Love Never Dies: - in defence of Andrew Lloyd Webber

Last Friday night, May 27th, at approximately 8pm, I was very excited.  Jen and I were sitting in the centre of Row AAA, the very front row of the Regent Theatre in Melbourne, to see the final preview performance of Andrew Lloyd Webber's latest offering, Love Never Dies.  I was wrapt.  My palms were sweaty, I wriggled around in my seat, my pulse raced and my eyes darted around the auditorium in eager expectation. 

This may or may not make sense to you, depending on how long you've known me.  See, for the last ten years or so, my heart, music-theatre-wise, has well and truly belonged to the school of Sondheim, and his pupils, Guettel, Ricky Ian Gordon, Josh Schmidt et al (but not very many 'al', I'm sorry to say).  These guys write deeply moving works of music theatre in which song, lyric and book are seamlessly integrated.  They write profoundly existential works (of course it's not cool enough to be "existential" anymore, one has to be profoundly so).  They write great works of literature, not the synth-bashing melodramas of the '80s that filled lyric theatre stages around the world for the better part of that overblown decade and the one that followed, the epic big-spender shows of Lloyd Webber and Cameron Mackintosh, particularly.  I openly scoffed and shook my head and wagged my finger at Lloyd Webber's bombastic Top 40 hits, his choice of increasingly invisible lyricists and his flagrant pilfering of tunes he had already used in his own shows.  I knew, in my head, that it was wrong to love Andrew Lloyd Webber...

...but all the time my head said "no", my heart said "aww, come on, he's not that bad!".  And I found that I harboured a secret desire: in between repeated listenings of Floyd Collins, Sweeney Todd and Assassins came a desire to listen to "Amigos Para Siempre" one more time, to reimagine how I would stage the first 20 minutes of Aspects of Love, to sing High Flying Adored with the same ridiculous faux-Argentinian accent I used at the school music recital in Grade 10. 

You see, I was once a full-blooded Lloyd Webber fan.  The fascination dates to February 14th, 1997, when my parents took the family to see The Phantom of the Opera - first balcony, third row back, stage left - my first experience of professional theatre.  Actually, I think it really began with "The Premiere Collection - Encore" CD, which my grandparents owned and a copy of which I still own today - an anthology of songs from Lloyd Webber shows, not just covers of hits, most notable for its inclusion of Peter Cousens singing "Love Changes Everything", including a fantastic "Why did I go back to see her?" just before the key change.  If you know the show you'll know why that's fantastic, but even if you don't, I hope you can understand that it is this inclusion of "why did I go back to see her?" that stands out in my mind as the place where I really began to get excited about musical theatre.  See, in every other version of the song, you hear "nothing in the world will ever be the same" followed by the key change, but in Cousen's cover, as in the show itself, it's "nothing in the world will ever be the same" followed by "Why did I go back to see her?", followed by the key change and it's just the most brilliant moment because up till then you've just been listening to a nice song about an abstract principle, but suddenly, it gets DRAMATIC!  Suddenly there's another character.  Suddenly we have a need to know - who is she?  What happened the first time he saw her?  Why did he go back?  And we're hooked.  And the music surges and the key changes and we are lifted to new heights of dramatic possibilities. 

That's why I love the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber.  That's why I support Love Never Dies, even though the book contains serious dramaturgical flaws that haven't been rectified since the London production (which is its main problem, incidentally.  It has a fantastic set, some great tunes and some wonderful performances, but the book flails.  For all other niggles and naggles with the show, just refer back to that.  A bad book is the root of all evil in the world of musical theatre.  That's my review of LND right there.  In totality).  That's why, when I'm 80, I'll still be listening to Lloyd Webber's music.  I'll admit it's partly about nostalgia.  I'll admit that Lloyd Webber is a victim of his own success.  But at the end of the day, I like a lot of his music (even if it belonged to Bach or Puccini first), and so do a lot of other people.  What other criteria is there for popular culture?  And must popular culture always be reprehensible?  I think not. 

So there!