The show must go on

WHEN Andrew Lloyd Webber turned up in Newcastle at the beginning of September to talk to a few journalists about the British touring production of his 1993 version of Sunset Boulevard, much of the conversation focused on the theatrical peer’s oft-quoted pronouncements on the demise of the Big Musical and his new-found enthusiasm for the form following an unlikely collaboration with Ben Elton on The Beautiful Game.

A fortnight later I find myself in Lord Lloyd Webber’s office at the Really Useful Group’s headquarters in London and initially the talk is not so much about what form the new shows will take, rather how long those cash-cow behemoths of music theatre - principally Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera and Schonberg and Boublil’s Les Miserables - can survive an industry in crisis.

It has been just over a week since the New York and Washington terrorist attacks rocked the world and, like so many of the other statistics released in the wake of September 11, the numbers from New York’s theatre district are simultaneously unbelievable and all too real. In what has been clearly the worst week in Broadway history, five shows closed and half a dozen others - all long-running hits with large casts - look very vulnerable. A few nights before our meeting Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera, produced on Broadway by Cameron Mackintosh, took a performance gross of just over 16,500, down almost 59,000 from the same night the previous week, the day before the attacks. According to most estimates, the industry has lost between 3m and 5m in one week. With the long-running shows relying on out-of-town visitors and Broadway’s traditionally high operating costs (Phantom needs to take 600,000 a week to break even) as Lloyd Webber says, "it isn’t suddenly going to get better".

Yet that hasn’t stopped him from playing the white knight. Goodspeed Musicals’ production of Lloyd Webber’s By Jeeves was one of the first theatrical casualties announced when two major backers withdrew following September 11. But Lloyd Webber has decided to press on regardless, assembling the 1.5m production costs "with the help of a few friends".

"I have had a great innings on Broadway," he tells me. "So I think showing solidarity and bringing in a plucky little Brit show is just something that has to be done. Of course, we have to face the fact that it will probably lose every penny."

Of course, if anyone could afford to prop up a plucky little Brit show, it is Lord Lloyd Webber. The composer of global theatrical hits like Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, Cats and Phantom of the Opera, Lloyd Webber is apparently worth something in the region of 550m. His enormous wealth has enabled him to indulge his non-theatrical interests. A serious wine connoisseur, his cellar is legendary and he has spent millions on an impressive art collection. "Was it 10m?" he asked a journalist who queried the price he paid for his Canaletto. "I thought it was 16m." Lately, encouraged by his third wife Madeleine, he has developed an interest in racehorses.

Yet musical theatre is his greatest passion - and it isn’t just his own compositions which enthuse him. Bombay Dreams, the next Lloyd Webber show to hit the West End next summer, will not be his own composition but the work of the man he calls "the most famous living Indian", AR Rahman.

"He is the most extraordinary melodist to come along in years," says Lloyd Webber of Bollywood’s most successful tunesmith. "And he has produced this hugely melodic score - a real West End musical, not some funny little Hindi curiosity. Actually, we keep telling him it needs to be a bit more Hindi again. I think the public will love it."

Whether the critics will like Bombay Dreams is, of course, another matter. Lloyd Webber has long since inured himself to the critical brickbats he has tended to attract - either for his compositions (generally accompanied by accusations of their derivative nature), his appearance (all those Phantom jokes) or his political leanings (the alleged - and he says misquoted - "I’ll leave Britain if Labour gets in" remark).

He freely admits that some of his early melodies had an unfortunately familiar ring. "‘I Don’t Know How to Love Him’ sounds like the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto," he says. "It does and there’s no way I can possibly claim it doesn’t." But he assures me he scrupulously checks his scores to make sure nothing has "seeped through". As to his appearance; in the public spotlight Lloyd Webber does look uncomfortably awkward as he nervously acknowledges an award or bumbles through an end-of-show speech. Yet in person he seems much more relaxed and affable - easy with the small talk and theatrical gossip. The Phantom jibes won’t go away, but his former wife Sarah Brightman has helped him have the last laugh. Asked recently on Graham Norton’s Channel Four chat show why she married someone who wasn’t "the prettiest boy in the playground", Brightman retorted "but he has the biggest willy".

Is it true, I ask Lord Lloyd Webber. "Of course," he replies. Well, as Mandy Rice-Davies once said, he would say that, wouldn’t he? But I get the feeling he’s rather pleased I asked.

Andrew Lloyd Webber is full of surprises. He certainly arched a few theatrical eyebrows when he teamed up with Ben Elton on The Beautiful Game. With a knee-capping and a sectarian murder, this tragic tale centred around a Catholic football team in Belfast is a far cry from the crashing chandeliers, trains on roller skates and feline pranksters of Lloyd Webber’s most popular shows. But it was his association with the Tory-bashing Elton that came as the biggest surprise.

"I’m not really a Tory at heart," Lloyd Webber tells me. "I voted with the Labour Government on Clause 28. It wasn’t so much the propaganda part - it was all that nonsense about homosexual couples not being allowed to bring up children. I happen to know several gay couples I’d be perfectly happy to let bring up my kids if Madeleine and I went under a bus."

The irony in the fact that The Beautiful Game, which closed in September after a year in the West End, is the show which has earned him his most respectful reviews is not lost on Lloyd Webber. "Neither Ben nor I thought it was remotely a commercial show - maybe we should have let the National Theatre do it." Yet if he has any real regrets he masks them behind the pride he has in the piece and sense of regeneration it has brought him. "I was fed up with it all after Whistle Down the Wind. I was repeating myself and bored with musicals. Working with Ben has made me rethink where I am coming from musically."

Where he will now go he won’t say. He remains convinced that the days of the blockbuster musical are over, despite the apparent success of Disney with Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King. "Disney get very cross with me when I say this, but their shows don’t need to be economically viable - they get the money back in ways that have nothing to do with live theatre. Lion King is not a show that can ever be in profit. Aida won’t get its 16m back."

He has had his own fingers burned a few times. Sunset Boulevard, which famously featured as much off-stage as on-stage drama, would still be running in the West End now, says Lloyd Webber, if it hadn’t cost so much to stage (and presumably if he hadn’t had to fork of 1m to Patty LuPone in compensation for giving the promised Broadway role to Glenn Close instead). Fraught with difficulties and burdened with a set that really did give credence to accusations that audiences come out of mega-musicals humming the hydraulics, Sunset Boulevard has, says Lloyd Webber, emerged in Robert Carson’s new staging as a "leaner, more effective production".

Lloyd Webber is reluctant to say where Sunset Boulevard sits in his canon. "The show are like children. It is impossible to say which I like more. You can’t compare it to Cats or Starlight - which everyone knows hasn’t got a brain in its head - but of the ‘grown-up’ musicals I think Sunset takes a bit of beating. I think it is probably the best book and lyrics [by Don Black and Christopher Hampton] I have ever had."

Which reminds him: "You know, I’ve got more music stock-piled right now than I have ever had in my career. I just can’t find a subject I like. I need to talk to Chris and Don."

Unlike Norma Desmond - and despite all the rumours which suggest the contrary - Andrew Lloyd Webber is not ready for that long close-up and fade to titles just yet. n

Sunset Boulevard, Edinburgh Playhouse

(0870 6063424), Tuesday to January 12; Whistle Down the Wind, Edinburgh Festival Theatre (0131-529 6000), January 21 to February 2