![]() Wodehouse (one of his rare flops was a Wodehouse musical). He emerged with, among other things, a passion for P. G. Rising from the English upper crust-that school he shared with Peter and Gordon was Westminster, a famous London one-he absorbed many of its attitudes, although, the English crust having as many layers as a mille-feuille, one has the sense that he comes from somewhere in the more insecure upper middle, rather than from the very creamy top. You get good at this stuff early, or probably not at all. You have a sense that this is still the theatre where he puts on shows one of those infant musicals was billed as “A Musical of Gigantic Importance,” and several well-known later tunes emerged from them. As a child, he operated a toy musical theatre with his brother, in which they put on full-scale shows, Andrew pulling all the strings and arranging all the music. ![]() (He later amassed one of the world’s best private collections of the school.) He loved pantomime, a distinctly English holiday entertainment that mixed spectacle, parody, nostalgia, and pastiche. He knows his instruments, ready to whip out a twelve-string Rickenbacker for the right effect in a recording session.īut he also had, from early on, a Betjemanian love of Englishness: he tells, touchingly, of schoolboy trips to see old churches and abbeys and of a keen love for Pre-Raphaelite art, that wistful-whimsical mode of nineteenth-century British painting. Born in 1948, Lloyd Webber as a child was an Elvis nut who played “Jailhouse Rock” until his parents were numbed by it, and later led a school celebration for the duo Peter and Gordon, recent alumni who had had a pop hit. Though his music may often sound as if it were written by a man locked in the basement of the Paris opera-hearing late-nineteenth-century music, muffled, from a couple of floors down-he turns out to be very much a boy of the Monty Python generation, his ears full of rock and British comedy. Lloyd Webber, as his memoir, “ Unmasked” (HarperCollins), reveals, was caught in a wrinkle within that time. ![]() Certainly, no artist as hugely successful as he has been can have struck a chord without owning a piece of his time. Given his reputation as the guy who dragged the Broadway musical from its vitality and idiomatic urgency back to its melodramatic roots in European operetta-while also degrading rock music to a mere rhythm track-is it possible that, as his memoir indicates, his work might be more varied and interesting than we had known? Could we, terrible thought, have been unfair to Andrew Lloyd Webber? The answer turns out, on inspection, to be a complicated and qualified Yes. There is nothing pompous or pallid about his prose, which makes it all the odder that so much of the music that he wrote seems to have no other qualities. Illustration by Bendik KaltenbornĪmerican lovers of musical theatre who blame Andrew Lloyd Webber for pretty much everything that went wrong on its stages, starting in the early seventies, will be chagrined to discover that he has written an autobiography that has all the virtues his music always seemed to lack: wit, surprise, contemporaneity, audacity, and an appealingly shrewd sense of the occasion. In an age when the musical was no longer a hit machine, Lloyd Webber returned the form to its origins in operetta.
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