Andrew Lloyd Webber

Abstract

Andrew Lloyd Webber (b. 1948) and his Really Useful Group (founded 1977) have dominated British musical theatre since the 1970s, especially between 1981 and 2002. This critical survey of Lloyd Webber’s career discusses his self-understanding as a theatre composer; his development of an individual style in the late 1960s; his breakthrough success with Jesus Christ Superstar (1970) and the significance of what the lyricist Tim Rice calls its ‘operatic form’; the continued artistic and commercial development of the composer’s career through Evita (1976), Cats (1981), Starlight Express (1984), and The Phantom of the Opera (1986); and his subsequent failure to produce further musicals of comparable popularity. The Phantom of the Opera is identified as the most personal of Lloyd Webber’s major successes and his obsessive, revisionary investment in Gaston Leroux’s novel is analysed with reference to both the 1986 musical and its badly misjudged sequel, Love Never Dies (2010).