(He won’t say what it was.) “But I had to keep myself from thinking that way,” Lloyd Webber once told me. Lloyd Webber read “Skimbleshanks: The Railway Cat,” and had a pretty good idea of the song Eliot was listening to at the time. As it turned out, Eliot often wrote his poems while listening to popular tunes of the day. He solved the problem by finding a dead one. So Lloyd Webber was looking for a lyricist. As a mutual friend once said, Lloyd Webber was happiest when he was working Rice was happiest when the work was done. With lyricist Tim Rice he’d had two big hits, Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita, but by 1980 their relationship was strained. Lloyd Webber began work on Cats at an uncertain moment in his career. In New York, where it opened a year later, it is the musical that shook Broadway out of its financial doldrums and put it on the road to becoming the multibillion-dollar global entertainment engine it is today. In London, where it opened in 1981, it lifted the West End out of a crippling recession. (Roy Cohn’s synopsis: “ Cats! It’s about cats! Singing cats!”) But love it or loathe it, there’s no denying the profound impact Cats has had on the entertainment business. John Guare made it the butt of a joke in Six Degrees of Separation, as did Tony Kushner in Angels in America. Theater critics and other elites have long disdained it. But snipping and snickering are nothing new for Cats. Two trailers have dropped, with the CGI fur on the actors and the female cats’ human breasts causing all sorts of sniping and snickering on social media. The latest incarnation of the juggernaut is Tom Hooper’s movie. A friend of Lloyd Webber’s says that whenever the composer walks into a restaurant in Europe where an orchestra is playing, the conductor invariably strikes up the tune. Its take-home tune, “Memory,” is the most lucrative song ever to come out of the musical theater. Cats has grossed nearly $3 billion worldwide. Lloyd Webber thought it might be fun to set some of the poems to music, as William Walton had done with Edith Sitwell’s poems in Façade - An Entertainment, and over time his idea grew into a full-fledged musical. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. Rather than pull his score, Lloyd Webber kept frustration at bay by reciting to himself the poem “Macavity the Mystery Cat” from one of his favorite childhood books, T.S. As Elaine Paige was attempting to sing “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” during tech for Evita in 1978, the Casa Rosada - the set with the balcony where Evita sings - broke down. The moment always passes, but everybody who’s worked with him knows that, sooner or later, the “I’m pulling my score!” moment will come during tech.Īnd yet it’s to one of those rehearsals that Lloyd Webber owes an idea for a show that has made him the richest composer in the history of the theater. He’s been known to get so frustrated that he’ll announce, “I’m pulling my score!” Sometimes he jumps into the orchestra pit, gathers up the sheet music and storms out of the theater. The slow pace, the stopping and starting as stagehands and designers fiddle with sound and lighting cues, and the inevitable breakdown of the set “redefine watching paint dry,” he writes in his charming memoir, Unmasked. Andrew Lloyd Webber hates technical rehearsals.
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