Culture Vultures: Andrew Lord Hyphen
Steyn, Mark
CULTURE VULTURES by Mark Steyn Andrew Lord Hyphen A „ ndrew Lloyd Webber's music is everywhere," sniffed Malcolm Williamson, distinguished Australian composer and Master of the Queen's Musick,...
...I remember, a year or two back, at a party thrown by Sir David Frost, having a chat with Tim Rice, Lloyd Webber's old partner (and now a Disney lyricist), and Bob Geldof, lead singer of the Boomtown Rats and organizer of the Band Aid rock benefits for Ethiopia...
...Sooner or later he'll come across another subject that, like Phantom, is perfectly suited to that broad, soaring, gloopy operetta style...
...If Rich thinks Disney is now stealing his clothes, he—and the studio—is missing the point...
...Instead, he only emphasized how drearily blinkered Broadway's view of itself is...
...And, to his credit, at least Frank loathes the Brit-hits: wander into a theatrical bookstore and you find that most Broadway buffs find the subject too distasteful even to raise...
...Like the other major studios, it has sufficient clout and big enough marketing budgets to hype its blockbusters into terrific opening weekends...
...The reason Cats is a hit is nothing to do with synergy...
...and, above all, the Broadway show queens, those fans of Kern, Porter, and Rodgers who've watched aghast as he's inherited by default...
...Correspondence...
...But good grief: you can't even switch on the O.J...
...He meant this to sound liberating and exciting, inclusive and expansive...
...In fact, Cats is bigger than any motion picture ever...
...Take, for example, the Lloyd Webber hyphen...
...As it turned out, it wasn't necessary: students of the finer points of correct form in Britain may care to note that, if you're referring to "the new musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber," he remains a hyphen-free zone, but, if you say "The Lord Lloyd-Webber of Sydmonton graciously received His Excellency Mr...
...Does anyone seriously think that tasteful bores like Titanic, this year's "Best Musical," represent any kind of future for Broadway...
...Twister, say...
...it has no stars to place on the "Tonight Show" or People covers...
...To showtoon connoisseurs, the packed Winter Garden (Cats) and Majestic Theater (Phantom) are like unpumped septic tanks: sure, they're at capacity, but you can't avoid the smell...
...Do you realize," Sir Bob Geldof said to me, with his twinkling Irish charm, "you're the only one of us without a fokking knighthood, you useless fokker...
...And, for once, you have to believe him...
...77 buster Phantom to the so-so Aspects of Love to the megaflop Sunset Boulevard...
...For the past fifteen years, Lloyd Webber has been more ubiquitous than even Williamson could have imagined: In the O.J...
...Can you remember a single thing about last summer's record-breaking box-office-smashes...
...Boutros Boutros-Ghali," then full dress hyphens will be worn...
...The other week, in his maiden speech in the House of Lords, Lord Lloyd-Webber urged the British Government not to sign up to various European labor directives, pointing out that, in Germany, Cats required twice as many people backstage as it did in London...
...As Lloyd Webber's monniker has gotten grander—from Mister to Sir Andrew to Lord Hyphen —the shows have gotten smaller—from the block-44 It's easy to despise Lloyd Webber for his cats and roller-skaters and crashing chandeliers, but what's Broadway got to offer in return...
...the whitest composer on the planet...
...50 August r997 • The American Spectator You can't blame Frank for gloating...
...Well, yes...
...Sir Andrew...
...In the middle of June, Cats became the longest-running Broadway show ever —which would seem to be pretty good news for Andrew...
...was humming and softly singing to himself—the big ballad from Cats: "Mem-reeeee All alone in the moonlight...
...The question now is whether, like Mobutu, his Presidency-for-life is crumbling...
...But he could have made the same point about Broadway...
...Broadway passes itself off as the embodiment of boundless American energy—"You're going out there a youngster but you've got to come back a star...
...Compare that with the Rosie O'Donnell Tony Awards show for CBS, in which Rosie's movie-star pals were flown to New York to present Best Lighting Design awards to people they'd never heard of for plays they'd never seen and toreminisce solemnly about the seminal impact being taken by Aunt Vera to see a summer-stock production of Brigadoon had had on them and how, without it, they'd never have been able to pull off the role of the deranged alien serial-killer in Robocop u. The Tonies couldn't have cooked up a better example of how deeply ingrained the theater's inferiority complex is if they'd tried...
...Just think of it: Broadway's all-time longest-runner is a British musical...
...Is there any more selfregarding form than the modern Broadway musical...
...the classical crowd, who resent his assumption that he's just like Mozart, only more versatile...
...the secret of its success is...
...Theater is now almost invisible in the wider media culture: it's not covered by Entertainment Weekly or "Entertainment Tonight...
...But, in a New York Times column headlined "Cats and Mouse," Frank Rich marked the 6,138th performance by suggesting that Lloyd Webber was a sad, bewildered, marginalized figure: he'd made Broadway safe for "theme-park theater" but had now been swept aside by Disney...
...The secret of Cats' success is not the Burger King meal tie-in or how many ABC affiliates you can contra-deal the advertising on...
...In Britain, his company has posted losses of £io million, and downsized two-thirds of the workforce...
...Whatever happens, success or failure, I'll still be there...
...In other words, he was merely a transitional figure — Kerensky to Disney's Lenin...
...I was a schmuck at school because I liked The Sound of Music," he once told me...
...Williamson's line pretty well sums up the feeling not just of critics but also of rockers, who mock Lloyd Webber's Top 4o forays...
...And then, a few months ago, Her Majesty the Queen made Andrew a peer of the realm, and it transpired that one of the minor addenda to the rules of the English peerage is that a baron cannot have more than one surname: Lloyd Webber, as he then was, thought about it for ten minutes and announced that henceforth he would be known as "Lord Lloyd-Webber...
...But then so is AIDS...
...Just a couple of days earlier, with the connivance of City Hall and the usual fawning coverage from ABC, the Disney Channel, etc., Disney had taken over most of midtown Manhattan for a combined launch —of their new film Hercules, of the newly Disneyfied 4znd Street, of their flagship theater the New Amsterdam, and of their forthcoming stage musical King David...
...Broadway is supposed to be ruthlessly commercial, but it's only so in the nickels'n'dimes sense of a second-hand car dealer...
...It's easy to despise Lloyd Webber for his cats and roller-skaters and crashing chandeliers, but what's Broadway got to offer in return...
...Into that vacuum came Lloyd Webber...
...That's fine for the theater's approved minorities: gays, blacks, feminists, and Sondheim fans...
...Kushner, Wolfe, Wasserstein, and Sondheim...
...But four weeks later the blockbusters are dead as dead can be...
...Of all the many inconsistencies in his amazing career, none has involved as spectacular a U-turn as this...
...Lloyd Webber, scoffed Rich, could never match that kind of synergy...
...It's true, too, that Lloyd Webber has had a few stumbles of late...
...But, then, what else would you expect from that hyphenated peerage...
...Try and imagine how long your average motion picture would survive under those limitations...
...responded Sir Tim, with an elaborate Gilbert-and-Sullivan bow...
...His new musical, Whistle Down the Wind, after a critically panned Washington tryout, has had its Broadway opening indefinitely postponed...
...For a start, forget who stopped more traffic in midtown or got more coverage on the it o'clock news: Cats is a bigger hit than Disney's Hercules will ever be...
...Playing in just a few dozen theaters around the world, it's managed to gross over $2.2 billion, more than ET and Jurassic Park combined (the same is true of Phantom...
...trial without hearing Lloyd Webber...
...trial, what was it reporters overheard when the defendant finally broke his long silence...
...CULTURE VULTURES by Mark Steyn Andrew Lord Hyphen A „ ndrew Lloyd Webber's music is everywhere," sniffed Malcolm Williamson, distinguished Australian composer and Master of the Queen's Musick, in 3.992...
...For that reason, I'd still bet on Lloyd Webber...
...But what about everyone else...
...honestly, Frank) the show...
...Not so long ago, a British musical on Broadway would be lucky to run until the Second Act...
...The point is whether the Lloyd Webber hyphen is, like Samson's haircut, of more than merely cosmetic significance: Does it portend the same kind of imperial overstretch as has afflicted, say, the equally hastily hyphenated Time-Warner...
...It's content to pitch ever more desperate revivals to ever declining numbers of blue-rinse matinee ladies, but it would never occur to its leading producers, as it did to Lloyd Webber and Cameron Mackintosh, that there were big bucks to be made in Bratislava and Budapest and everywhere else...
...It must be extremely irritating, if you're the soi-disant "Butcher of Broadway," with a readership as culturally craven as that of the Times, to be faced with a guy who's immune to your powers...
...But stick a hyphen in the middle of his name, and he'd come at you with both barrels...
...The "experimental" stuff manages to be even more parochial: Sondheim doesn't travel beyond Manhattan, and Rent is a ragbag of clappedout Village clichés—performance artists, transsexuals, AIDS, etc...
...Ever since the dawn of the industrial revolution, British entrepreneurialism in whatever field has always been atrophied by respectability...
...These days, synergy is all Disney has...
...After (Continued on page 79) The American Spectator • August 1997 51 (Continued from page 51-) the 1994 Tony telecast, Frank Rich suggested in the Times that next year's show should be written and cast by Tony Kushner, George Wolfe, Wendy Wasserstein, and Stephen Sondheim...
...Theater is largely discussed as an activity for losers—specialized, sickly, requiring protection and government subsidy and tax relief...
...He's probably right on the whole, AIDS gets a better press...
...Lloyd Webber approached: "Sir Timothy," he cried, with mock formality...
...Only Frank Rich would prefer Disney to the Cats man...
...A Chorus Line is about American showbiz, 42nd Street is about American showbiz, The Will Rogers Follies is about American showbiz, City of Angels is about American showbiz...and they wonder why the rest of the world isn't interested...
...Musical theater is the only thing that's ever made me tick...
...Yet Lloyd Webber has used it as a springboard to world domination...
...These last couple of decades haven't been easy for him...
...A week later, I happened to be on a TV show with Williamson and he apologized because the comparison was offensive—to people with AIDS...
...It reminds him of his children, said O.J...
...but, in fact, it's a particularly malign example of un-American unionized over-regulated torpor...
...Sunset Boulevard was crippled by seven-figure out-ofcourt payoffs to disaffected leading ladies Patti LuPone and Faye Dunaway, and its final tally is a $20 million loss—making it the most expensive flop of all time...
...Meanwhile, his third marriage —to an upper-middle-class horsey gel—has proved disappointingly stable to those hoping he was shooting for the only Broadway record he hasn't broken, Most Ex-Wives Receiving Alimony Checks From a Single Musical (holder: the late Alan Jay Lerner, author of My Fair Lady and husband to eight fair ladies...
...B ut if this is, as Rich insists, the end of the line, he deserves a better appraisal than the Times seems ready to give him...
...But I wonder if this isn't part of the process by which instinctive populism gets seduced into bland corporate complacency...
...If it was merely a stunt, Johnnie Cochran would surely have suggested something by Aretha or some other African-American role model, rather than a weedy British middle-class Anglican, MARK STEYN is theater critic of the New Criterion and movie critic of the Spectator of London...
...Once upon a time, if a critic or a playbill editor or a liner-notes writer referred to him as "Andrew Lloyd-Webber," he could expect to be ferociously denounced by the composer for failing even to get his name right...
...At the Academy Awards, collecting an Oscar for Evita, he moved at ease among the Spielbergs and Cruises...
...Cats, on the other hand, has been playing continuously in London for almost two decades, impervious to fashion...
...Dismiss Cats as a heap of junk, say that the main theme from Phantom of the Opera sounds like the descending chords Sylvester used to creep up on Tweety-Pie, suggest that the title role—a hideous misfit arrogant enough to believe that his music is the greatest the world has ever known—is obviously autobiographical, do all that and more, and he's cool...
...Recently, I was sent the final proofs for a book of mine that mentions him a zillion times, written just prior to his ennoblement: my assistant said she'd take the front and if I worked my way from the back maybe it'd only take us a week and a half to stick in all thehyphens...
...the very term "British musical" was an oxymoron...
Vol. 30 • August 1997 • No. 8
