Word: starlighters
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What would provide the most stimulating change of pace after Starlight Express's romance of the rails? For Andrew Lloyd Webber it was the sweep and dash of pure old-fashioned romance. He found it in French Novelist Gaston Leroux's 1910 thriller Le Fantome de l'Opera, long a standby for stage and screen adaptations (notably Lon Chaney's 1925 silent horror film). The version devised by Lloyd Webber and Librettist Richard Stilgoe dispensed with much of the novel's narrative superstructure to focus on two characters: the gruesomely disfigured genius who haunts the Paris Opera and the young...
Like Cats and Starlight Express, though, Phantom is likely to prove "castproof," for much of its attraction lies in its spectacular coups de theatre inspired by Victorian stage machinery. Among the highlights: a boat gliding across a gloomy underground lake, and a chandelier that appears to crash onto the audience at the end of Act I. The multiple trapdoors that create many of the illusions -- there are 102 tiny ones to accommodate the candles that rise from the gloom to illuminate the Phantom's subterranean realm -- are all controlled by computer. Says Will Bowen, assistant production manager in London...
...middle-class British kid grows up listening to Mozart and Richard Rodgers, teams with buddy to write school musical, is discovered by slumming music critic, goes on to pen smash biblical epic Jesus Christ Superstar and monster hit Evita, splits with pal, has megatriumphs with Cats and Starlight Express, then comes up with extra-hot spook, The Phantom of the Opera. Along the way swaps bell-bottoms for swank Belgravia flat, 1,350-acre English country estate, choice property on the French Riviera, $6 million apartment in Manhattan, private jet, beautiful second wife and a worldwide musical empire that, conservatively...
Musically he is just as busy: discussing a movie deal with Universal Pictures for a cinematic version of his roller-skating-trains musical Starlight, bruiting the possibility of writing a movie score for his Trump Tower neighbor Steven Spielberg, and launching plans for a U.S. production company with Director Harold Prince to seek out and stage new American musicals. "Music is born into Andrew," says Brightman. "Music just comes out of him. Without it, he wouldn't be Andrew...
Broadway could not need it more. In recent years the musical, which once planted America's theatrical flag from Rome to Tokyo, has been subjected to a kind of reverse Monroe Doctrine. The Great White Way's four hottest sellers -- Cats, Me and My Girl, Starlight Express and Les Miserables -- come from London (Les Mis originated in Paris). So does Phantom of the Opera, which opens in January but already boasts a $10.5 million advance sale. During the 1980s, dozens of homegrown musicals have come and gone, some losing as much as $7 million...