense of musical structure was "fantastically theatrical" and that what Lloyd Webber required of his collaborators was "ways in which his musical conception could be given a narrative or some character validation...
Cats marked another notable departure for Lloyd Webber. During rehearsals he fell in love with Brightman, who was gamboling as one of the show's kittens after a stint as lead singer of the sexy rock group Hot Gossip. In 1983 his twelve-year marriage ended in divorce, and he wed Brightman the following year. Custody of the two children, Imogen, now 10, and Nicholas, 8, went to their mother...
...Lloyd Webber's next show, Starlight, which opened in London in 1984, was also directed by Nunn and designed by Napier, but this time the cooperative effort was less happy. What was conceived as a small collection of genre songs (pop, rock, mock-soul) for children, like Joseph, emerged instead as an overblown extravaganza that the composer, despite his initial enthusiasm for the production, later disowned. "It was a mistake to have put it anywhere near where it could be considered a Broadway musical," Lloyd Webber says, though he still defends it as a vehicle that brings to the theater...
Phantom, then, is the gauntlet that Lloyd Webber has thrown down to challenge his critics to take him seriously. As lush and ornate as the Paris Opera in which it is set, Phantom is the composer's most elaborate, beguiling score. It is also the most frankly operatic, not only in its parodies of period works by such composers as Salieri and Meyerbeer but in the way it has been written. Like an opera, Phantom is almost entirely sung, and its characters are outfitted with sharply etched musical motifs. Except for the title song, there is no rock music...
...Lloyd Webber believes music should drive a show, giving it life and shape, soul and heart. "Audiences in popular theater are much more prepared to surrender themselves to a composer going down the route of the opera," he says. "In fact, they demand that the composer is more in the driver's seat than they did 15 years ago. I would never again give my score to a director until I feel it is as near finished as I can possibly make...