Word: webber
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Lloyd Webber attended Magdalen College at Oxford, in part because he had heard it harbored some of Britain's most promising lyricists. But the man who turned out to be the Oscar Hammerstein to his Rodgers came in the person of Tim Rice, a London law student with a penchant for pop music. Introduced by a London publisher, the pair hit it off at once, and Andrew promptly dropped out of Oxford. To hone his technique, he enrolled at the Royal College of Music. His father, surprisingly, warned him not to let the school educate away his natural gifts...
...partner were an odd match: Rice tall, affable, gregarious; Lloyd Webber slender, introspective, subdued. Rice's lyrics were hard-edged and cynical; Lloyd Webber's music lush and tuneful ("Tim can never write 'I love you,' " says Lloyd Webber. "It's always 'I love you, but . . .' "). Their first show, The Likes of Us, about a Victorian philanthropist named Dr. Bernardo, was never commercially produced; "square and dated," explained Rice. For their next try they took some really dated material: the Old Testament...
...most winning compositions. Originally a 25-minute piece for the school's younger boys, it was expanded for a performance at Central Hall, Westminster, where by chance it was heard by Derek Jewell, a music critic for the London Sunday Times. His unexpected rave led to a recording. Lloyd Webber's deft gift for parody (the Elvis homage of Pharaoh's Story) and melodic invention (Joseph's moving anthem Close Every Door) captured a wide audience. "Without realizing it," recalls Rice, "we were breaking new ground by forgetting about Rodgers and Hammerstein...
...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 as offensive, but it ran for 720 performances before...
...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...