Word: napier
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Batman film, and people would laugh," recalls Peters. "They saw him as a guy in tights, and unlike Superman, he didn't fly." Finding a suitable script proved an additional problem. Early drafts followed Batman from the childhood trauma of seeing his parents gunned down by vicious Jack Napier. "You had to wade through 20 years," says Sam Hamm, one of the three writers who worked on the film, "just to get to the first shot of the guy in the costume that we've all come to see." His solution: Bruce Wayne is already Batman, but Jack Napier...
...Hamm's scenario, Batman interrupts a Napier heist and allows the crook to fall into a vat of toxic waste. Jack emerges as the Joker and leads a crime wave, concocting a formula to be injected into cosmetics that twists the victim's face into the Joker's awful leer. Soon Gotham is a city of the grinning dead, and only Batman can revive it, with the help of Vicki Vale (Kim Basinger), frontline photojournalist and all-time fabulous babe...
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...
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...
Starlight, which opened in London in 1984, comes from a glittering team: Director Trevor Nunn, Set Designer John Napier and Lighting Designer David Hersey, who mounted Nicholas Nickleby, plus Composer Lloyd Webber and Lyricist Richard Stilgoe, who had joined the former trio to devise Cats. In reconceiving the show for Broadway, the creators had some smart ideas: instead of a gloomy, abandoned train siding, the gaudy set now represents a panorama of the U.S., dotted with highlights a child might recognize, from the Statue of Liberty to the Golden Gate Bridge; the recorded narration too is now by a child...