Word: webber
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...Manhattan aerie last week, Lloyd Webber worked with Lyricists Don Black and Charles Hart on his next musical, Aspects of Love, studied portfolios of photos in search of a female lead for Phantom's April production in Japan, and kept a watchful eye on the Broadway incarnation, which started previews on Saturday. "He monitors every word and orchestrates every aspect of the production," says Black. "He is good at casting, costumes, orchestration, design, marketing. Nothing slips through the net." When he does unwind, it is generally at his Steinway grand piano. "Want to hear some tunes?" he will...
...possible at Sydmonton, near the Watership Down country of Novelist Richard Adams, where his extensive holdings have made him the squire of two villages. The oldest part of his brick manor house dates back to the 16th century. Each July the estate serves as the site of Lloyd Webber's private Sydmonton Festival, where the composer tries out his works in progress before a specially invited audience. A connoisseur of old English religious architecture, Lloyd Webber often spends Sundays driving around with Sarah to visit churches...
What prompts all this frenetic activity? With a secure place in the annals of musical theater, a personal net worth of more than $200 million and all the creature comforts that attend such a favorable balance sheet, Lloyd Webber would seem to have everything. It may sound like an old joke, but rich and famous as he is, he still craves one gratification: critical respectability, especially...
Since 1971, when the iconoclastic Superstar shattered Broadway tradition with raucous electric guitars, grinding dissonances and a subject that was, to say the least, unorthodox, it has been fashionable to dismiss Lloyd Webber as a panderer to the basest melodic cravings of the mass audience, hammering home a few repetitive themes amid overblown orchestral climaxes and distracting technological gimmickry. His scores have been derided as derivative and too dependent on pastiche -- meretricious parrotings of his Broadway betters (Rodgers) and his operatic antecedents (Puccini...
...People talk about commercialism," Lloyd Webber says, "but in actual fact, I really fight it an awful lot. I don't think that way. I put an awful lot into these scores. It is not just a matter of two or three songs repeated and repeated. If people think it is, they are crazy. The reason why the public responds is that the pieces are very rich...