Word: superstar
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Edda Sels, press spokeswoman for the popular production of Cats in Hamburg, "but he can combine classical and popular music in such a way that it appeals to audiences who want both 'entertaining' and 'serious' music." Director Keita Asari, whose Shiki theater company, the largest in Japan, has staged Superstar, Evita and Cats, calls Lloyd Webber a "genius who unfolds melodies through various modes that somewhere reverberate classical music. That's the reason he is universally loved...
Practically alone among present-day theater composers, Lloyd Webber repeatedly hits the Top Ten with his songs: I Don't Know How to Love Him from Superstar; Don't Cry for Me, Argentina from Evita; Memory, the instant standard from Cats. Four songs from Phantom have made the British charts. But despite his unique crossover appeal, his scores are far from cheap tunesmithery. In addition to their obvious debt to rock, Superstar, Evita and Cats also bristle with some hair-raising atonal passages, while Phantom's glorious credo, The Music of the Night, contains one of Lloyd Webber's most...
...false start with a show about Richard the Lion-Hearted sent Rice back to the Bible for inspiration, and he found it in the greatest 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...
...about this time, Lloyd Webber married Sarah Tudor Hugill, whom he had met at a party when they were teenagers. As this partnership was formed, the other one in his life, with Rice, began to crack under the stress of Superstar. While Lloyd Webber felt embarrassed and humiliated by what he regarded as the "travesty" of the New York production, the more phlegmatic Rice was content to let it run its course and enjoy the success. A few months later, when Rice dropped out of a treatment of P.G. Wodehouse's unflappable butler, Jeeves, Lloyd Webber enlisted Playwright Alan Ayckbourn...
...last Rice-Lloyd Webber show was also the best and the most daring: Evita. The authors were condemned for glorifying the right-wing Eva and Juan Peron, even though they intended the show as an allegory of the deteriorating political situation in England in the mid-'70s. Like Superstar, Evita was first released as a record. The task of getting it onstage devolved upon Director Prince; watching Prince put the show together turned out to be a most instructive lesson for Lloyd Webber. "When I came into Evita, there was no script, just a lot of numbers in a shape...