Andrew Lloyd Webber

Andrew Lloyd Webber was born on March 22, 1948, in Kensington, London, into a household saturated with music ^[1]. His father, William Lloyd Webber, was a composer and organist who later directed the London College of Music, and his mother, Jean Johnstone, taught piano. His younger brother, Julian Lloyd Webber, became one of Britain's best known cellists ^[2].

Music came early and obsessively. As a boy he built a toy theatre at home and staged miniature productions, played several instruments, and began writing his own pieces before he reached his teens ^[1]. He attended Westminster School as a Queen's Scholar and went up to Magdalen College, Oxford, to read history in 1965. Oxford held him only briefly. Within a term he had left to concentrate on writing musicals, a decision his family accepted with some unease but which set the course of his career ^[2].

The decisive event of these years was a letter. In 1965 a young lyricist named Tim Rice wrote to Lloyd Webber after hearing that he was looking for a collaborator with a gift for words. The two began working together almost immediately, and the partnership would produce some of the most commercially successful musicals ever staged ^[3].

The first Rice and Lloyd Webber project, a musical called The Likes of Us about the Victorian philanthropist Thomas Barnardo, was written in the mid 1960s but went unproduced for decades ^[3]. Their breakthrough came from an unlikely commission. In 1968 a London school asked for a short cantata for its end of term concert, and the pair delivered Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, a retelling of the biblical Joseph story in a cheerful patchwork of pop styles. The piece grew steadily through revivals and expansions until it became a full length show performed around the world ^[1].

Jesus Christ Superstar changed everything. Unable to raise money for a stage production, Rice and Lloyd Webber recorded the work as a concept album in 1970. The record became a major hit, particularly in the United States, and the show opened on Broadway in 1971 before reaching London the following year ^[4]. A rock opera about the last days of Jesus drew protests from some religious groups, but it also drew enormous audiences, and the London production ran for eight years.

Evita followed the same album-first route. Released as a record in 1976 and staged in London in 1978, the musical dramatized the life of Eva Perón and gave the world the song Don't Cry for Me Argentina. The 1979 Broadway production won seven Tony Awards, including Best Musical, and confirmed that the Rice and Lloyd Webber partnership could dominate theatre on both continents ^[4]. It was, however, effectively their last full collaboration on a new stage work for many years, as the two men drifted toward separate projects.

Anyone asking who was Andrew Lloyd Webber at his commercial peak need only look at the 1980s. Cats, based on T. S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, opened in London in 1981 and in New York in 1982. Produced with Cameron Mackintosh and directed by Trevor Nunn, it ran for 21 years in the West End and 18 on Broadway, where it held the record as the longest running show in Broadway history until one of Lloyd Webber's own musicals overtook it ^[5]. The song Memory, with lyrics completed by Nunn, became a standard recorded by hundreds of singers.

Starlight Express, a roller-skating spectacle about racing trains, opened in 1984 and enjoyed exceptionally long runs in London and in a purpose-built theatre in Bochum, Germany, where it has played continuously since 1988 ^[1]. Then came The Phantom of the Opera. Opening in London in 1986 with Michael Crawford and Sarah Brightman in the lead roles, and on Broadway in 1988, Phantom became the most financially successful entertainment property of its era on stage. The Broadway production ran until 2023, closing after 35 years as the longest running show in Broadway history ^[6].

Later works never quite matched that scale, but several found substantial audiences. Aspects of Love appeared in 1989, and Sunset Boulevard, adapted from the Billy Wilder film, won the Tony Award for Best Musical in 1995 ^[4]. Among the most significant Andrew Lloyd Webber achievements away from composition is the Really Useful Group, the company he founded in 1977 to control his copyrights and productions, and through which he came to own several historic London theatres, including the Palladium and the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, which he restored at great expense ^[7]. His trophy shelf reflects the range of his work: an Academy Award for the song You Must Love Me from the 1996 film of Evita, a Grammy for the Requiem he wrote in memory of his father, multiple Tony and Olivier Awards, and in 2018 an Emmy that made him one of the few people to hold all four major American entertainment awards ^[4].

Lloyd Webber has married three times. His first wife, Sarah Hugill, whom he married in 1971, was the mother of his two eldest children. In 1984 he married the singer Sarah Brightman, for whom he wrote the role of Christine in The Phantom of the Opera and the soprano part in his Requiem; the marriage ended in 1990 ^[2]. In 1991 he married Madeleine Gurdon, an equestrian and businesswoman, with whom he has three children and who has taken a leading role in managing his business interests ^[7].

Outside music, his best known passion is Victorian art. Over several decades he assembled one of the finest private collections of Pre-Raphaelite painting in existence, and selections from it were exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2003 ^[8]. He has also been open about health struggles, including prostate cancer in 2009 and repeated back problems, subjects he discussed in his 2018 memoir Unmasked ^[9].

Public honours arrived steadily. He was knighted in 1992, and in 1997 he was created a life peer as Baron Lloyd-Webber of Sydmonton, taking a seat in the House of Lords ^[1]. His country estate at Sydmonton in Hampshire hosts an annual festival at which he has tried out new work in front of invited audiences since the 1970s.

The composer's output since 2000 has mixed new musicals with stewardship of his catalogue. The Woman in White appeared in 2004, and Love Never Dies, a sequel to The Phantom of the Opera, opened in London in 2010 to divided reviews ^[1]. School of Rock, adapted from the 2003 film, opened on Broadway in 2015 and gave him his first new Broadway hit in years; notably, it opened in New York before London, reversing his usual pattern ^[4]. Cinderella, later retitled Bad Cinderella for New York, premiered in London in 2021 during the disruptions of the pandemic.

Television brought him a different kind of visibility. Beginning in 2006 with How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?, he appeared as a judge on a series of BBC casting shows that selected unknown performers for West End revivals of The Sound of Music, Joseph, Oliver! and The Wizard of Oz, making him a familiar face to audiences who had never bought a theatre ticket ^[2].

During the coronavirus shutdowns of 2020 and 2021 he became one of the loudest public advocates for reopening British theatres, volunteering his venues for trial performances and pressing the government over the economics of the shutdown ^[10]. In 2023 he experienced private grief when his elder son, Nicholas Lloyd Webber, himself a composer, died of gastric cancer at the age of 43, shortly before the Broadway opening of Bad Cinderella ^[10].

Few figures have altered the economics of theatre as thoroughly. The sung-through pop musicals Lloyd Webber wrote in the 1970s and 1980s, marketed globally with identical productions in multiple cities, helped create the modern megamusical, a model later followed by shows such as Les Misérables and Miss Saigon ^[5]. At various points in the 1990s his musicals ran simultaneously in dozens of cities, and by common estimates hundreds of millions of people have seen his shows worldwide ^[1].

Critical opinion has never been unanimous. Some reviewers have found his scores derivative or sentimental, and the gap between his popular success and his critical standing has been a running theme of writing about him for decades ^[2]. Defenders point to the durability of the melodies, the theatrical daring of subjects ranging from crucifixion to railway trains, and the sheer difficulty of holding mass audiences across fifty years.

Basic Andrew Lloyd Webber facts secure his place regardless of taste: composer of some of the longest running shows in the history of both the West End and Broadway, winner of the Oscar, Grammy, Emmy, and Tony, owner and restorer of historic London theatres, and a working composer across seven decades ^[4]. Through the Andrew Lloyd Webber Foundation he has also funded arts training and music education for students who could not otherwise afford it, an investment in the audiences and performers who will inherit the theatres he spent a lifetime filling ^[7].