The most successful British musical in history is, of course, a completely ludicrous document of ’80s excess. Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat airs on Friday April 3. We’re now firmly into the Andrew Lloyd Webber-Tim Rice zone, where everything is just better. ![]() But don’t judge a coat by its (many, many) colours: underneath the gaudy trappings, this show is stuffed with high drama and endlessly catchy songs. ![]() This Biblical musical has a whiff of naffness to it. Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat But although it probably still lacks a definitive production, ‘Sunset Boulevard’ is a truly claustrophobic and intense take on Billy Wilder’s classic film noir. Lloyd Webber musicals often feel like they’re on uncertain ground when operating on a smaller, more intimate, more human scale. But it’s full of memorable moments, and is more at ease with itself than the terrifying-looking upcoming film adaptation. Yes, it’s three hours of felines singing in a dump. CatsĪs iconic as it is annoying, as genius as it is dumb, ‘Cats’ is in some ways the pivotal musical in Lloyd Webber’s career, the start of his post-Tim Rice commercial-juggernaut phase. But a deliberately low-key 1996 rework was thoroughly charming and became a modest success. An unlikely collaboration with playwright Alan Ayckbourn, this PG Wodehouse adaptation flopped hard in 1975. Lloyd Webber has several hits that feel like failures, but ‘By Jeeves’ is perhaps his only failure that feels like a hit. But amid the befuddlement, the show’s emotive piano-led score has moments of real magic. This show is undeniably icky: the first half’s très Francais incestuous grapplings give way to a second half where a man falls in love with a literal baby, and struggles to wait until she’s 15 (!?) to woo her. But its smug evangelism for baby boomer rock is painful. Look, the tunes in ‘School of Rock’ are very decent, and you would have to be a monster not to adore the axe-toting child performers. It’s an excuse for Lloyd Webber to indulge his taste for Victorian frills, with mixed results: its female characters are feminist but a bit drippy, the music swings between enjoyable pastiche and insipid pastiche. This 2004 crack at the West End is inspired by a pacy Wilkie Collins novel. Alas, Don Black’s lyrics don’t show the sharpest of insights into the female psyche. In a succession of gorgeously subtle pop ballads, a young woman stands alone on stage and sings about getting her heart broken by the cheating cads of New York. This hour-long song cycle is about as understated as Lloyd Webber gets. The Wizard of OzĪ bit of a weird one: this 2011 musical marked Lloyd Webber’s first project with Tim Rice in aeons – yay! But it was also explicitly an adaptation of the iconic 1939 film, retaining all of its original songs, and much of the script – hmm! The result was solid enough, but essentially underwhelming. This sequel to ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ looked good but lacked its predecessor’s campy panache or killer tunes. No, it’s not as bad as everybody says it was. But this first priapic, then self-righteous romp through the Swinging Sixties isn’t it. Maybe there is a good musical to be made from the scandal of the eponymous society osteopath, destroyed by the Profumo Affair. ![]() In reality, this adaptation of the classic Brit flick – torturously transposed to the American South – was ponderous and dull. On paper, the pairing of Lloyd Webber and MeatLoaf’s songwriter Jim Steinman sounded agreeably bombastic. Teaming up with Ben Elton to write a very earnest original story about Ireland during The Troubles is possibly as bad an idea as either of them have ever had, and they have both had some truly terrible ideas. The Beautiful GameĮven at their worst, the truth is Lloyd Webber’s scores are rarely the main problem with his musicals, but his choice of lyricists not named ‘Tim Rice’ is often catastrophic. It runs permanently in a custom-built arena in a German city called Bochum: they can keep it. Why? Sure, the standard response is, ‘It’s for kids.’ But honestly, our nation’s youth have enough on their plates without having to worry about the love lives of a bunch of frisky steam engines. Read on to see where they stand in the artist’s back catalogue and which shows you really have to look out for over on YouTube in the coming weeks. Forthcoming smash-hits will include ‘Cats’ and ‘The Phantom of the Opera’. With the news that Andrew Lloyd Webber’s much-loved musicals will be streaming to a global audience, what better time to rank his shows? From tonight, a different play by the composer will be streaming for free each week on dedicated YouTube channel The Show Must Go On!.
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