By John Snelson
Andrew Lloyd Webber is the main famous—and such a lot controversial—composer of musical theater alive this day. hundreds and hundreds of thousands of individuals have obvious his musicals, which come with Cats, The Phantom of the Opera, Starlight show, Joseph and the fantastic Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ famous person, Evita, and sundown street. much more recognize his songs.Lloyd Webber’s many awards comprise seven Tonys and 3 Grammys—but he has still been the topic of higher serious vitriol than any of his inventive friends. Why have either the fellow and his paintings provoked such severe responses? Does he problem his audiences, or basically recycle the cozy and well-known? Over 3 a long time, how has Lloyd Webber replaced essentially what a musical can be?In this sustained exam of Lloyd Webber’s inventive occupation, the track pupil John Snelson explores the huge variety of impacts that experience proficient Lloyd Webber’s paintings, from movie, rock, and dad tune to Lloyd Webber’s personal existence tale. This rigorous and sympathetic survey might be crucial interpreting for someone drawn to Lloyd Webber’s musicals and the area of recent musical theater that he has been so instrumental in shaping.
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Additional info for Andrew Lloyd Webber (Yale Broadway Masters Series)
Example text
This is a good example of Lloyd Webber’s refusal to give in to the standard categorizations of music—his best work has always been able to adapt and reinterpret influences from a variety of styles, although he has never actively presented himself as a conscious champion of such developments. With the pop-rock treatment of a classical theme in Variations, Lloyd Webber again showed the influence of British progressive rock and also increased the prominence of an everpresent temporal and cultural duality in his work.
In the clichéd plot, the underdog steam train Rusty loves the glamorous carriage Pearl but must steal her affections away from a rival diesel train, Greaseball (characterized by rock ’n’ roll and macho attitude), by winning a race. But the show became hugely popular, second only to Cats in the West End. 18 06:50 their sustained success. That particular baton seems now to have passed to Disney, with its stage versions of the cartoons Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, for example, and picked up by others even more recently in the West End with the stage adaptation of the fantasy film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
Musically, this threw into much sharper relief Lloyd Webber’s developing propensity for dramatic juxtapositions of styles, used in Jesus Christ Superstar to portray the various factions of the story as well as its central characters. Jesus Christ Superstar had grabbed attention through Lloyd Webber’s inventive musical style—a combination of classical, pop, rock, and musical theater influences—and through the wordplay of Rice’s lyrics, which combined contemporary idiom and historic events. In their common crossgenre attitudes, Rice and Lloyd Webber were well matched.