Word: webber
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...Lloyd Webber's rise to prominence is something of a historical anomaly. Since the heyday of Gilbert and Sullivan and the demise of the Viennese operetta, the leadership in musical theater has belonged to Americans. British musicals, when they were considered at all, conjured up images of aging vaudevillians with straw boaters and canes barking strophic ballads at nodding pensioners. That has all changed. Now, not only a stirring new work like Les Miserables but even a relic like Me and My Girl can be shipped across the Atlantic from London to win a passionate following on the Great White...
This has caused more than a little resentment on Broadway, not least against Lloyd Webber himself, since it sometimes seems that half the musicals running at any one time are his. What American can compete with him? Charles Strouse has not had a hit since Annie (1977). Marvin Hamlisch's A Chorus Line is still strutting its stuff, but the show opened in 1975. Jerry Herman's 1983 cross- dressed love story La Cage aux Folles packed in the tourists, but its appeal came more from the frisson of seeing men in black lace and garter belts than from...
...sinuous melodies and intricate lyrics of Stephen Sondheim, the leading American composer of musicals, have made for an impressive body of work, including the delicate Pacific Overtures, the sanguinary Sweeney Todd and his new hit, Into the Woods. But Lloyd Webber's sure, if more conventional, sense of musical structure, his adroit handling of the orchestra (unlike Rodgers and Sondheim, Lloyd Webber generally makes his own orchestrations) and his willingness to tackle big subjects bespeak a talent no less sophisticated...
Indeed, except for Sondheim, few American theater composers can match Lloyd Webber's strong classical background. His father, who died in 1982, was Composer William Lloyd Webber, director of the London College of Music, and his mother Jean is a piano teacher. His brother Julian, now 36, became a noted concert cellist. Partly because of his bona fides, however, he feels that his field "inhabits a no-man's-land." Classical reviewers, he observes, do not consider musical shows a part of their world, while drama critics do not always pick up on the subtleties of his music...
Colleagues do, though. Tenor Placido Domingo sang the premiere of Lloyd Webber's 1985 Requiem under Conductor Lorin Maazel, who also recorded the orchestral version of Lloyd Webber's Variations. Maazel, former music director of the Cleveland Orchestra and a longtime Lloyd Webber supporter, praises the composer's "great talent -- I would even say genius" for melody...