During last week’s entry, I went on at length about why Stephen Sondheim was an essential part of a Broadway experience. He put the “theater’ in musical theater. However, there was another name that I mentioned. I’m talking about the one who put “musical” into the same phrase. He was a figure who was more about the bombast, the showmanship that you couldn’t get inside any other room. The mentality when entering an Andrew Lloyd Webber show is not that you’re going to be enriched as if you entered academia set to song, but that you will be entertained, taking in the theater on an immediate level.
To break it down to a very basic core: he’s the gimmick guy. He’s selling you a Pepsi while explosions go off and loud horns play, the font pushing at the screen. There’s no bigger point other than to sell you on an experience.
Now imagine if you will being out in Time Square and all of the sudden there’s this guy with tickets in his hand. You don’t know anything about what he’s selling and he needs to convince you to change your plans for the night. As he runs up, he yells loudly:
“Hey! Yeah, you…”
“What?”
“You want to see a show where people dance as cats?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“What about Jesus as a rock star?”
“Okay…”
“Or better yet, what about people singing on roller skates?”
See how easy it is?
There’s no actual need to focus on the substance of these shows. All you need to sell an ALW production is to focus on something unique that the show does. Whereas you have to describe more contemporary hits like Book of Mormon or Dear Evan Hansen, Webber has a shorthand that undeniably has worked. Why else would he have five shows running on Broadway consecutively? People want a spectacle, and he has given them that advantage for near 50 years now. It’s why The Phantom of the Opera and Cats remain the two longest-running shows in Broadway history. People just want to see these weird oddities that they can’t get sitting at home. Where you can put on headphones and get the intellectual gist of a Sondheim show, you can’t do that with Webber. He won’t let you.
That is why it’s difficult to fully appreciate his work. For most of us, we don’t have the money to fly out personally and see one of his shows. Also, his film adaptations are largely inferior. The simple truth is that The Phantom of the Opera (2004) and Cats (2019) aren’t great representations of the shows. Film has taken liberties to take what works in theater, and largely missed the point. Webber is all about exclusivity that can’t translate too well to any other medium. Even when you think it will, they cast Gerard Butler as The Phantom and ruin the most accessible musical in his entire career.
So please, do not judge the man on his film adaptations. While they all share this insane level of earnestness that makes theater seem kind of dumb, there is something that is lost in translation. I would even go so far as to argue that an Original London Cast Recording can’t do Webber any justice. He may be a composer and you can take in his wondrous melodies, some like “Memory” (Cats) and “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” (Evita) have transcended the medium beautifully. However, I guarantee that most of it won’t make sense until you’re in the room watching it in action.
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| Starlight Express |
There are some shows, like Starlight Express, where you will be amazed that he actually went through with it. You have to ask yourself what was the point of putting an entire musical on roller skates, making them wear bawdy eyesore of costumes. Once you realize that it’s a story based on a failed Thomas the Tank Engine project, it becomes more appalling. Then there’s something both brilliant and completely stupid when realizing that it needs a specially designed stadium-sized stage to put on. The cherry on top is that this is a show that’s geared at little boys, which makes the amount of sexually ambiguous characters all the more wonderfully confusing.
But here’s the thing, you’re missing the bigger point of Webber. He isn’t going for a contemporary mentality when it comes to the musical. He’s recalling an older style, where you showed up to be impressed by the ingenuity of live theater. It’s true that he’s written some catchy songs in his days, but I go back to the image of him yelling like a madman out in Time Square, asking people to come to his shows. I feel like he thinks of the craziest thing to embarrass his actors and then proceeds to force them to do it.
To date, I have only seen two of his shows on stage, and I guarantee that it will change your perspective. I definitely think that you can get some of the resonance from his current YouTube series The Show Must Go On, where he’s been airing all of his old shows on a weekly basis. As you can guess, it’s a good use of your time if you just want a show that will warm your heart, filling you with an awe of what self-expression can look like. Even then, you have the separation of a recording and being there. It may not seem like much, but there’s something about video that’s comparatively impersonal.
When dealing with Webber, you cannot answer the question of why he’s so revered without actually sitting in an audience. The most noteworthy for me came when I saw The Phantom of the Opera last year at the Segerstrom in Costa Mesa, CA. It’s one of those shows whose reputations precede it. You can’t miss the novelty of the chandelier falling from the ceiling – it’s hanging right above your head. At most you’ll wonder what those drapes covering it are. With that said, when it gets into motion you’re left in awe of how this immerses you in a classical form of opera (though in all honesty, this show is far from the real deal).
It’s THE loudest Webber music in the world. His overture is an organ that bangs through the auditorium and its deep bass rattles your soul. While the story to follow is campy and problematic, you buy into it because Webber is in love with an earnestness that overshadows any of his dumbness. All you have to do is wait for the title song, itself with an incredible stage design that goes from The Phantom and Christine descending into the sewers to rowing on a boat surrounded by dry ice, to a room full of candles. Over the course of five minutes, so much happens and you can’t help but admire the intricacy and commitment to every last detail. If The Phantom walks one step slower, everything is off.
Then it happens. It’s the moment that the show likely will always be remembered for. The Phantom asks Christine to sing for him as his “angel of music.” It’s hard to describe, but it involves holding a high note for a long time. I don’t care if you like the show or not. You can say that the music is garbage, but the way that Christine holds that note defies criticism. It’s amazing, especially once you stop and think of how much training goes into perfecting that. Not just anyone could do it because their voice would be forever scratched. The kicker? There’s still over half of the show to go. No wonder there were THREE alternating Christines on that tour.
You can’t understand why people love The Phantom of the Opera until you see it for yourself. You just can’t. What Webber does is manage to make the experience of seeing an opera come to life. There’s balcony seats onstage, performances within performances, and the best use of surround sound I’ve ever heard. The Phantom is known to wander the halls of a theater, and the way that his voice echoes from one side of the room are effective. Shadows tower over different walls, making him briefly seem like a real phantom. So much of the show convinces you of this absurd premise, and that is where the magic of Webber lies.
If you had to make one parallel of Webber as an artist, it would have to be Michael Bay. There is nothing about their subjects that would arguably be similar, but they both come with these larger-than-life reputations. Bay is the Transformers (2007) guy. He blows things up, uses a grand scale to present his story often with disregard for insightful character development. As a result, he is both hated for dumbing down audiences while others love him for having a singular vision of product-sponsored chaos. I’m not saying that Webber has actors sing songs about Coke machines, but Starlight Express does currently have characters named Brexit, Manga, and SEVERAL characters named after the Rocky (1976) franchise.
That is the thing with him. On a lot of levels, he has created some of the stupidest sounding shows in existence. But you can’t deny that he knows how to market it. Even if you have never seen Cats, there’s a good chance that you recognize its iconography. He has a way of making you talk about his shows as if they’re the most revolutionary thing in the world.
Do you want to see a revue-style show celebrating dance? I sure do! But here’s the catch… they’re all dressed up as cats and they roam the audience.
If you want to get anywhere with Webber, you have to accept that you’re about to watch something appallingly silly. Even his most straightforward show, Evita, has a whole dance number where soldiers sing about how Eva Peron is a slut. It services the story but hearing a militia yell that in unison is quite a moment to witness. Also, the fact that it mixes activism chants with circus melodies is amazing. It’s true that Webber wrote the music and not the lyrics, but his name could sell a busted up couch if you had the right poster design. You don’t go into Evita thinking of Tim Rice as a lyricist. You think of how Webber produced the show and made it what it was.
At the end of the day, I think that there are two ways of looking at it. You can just write him off as one of the worst things to happen to Broadway. He’s not creating art that elevates the form on an intellectual level, but instead appealing to the Goofuses who don’t know what theater is. Want to see kids play their own instruments? Then check out School of Rock. You don’t need to know more than that. This isn’t a Sondheim show like Passion where you need five sentences to even halfway convince someone to show up (but it won the Tony!). You just need to promise spectacle, and they’ll be there.
The older that I get, the more that I admire artists who are able to sell their vision in such a compelling way. While I will admit to loving higher-brow authors more, there is something amazing about being able to have such a clear thesis. Communicating ideas is one of the hardest things for me to do, and in some ways, it has limited my career. That is why figures like Webber are compelling because even as a kid I knew that the cats in Cats wandered the aisle ways during the show. I feel like I’ve seen The Phantom Mask™ a good decade before I saw the show. He has a way of permeating culture and appealing to our basic desires for something compelling.
Do I think he’s created high art? I don’t know. Part of the fun of Broadway theater has always been the spectacle. To go even further back, you look at groups like Rodgers & Hammerstein or Gilbert & Sullivan and you see that theater has always been a bit goofy and meant for the masses to have a moment of escapism. It is only in the 20th century that the more mature and complicated narratives became normalized. For serious stories, you went to plays. For a fun night out, you went to musicals. There have been those nights that I much prefer to just laugh and have fun and to have Webber there has been a wonderful service.
With that said, I truly doubt that I would enjoy his version of Sondheim’s recent “Take Me to the World,” which was 2.5 hours of people singing his work. While there are Webber songs I love, the theatrics are a big part. You loved them because you had to leave your house to see them. At home, they’re just a bit too silly and loses their kitsch after a bit. When the world starts back up, I imagine that Webber shows will be in high demand (like his upcoming Cinderella) because after months of feeling trapped we’re finally free to express ourselves in whatever weird ways we want. It may not make sense, but not everything does. Sometimes we just need to let loose and have fun.
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