It's not often that a "pop" journalist seeks a private audience with a Lord. But this, my right Honourable readers of the Irish Times, is precisely what happens only hours before the first preview of The Beautiful Game, Andrew Lloyd Webber's new musical, which is set in Ireland. Sorry, Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber. Or "The Lord Lloyd-Webber" to cull a line from his personal notepaper. Come to think of it, it's not often a British Lord pens music for a drama that deals, even peripherally, with the situation in Northern Ireland. But that we'll get to later.
Right now, as Webber fumbles to find the pause button on a CD player in his London West End office, he looks not Lordlike but humble. As though he really is genuinely anxious to hear a music critic's evaluation of his latest "big ballad". But then Webber also is often described as "excruciatingly shy". And self-conscious. He certainly walks back across the room as if expecting those merciless puppet-makers from Spitting Image to reappear at any moment and mock even, well, the way he walks. It's hard to believe this is the man who composed two of the most popular musicals of all time. Cats and Phantom of The Opera - the latter, as he proudly reminds me, the "highest grossing entertainment in history". So why doesn't that fact alone give him supreme self confidence?
"That's a good question but I don't know the answer!" says Webber, smiling. "Yet even though I am shy, I'm a lot better than I was 20 years ago. Up until that time I'd worked with Tim Rice and he'd do all the up-front PR stuff, something I never enjoyed. But then I did Cats, which was based on T.S. Eliot's verse, and given that Eliot himself wasn't around to help me publicise the show, I had to overcome my shyness! To a degree. Then again, I always feel my job, really, is writing, composing, producing shows. I still don't enjoy doing all this PR stuff."
Namely, meeting the media. And that is understandable. After all, ever since his first collaboration with lyricist Tim Rice, on Joseph and his Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, which was premiered in London in 1968 when its composer was just 20, Webber has been less than the darling of music critics. This despite some of his more innovative ideas, such as the sung-through structure of Jesus Christ Superstar, the liberal politics at the heart of Evita, the focus on dance in Cats and the Puccini-like, highromance of Phantom of The Opera. Plus the string of top-ten singles these shows produced, such as Any Dream Will Do, Don't Cry For Me Argentina, Memory, All I Ask of You, Pie Jesu and No Matter What.
Does it bother Webber that his more savage critics claim that apart from a few "memorable melodies", his music is, frankly, awful? "That kind of response does bother me because I don't think it's true," he responds, growing slightly defensive. "Even in terms of later works like Whistle Down The Wind, which, though it was criticised, got a dozen raves! Likewise, the New York Times review of Sunset Boulevard was a love letter! And there is a lot more that goes into composing these shows than, perhaps, people realise. Cats, for example, starts with a fugue. And for The Beautiful Game I had to write a form of football music. In fact, I'm always eager to try something new."
But isn't there also the view that Andrew Lloyd Webber may have grown a little "flabby" of late, artistically. And that he probably needed a new co-writer, such as Ben Elton, who wrote The Beautiful Game, to challenge him at a creative level, push him in new directions? "I would agree with that," he says, unhesitatingly. "I felt, very acutely, that I was just treading water when I did Whistle Down The Wind, though I loved the show. So when Ben came along and offered me a new story, I thought, `I've a writer here who will challenge me!' Even the fact that it was a new story rather than an adaptation was a challenge. Because most musicals are adaptations of other works."
Webber's latest show, The Beautiful Game has its roots in a BBC documentary Webber watched "about children in Belfast, who played football together around 1969", and he "had the idea of looking at how, something that is beyond people's control, alters their lives". The fact that Webber doesn't refer specifically to "The Troubles" is, itself, revealing. Either way, he says that Elton's "gritty, near-the-knuckle" tale does focus on "Catholic working class kids, living in a war-zone, who are quite normal and just want to shag their girlfriends, play football and get pissed, yet get sucked into the conflict".
And he claims the work is "actually a metaphor about the nature of these conflicts and how young people respond. Some are enriched, some turn to violence. As such it is, ultimately, a tragedy and unlike any subject I've seen addressed in a musical before." This, to Andrew Lloyd Webber, apart from the "avant-garde nature of some of the music" is the "real challenge" in The Beautiful Game. He's "totally aware" of the dangers in tackling a subject as sensitive as Northern Ireland. So much so, that talk of opening the show in Belfast came to nothing.
"As I say, what Ben has written is universal and not necessarily about Belfast," he explains. "Whereas opening the musical there would have locked the subject matter too specifically in Northern Ireland. It could just as well have been set in Kosovo, Palestine, wherever. The politics in Northern Ireland is not, really, what this musical is all about. What it says, in the end, is that the human spirit wants to love in peace." This, no doubt, will sound like a cop-out to some people. But no, says Andrew Lloyd Webber, who now has a home in Ireland and reveals that The Beautiful Game recently had "an extensive cabaret" run in Dublin for, in part, "tough, Irish-Americans who we were hoping would invest in the show and they said it was great, brave of us to tackle the subject at all".
This trial-run also led to the fact that the "Ireland Fund, who donate large amounts of money to help in places like Omagh" will be the main beneficiary from the musical's gala opening in London next Tuesday. Tellingly enough, despite Webber's immense wealth and the fact that The Beautiful Game is "relatively small scale" and will cost "only £2.8 million" his company, the Really Useful Group, did need that potential Irish-American cash and does have "a lot of Irish investment" including the "single biggest private investor". The investment was needed partly because Webber's company has just spent £87 million on the Stoll Moss playhouses, meaning he now owns no less than 13 theatres. So what is he trying to do, colonise London's West End? At least in terms of musical theatre?
"Actually, we co-own those theatres," he says, laughing. "The money came from a bench-capitalist firm, not us. And they would be very unhappy if they thought our company was being shown any favouritism at all. But I, myself, do have a 50 per cent investment and hope that in six or seven years we can buy them out. We can't at the moment because we are £35 million in debt, because I had to buy back a 30 per cent interest Seagram and Polygram had. We bought that for £50 million and we're paying a million pounds to the bank every quarter. At that level, too, there is a hell of a lot riding on The Beautiful Game. I haven't had anything since Phantom that reached that scale of success. And though, I know, nothing will be as big as the Phantom, if this were a total disaster it would be very difficult for me to raise the money, myself, to do another musical."
It's all relative. Phantom of The Opera grossed $3 billion globally, and Cats $2 billion. But Andrew Lloyd Webber is decidedly pragmatic when it comes to such phenomenal successes. "A Cats and a Phantom come along very infrequently," he says. "When I did Phantom Of The Opera I thought it was a great, high romance and a fun yarn, but I didn't think it would become the highest-grossing entertainment of any sort, anywhere. But a Phantom comes only once in a lifetime."
So do certain love affairs. And the kind of romantics that make up the millions who adore Webber's music would probably say that the one major difference between Phantom of The Opera and all of his works since is that it was "at its heart" a love letter to Sarah Brightman. Indeed, even he agrees that this layer of "authenticity" probably was important, to whatever degree, to the musical's success.
"The only show I did write for a particular person was Phantom, which I wrote for Sarah when I was married to her. The score was written for her voice. And, in my opinion, no one has done it better. But then how am I going to argue with the success of Phantom? It probably is the most romantic musical ever. And it did come from a true impulse. But one also cares about the characters in, say, The Beautiful Game. What I have to try to do, as a composer, is express a genuine affection for all these characters, though the music. Whether I'm successful or not is for other people to decide."
Likewise for Lord Lloyd-Webber's latest "big ballad", Our Kind Of Love which, in fact, is quite beautiful. But will it be a charttopper? That, too, as Webber says, is for "other people" to decide.