Word: webber
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Some of the show's lures are known commodities: Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber (Cats, Jesus Christ Superstar) and Director Harold Prince (Cabaret, Follies) have mounted some of the flashiest spectaculars of recent years, including their prior collaboration, Evita. Practically everyone, it seems, has seen a movie version of Phantom, although few have read Gaston Leroux's turgid 1910 thriller about the hideously misshapen genius who constitutes himself the shadow ruler of the Paris Opera House and, upon becoming infatuated with a chorine, maneuvers her career from afar. The beauty-and-the- beast theme and subterranean wonderland setting echo the myths...
...London, and therein lies the show's chief weakness. As the Phantom -- musically, a tenor good guy rather than a baritone baddie -- Michael Crawford gives the most compelling performance currently to be found on any Broadway stage. The character is an extortionist, kidnaper, incendiary and murderer. Yet as Lloyd Webber conceived him and Crawford plays him, he is also a romantic capable of true selflessness and is all too easily forgiven. As his rival, Steve Barton is blandly tuneful and smugly self-assured, which is all the role demands. The narrative tension is meant to emanate mainly from the virginal...
...conversation, though, is an incomplete guide to the man; Lloyd Webber's essence lies in his music. "I don't think Andrew ever puts into words accurately what he thinks about anything," Rice has said. "Yet he puts into music precisely what he thinks about something. So you don't have to listen to what he says but what he writes, which is probably why he is a great composer...
COVER: Andrew Lloyd Webber brings his smash Phantom to Broadway...
...British composer of Evita and Cats has his biggest hit yet in Phantom, which opens Jan. 26 after an all- time- record advance sale. With his shows playing from Budapest to Tokyo, Lloyd Webber, 39, presides over a musical empire that brings him more than $1 million a month (though not always critical acceptance) and is making him a superstar. See SHOW BUSINESS...