Word: webber
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...show-biz axis, but it is full of the splendid physical comedy that is Director Edwards' specialty. And besides, most of the movie types he so viciously caricatures are portrayed with high, vile spirits by the likes of Robert Preston, Larry Hagman, Robert Vaughn and Robert Webber, the meanest-looking crew since the Wild Bunch bit the dust. Edwards occasionally strays too far inside for his own good, lapsing from parodies of bad taste into the genuine article. But his work has pace and the courage of bleak convictions, not just about movie people, but the human race...
...magnetic stuff; but it is in ensemble work that the London stage shines. In directing Nicholas Nickleby, Trevor Nunn juggled 43 actors in 138 speaking parts to create the propulsive bustle of Dickens' London. Now he and Choreographer Gillian Lynne have brought an informed anarchy to Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical settings for T.S. Eliot's exercise in whimsy and social satire, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. When it appeared in 1939, Practical Cats comprised 14 poems; Valerie Eliot, the poet's widow, discovered others, which have been incorporated into the production...
Eliot cast most of his Cats verses in the ricky-ticky septameter that served lyricists from Gilbert to Kipling to Lear. The challenge to Lloyd Webber was to compose a score that did not sound like outtakes from The Pirates of Penzance. Because of this metrical restriction, Lloyd Webber could not have matched the profligate melodiousness of his score for Evita if he had tried. He has not; he works mostly in the loud Europop vein, hurling his listeners up against the caterwaul...
...penned a splendid processional, all pomp and circumference, for Brian Blessed as Old Deuteronomy, the group's sage and patriarch. For Elaine Paige, who was the original West End Evita and here plays a tattered cat of the evening named Grizabella, Lloyd Webber wrote the show's first hit single, a melancholy bolero called Memory...
...Cats from some of the same angels who thought the project too risky to invest in when it needed funds a few months ago. So the Prince of Wales and his bride-to-be are not the only British couple who have reason to smile these days. Catch Lloyd Webber or Nunn off-guard, and you are likely to see a mile-wide Cheshire-cat grin. -By Richard Corliss