Word: webber
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Somewhat disingenuously, Lloyd Webber professes not to relish his new status, to be unaware of the impact his growing personal fame will have on his box-office appeal. "In the end," he insists, "it comes down to the quality of what you give them in the theater." So it does. And on that basis the canniest show composer of our time has long since confirmed his standing. But the sure-to-be-smash opening of Phantom will doubtless confirm something else too. The awkward London youth has grown up, conquered Broadway and become what he once only envisioned: Andrew Lloyd...
...people overhearing him would suspect it, but those barely audible hums are the stuff dream musicals are made of. Out of them, Lloyd Webber, 39, has spun a worldwide empire unmatched in the history of musical theater. With one exception, the ill-starred Jeeves of 1975, Lloyd Webber has scored an unbroken string of triumphs over the past 15 years. His most financially successful show, Cats, has had 19 productions in cities ranging from Budapest to Tokyo to Sydney to Stockholm; eleven of them are still running. Cats has racked up total box-office receipts of more than $425 million...
When Lloyd Webber's latest show, The Phantom of the Opera, opens on Broadway the week after next, he will have three hits playing simultaneously in both London and New York City. It is only the second time a composer has ever pulled off such a double hat trick. The first was in 1983, and, of course, it was Lloyd Webber who did it. In New York, Evita ran for almost four years; Cats is still selling out five years after its opening...
...keep tabs on his burgeoning realm, Lloyd Webber is a man in almost perpetual motion. During the year between the London and New York openings of Phantom, he has circled the globe in his leased Hawker Siddeley 125 jet, making arrangements for new productions and spot-checking the quality level of old ones. "I have been all over the world until I hardly know what time of day it is," he says. It doesn't matter: the sun never sets on this new British empire...
Between trips, Lloyd Webber has overseen the continuing restoration of London's Palace Theater, a Victorian landmark that he bought for $2 million in 1983; expanded the dairy farm on Sydmonton Court, his estate in Hampshire, and planted 50,000 trees in an effort to reverse soil erosion; and with his wife, Soprano (and Phantom Star) Sarah Brightman, 27, acquired a nine-room duplex apartment on the 60th floor of Manhattan's Trump Tower, as well as a seaside villa in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat in the south of France. He has indulged his hobbies of collecting pre-Raphaelite...