Word: starlight
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...could do for an encore. After four years, during which Nunn was busy directing with the Royal Shakespeare Company, in London's West End, in opera and in film, the answer emerged: he could top himself on Broadway. Within four days he opened not one but two megamusicals. Starlight Express earned him yet another Tony nomination for directing; so did Les Miserables, for which he won a Tony...
...Broadway is extraordinary. Last week Nunn became unique: he opened a fourth. Chess, which links a Soviet-U.S. summit, a world chess championship and a doomed international romance, has already racked up advance sales of $4 million. If it overcomes bumpy reviews -- which also beset Starlight and, to a lesser degree, Cats -- Nunn will parallel what he has achieved in London, where the same four shows have been running for years...
Onstage physical stresses can be as fierce as any endured on the football field or basketball court. Actor Mark Frawley, late of Broadway's Starlight Express, had to barrel-jump over five people in the show's opening number. "You're wearing two 4-lb. skates and a costume weighing 25 lbs.," he notes. "In order to clear the people, I had to get my speed up to 35 m.p.h. It was a knee killer." Musicians face peril as well. Pinched nerves and muscle cramps caused by repetitive hand motions are common. Violinists suffer everything from fiddler's neck rash...
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...
...with him on both Cats and Phantom, says, "Andrew always has one night when he has a fit. He can become like a shark with anger. He is passionate. But that is so much better than people who settle, isn't it?" One such moment occurred during rehearsals for Starlight, when Lloyd Webber argued vehemently with Nunn over two bars of music the director had inserted in order to help the skaters negotiate a dangerous maneuver. Insisted Nunn: "You either have those bars, Andrew, or you'll have a few roller-skating deaths." "O.K.," Lloyd Webber shot back, "either...