ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER, A GENIUS OF MUSICAL THEATRE

Today, The Grandma has visited an old friend, Andrew Lloyd Webber, the English composer.

Andrew Lloyd Webber, Baron Lloyd-Webber (born 22 March 1948) is an English composer and impresario of musical theatre. Several of his musicals have run for more than a decade both in the West End and on Broadway. 

He has composed 21 musicals, a song cycle, a set of variations, two film scores, and a Latin Requiem Mass. Several of Lloyd Webber's songs have been widely recorded and widely successful outside their parent musicals, such as Memory from Cats, The Music of the Night and All I Ask of You from The Phantom of the Opera, I Don't Know How to Love Him from Jesus Christ Superstar, Don't Cry for Me Argentina from Evita, and Any Dream Will Do from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. 

In 2001, The New York Times referred to him as the most commercially successful composer in history.

The Daily Telegraph named him in 2008 the fifth-most powerful person in British culture, on which occasion lyricist Don Black said that Andrew more or less single-handedly reinvented the musical.

Lloyd Webber has received numerous awards, including a knighthood in 1992, followed by a peerage for services to the arts, six Tonys, seven Olivier Awards, three Grammys (as well as the Grammy Legend Award), an Academy Award, 14 Ivor Novello Awards, a Golden Globe, a Brit Award, the 2006 Kennedy Center Honors, and two Classic Brit Awards (for Outstanding Contribution to Music in 2008, and for Musical Theatre and Education in 2018).

In 2018, after Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Variety Special (Live), he became the thirteenth person to win an Oscar, an Emmy, a Grammy, and a Tony. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, is an inductee into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and is a fellow of the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers, and Authors.

The Really Useful Group, Lloyd Webber's company, is one of the largest theatre operators in London. Producers in several parts of the UK have staged productions, including national tours, of Lloyd Webber musicals under licence from the Really Useful Group. He is also the president of the Arts Educational Schools, London, a performing arts school located in Chiswick, west London. 

Lloyd Webber is involved in a number of charitable activities, including the Elton John AIDS Foundation, Nordoff Robbins, Prostate Cancer UK and War Child. In 1992, he started the Andrew Lloyd Webber Foundation which supports the arts, culture, and heritage of the UK.

 More information: Andrew Lloyd Webber

Lloyd Webber premiered The Phantom of the Opera at Her Majesty's Theatre in the West End in 1986, inspired by the 1911 Gaston Leroux novel. 

He wrote the part of Christine for his then wife, Sarah Brightman, who played the role in the original London and Broadway productions alongside Michael Crawford as the Phantom. The production was directed by Harold Prince, who had also earlier directed Evita. Charles Hart wrote the lyrics for Phantom with some additional material provided by Richard Stilgoe, with whom Lloyd Webber co-wrote the book of the musical. It became a hit and is still running in the West End; in January 2006 it overtook Lloyd Webber's Cats as the longest-running show on Broadway.

On 11 February 2012, Phantom of the Opera played its 10,000th show on Broadway. With over 14,200 London productions it is the second longest-running West End musical. The Broadway production closed on 16 April 2023, having played 13,981 performances, the most in Broadway history.

Lloyd Webber was born on 22 March 1948, at Westminster Hospital in London, the elder son of William Lloyd Webber (1914-1982), a composer and organist, and Jean Hermione Johnstone (1921-1993), a violinist and pianist.

In 1965, when Lloyd Webber was a 17-year-old budding musical-theatre composer, he was introduced to the 20-year-old aspiring pop-song writer Tim Rice. Their first collaboration was The Likes of Us, an Oliver! -inspired musical based on the true story of Thomas John Barnardo. They produced a demo tape of that work in 1966, but the project failed to gain a backer.

Lloyd Webber was asked to write a song for the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona and he composed Amics per Sempre-Friends for Life with Don Black providing the lyrics. This song was performed by Sarah Brightman and Josep Carreras.

On St George's Day 2024, he was appointed a Knight Companion of the Order of the Garter (KG).

More information: Instagram-Andrew Lloyd Webber

I don't know what really makes a great musical or not.
In the end, you write it, and you write it
because you want to write it.

Andrew Lloyd Webber

CATS, DEEP MEMORIES IN AN ETERNAL MUSICAL

Cats in the Winter Garden, Broadway, NYC

In a few days, Tina is going to travel to New York City. It's not the first time that Tina visits this big city. She has been many times in a place which is considerated the capital of the world.

Now, Tina is preparing her agenda for these days meanwhile she's remembering the first time she visited the city that never sleeps. It was in 1982 and she travelled to NYC to watch a theatre performance, Cats, first aired in October, 8. Cats first opened in the West End, in the New London Theatre, in May 11, 1981 and the following year the show was represented in Broadway.

Cats is a musical composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber, based on Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T.S.Eliot, and produced by Cameron Mackintosh. The musical tells the story of a tribe of cats called the Jellicles and the night they make what is known as the Jellicle choice and decide which cat will ascend to the Heaviside Layer and come back to a new life. Cats introduced the song standard Memory.

More information: Cats the Musical Official Website

Directed by Trevor Nunn and choreographed by Gillian Lynne. It won numerous awards, including Best Musical at both the Laurence Olivier Awards and the Tony Awards. The London production ran for twenty-one years and the Broadway production ran for eighteen years, both setting new records. Actresses Elaine Paige and Betty Buckley became particularly associated with the musical. One actress, Marlene Danielle, performed in the Broadway production for its entire run, from 1982 until 2000.

As of 2016, Cats is the fourth-longest-running show in Broadway history, and was the longest running Broadway show in history from 1987 to 2006 when it was surpassed by The Phantom of the Opera. Cats is the fourth-longest-running West End musical. It has been performed around the world many times and has been translated into more than 20 languages. In 1998, Cats was turned into a made-for-television film.

Download Cats (Study Guide)

Memory, all alone in the moonlight. 

I can dream of the old days.
Life was beautiful then.
I remember the time I knew what happiness was.
Let the memory live again.

Andrew Lloyd Webber / T.S.Eliot