Man behind the mask

Andrew Lloyd Webber is on the lookout for new material. ‘At the moment I haven’t got a story and all musicals are story-driven.”

Maybe, instead, he’ll do something unexpected. As we stroll from his office at the Really Useful group down St Martin’s Lane to lunch, he says: ‘I must say that I’ve done 14 musicals now and I am wondering whether to change direction.” To what? ‘Well, I’ve been sent a book of poems written in the Warsaw ghetto during the war. I’m thinking about it seriously. I’m ready to do something different. A song cycle.”

We are walking through the epicentre of world Webberdom. The Woman in White at the Palace is to the right of him; Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat at the New London to the left of him, and over in the Haymarket, The Phantom of the Opera (of which more later) is on at Her Majesty’s. He is the 100% shareholder of the Really Useful group, which jointly owns 12 London theatres.

Lloyd Webber is only 56 and has a fortune estimated at £450-million so, you might well think, he can do whatever he wants. ‘Do you have my reservation?” Lloyd Webber asks the maître d’. There’s a blankness in the man’s eyes. To spare mutual embarrassment the titan of music theatre quickly adds: ‘It’s under Webber.” Typical: your fame girdles the globe but doesn’t reach two minutes down the street.

‘Last time I came here was with Tim Rice. As we arrived he said, ‘I’ve left my coat in Drury Lane. I’ll just pop back and get it’. Fifteen minutes go, then half an hour. Then an hour, so I order. Then an hour and a half later — nothing. And I thought that’s it — I will never work with him again. Then in comes Rice and he says, ‘I’m sorry, but I think we’ve got the subject for our new show.’ He said: ‘It should be a musical about, say, Oliver Cromwell and there’s this poor customer who loses their coat and ends up starring in the musical.’ Which I thought was a pretty good excuse for Rice.”

Talking missing coats — there’s a whole wardrobe of musicals crying out for Lloyd Webber to add to the one he and Sir Tim wrote about an implausible-sounding dreamcoat all those years ago. ‘It’s Tim’s 60th tomorrow. I think I might send him a note saying, ‘What about The Coat?’”

Will you work together again? ‘It really depends on whether something comes along. He doesn’t particularly enjoy writing musicals. In fact, he goes out of his way, rather curmudgeonly, to say he hates them.”

Do you? ‘Well, as I say, I’m thinking of a change. I quite like the idea of going back to writing for the cinema.”

‘I wrote the music for Gumshoe, you know.” What — Mike Hodges’s 1971 film with Albert Finney as a wannabe Chandlerian private dick in Liverpool? ‘Yes, I’d forgotten what fun it is, to write to picture.”

By this he means composing music to fit already edited scenes. He’s been doing a lot of that recently, having collaborated with director Joel Schumacher on the £55-million film version of The Phantom of the Opera. ‘In the past 10 years the standards of sound in the cinema have come along in leaps and bounds and so to be able to take advantage of that is wonderful,” he says. ‘When Jesus Christ Superstar was done on film — half the cinemas would show it in mono. It was a joke.”

His meal arrives and there is a lull while he gets stuck in. Lloyd Webber doesn’t like giving interviews, which is a shame because he’s a good storyteller. But who can blame him for being wary of journalists? Looking through the cuttings, I realise that if I had a penny for each time he’s been called ugly, thin-skinned, borderline, talentless or had his marriage to Sarah Brightman torn into shreds, I would have enough to buy good seats for his recent musical adaptation of The Woman in White.

But, really, would such expenditure be warranted? After all, The Woman in White was hailed by the London Evening Standard thus: ‘Deserves to be stuffed and placed in a museum for deceased musicals.”

Did the reviews hurt? ‘What is so dangerous is that you get a lot of lazy journalists around as certainly happened with The Woman in White. They find internet reviews of previews of the show, and then they are picked up of course. What you’re trying to do is a preview, you know — you’re working on it. It’s just wrong to review a show in those circumstances.”

In music theatre, Lloyd Webber believes, he isn’t resting on his laurels, but trying to do something new. And really, any good critic should give him credit for this, he says. And this should apply, too, to the film version of Phantom. ‘It’s sold 40-million albums and 40- to 60-million people have seen it before.” Those are incredible figures and only a fool would gainsay Phantom‘s popular appeal, but is he steeling himself for hostile reviews? ‘Not really. Nothing like this has really been attempted before. I think it’s fantastic.”

Warner Brothers bought the film rights for Phantom in the late 1980s. ‘It hung in abeyance for years. I had one meeting with somebody from Warner in which he said to me: ‘Andrew — you can understand why people sing in an opera house, you can’t understand why people sing on an opera house roof.’ And I thought — it’s a musical! It’s like saying, ‘I can understand why a nun can sing in a convent, but not when she’s on a mountain.’ It was after that meeting that I really saw that the only way to make the film the way I wanted was to buy the rights back somehow.”

He has — putting £4-million into a project that accords Warner distribution rights and has been bankrolled by several international entrepreneurs. It is, he contends, the biggest independent British film ever made. ‘We had no help at all from the British film area funds that exist. It’s absurd — we couldn’t even get anybody connected with government funding to come and look at the huge set we built.

‘Doesn’t matter though. The wonderful luxury it gave us once we had got the money is that there were only two people who had to answer to anybody in this film and that was Joel [Schumacher] and I to each other.”

Schumacher, director of Falling Down and Phone Booth, isn’t an obvious choice to direct. ‘Oh, but he is. I’ve been his friend for ages, ever since I wrote him a fan letter for that film the Lost Boys.” What — the 1987 vampire thriller with Keifer Sutherland? ‘That’s it. I thought it was wonderful … You should always write fan letters,” he counsels.

Coffee arrives. Which is your favourite of your musicals? ‘It’s difficult because in a way they’re your kids, aren’t they? They’re all like a favourite child. I mean there are different reasons for being pleased with them. I mean I was very pleased with Aspects of Love — because I’d done Phantom and Cats and people had forgotten at that time that Evita was very austere — so what was basically a chamber musical was a good idea.” With The Beautiful Game, his relatively unsuccessful soccer musical set in Northern Ireland, ‘I’m quite proud of the fact that we tackled a subject like that and made it work for about a year, and got people to think a little bit about whether musical theatre could do this.”

But Phantom has what he calls ‘a special personal place in the canon”. He decided he wanted to adapt it as ‘a high romance” in those giddy, distant days when he was engaged to his first wife, Brightman, and very much in love. Soon after seeing a campy adaptation of the novel at Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Royal at Stratford East, he bought a copy of Gaston Leroux’s novel. ‘It’s one of the most confused books ever written. It can’t make up its mind whether it’s a detective story, a history, a horror story, but the most intriguing for me — which I’d never thought it was — a love story. Because it ends up with a line saying that on the Phantom‘s finger — he’s exhumed — they found Christine’s ring. And I thought, ‘Hello’.”

The question now is what will make Lloyd Webber go ‘hello” again. —