Word: operas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...story ever told. Jesus Christ Superstar was an instant hit, first as a single pop song, then as a double album, finally as a 1971 stage show in New York. It was not the first rock musical -- Galt MacDermot's Hair preceded it, as did the Who's "rock opera" Tommy -- but its impact was extraordinary. Lloyd Webber hated Director Tom O'Horgan's lurid, heavenzapoppin' staging, which featured a transvestite Herod, Judas in silver briefs and Christ emerging from a huge chalice clad in a $20,000 glittering robe. Christian as well as Jewish groups protested the show...
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...
...What do we mean by opera, anyway?" wonders Lloyd Webber. "And where does that put Phantom? Obviously there is a world of difference between Phantom and something like Sugar Babies. But there is no difference today between opera and serious musical theater." Indeed, the line between the two forms is becoming increasingly blurred. Postwar operatic history is a Sargasso Sea of shipwrecked hulks, great lumbering Establishment vessels launched with much fanfare but quickly sent to the bottom under their own weight. Many opera- house successes have come instead from composers outside the academic tradition. Sondheim's Pacific Overtures opened...