Andrew Lloyd Webber

• 1. Introduction

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  Andrew Lloyd Webber walked into Her Majesty's Theatre on the 11th of February 2012 to mark a milestone that no Broadway show had ever reached: the 10,000th performance of The Phantom of the Opera. The run would continue for another decade before finally closing on the 16th of April 2023, having played 13,981 performances. No musical in the history of Broadway had lasted longer. How does a composer from a Victorian terrace in west London come to rewrite what a popular musical can be? How does a child who sat down at the piano at age three end up with a catalogue that The New York Times would call the work of "the most commercially successful composer in history"? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. A Musical Household

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  William Lloyd Webber, a composer and organist, and Jean Hermione Johnstone, a violinist and pianist, raised their elder son Andrew at a home steeped in music from the first years of his life. Andrew started playing the piano and the violin at age three, added the French horn shortly after, and was writing his own compositions by the age of six. By the time he was nine he had produced a suite of six pieces. His younger brother Julian would go on to become a world-renowned solo cellist, which hints at how seriously the family took musical training.

  His aunt Viola, an actress, escorted Andrew through stage doors and into the world of live theatre, an experience that proved formative. In his memoir, he recalls his mother's ambition plainly: "mum was determined that I should be a prodigy in something or other." His father enrolled him as a part-time student at the Eric Gilder School of Music in 1963, the same period when he was already drafting a musical about Genghis Khan he called Westonia!.

  From 1960 to 1965 he was a Queen's Scholar at Westminster School, where he absorbed 1960s rock and pop alongside his classical training. He would later name The Rolling Stones song "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" the "best record of the Sixties" and cite Dusty Springfield's rendition of "Son of a Preacher Man" as the song that taught him "the power of a perfect pop song." He briefly read history at Magdalen College, Oxford before abandoning that course in the winter of 1965 to attend the Royal College of Music and pursue musical theatre.

• 3. Tim Rice and the Early Breakthroughs

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  In 1965, a 17-year-old Lloyd Webber was introduced to the 20-year-old aspiring songwriter Tim Rice, and the partnership would prove to be among the most consequential in British musical theatre. Their first project together, The Likes of Us, was an Oliver!-inspired musical built around the true story of Thomas John Barnardo. They produced a demo tape in 1966, but found no backers and the show would not receive a public performance until 2005, when it was staged at Lloyd Webber's Sydmonton Festival.

  The collaboration that did break through came from an unexpected commission. In the summer of 1967, Alan Doggett, a family friend who taught music at the Colet Court school in London, asked Rice and Lloyd Webber to write a short piece for the school's choir. Doggett requested a "pop cantata" in the manner of two recent works published by Novello, and the commission came with a 100-guinea advance. The result was Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, a retelling of the biblical Joseph story in which the pair pastiched Elvis-style rock and roll, Calypso, and country music. Joseph started small, gained a favourable review in The Times on its second staging, and was gradually expanded by Rice and Lloyd Webber through added songs and revised scenes.

  Jesus Christ Superstar followed in 1970 and made the transition from concept album to Broadway stage in 1971. By 1980 it had grossed more than any other musical of its kind, and its London run between 1972 and 1980 set the record for longest-running West End musical at the time. The planned next collaboration with Rice was to have been based on the Jeeves and Wooster novels by P. G. Wodehouse, but Rice withdrew from the project. Lloyd Webber pressed ahead with playwright Alan Ayckbourn, producing the musical Jeeves, which closed after only 38 performances in the West End in 1975. That failure, though, would eventually be revisited: a thoroughly reworked version called By Jeeves followed in 1996.

• 4. Evita and the Parting of Ways

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  Rice and Lloyd Webber reunited to write Evita, a musical portrait of Eva Perón that first reached audiences as a concept album in 1976, with Julie Covington singing the role of Eva. The single "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" became a hit before the stage version even opened. When the musical debuted at the West End's Prince Edward Theatre, it was directed by Harold Prince and starred Elaine Paige in the title role, and it ran for nearly eight years in London.

  Evita transferred to Broadway in 1979 with Patti LuPone as Eva and Mandy Patinkin as Che. The production won seven Tony Awards including Best Musical and ran for almost four years, helping launch the careers of both LuPone and Patinkin. Rice and Lloyd Webber parted ways professionally shortly after, though they would return to each other's orbit on a handful of occasions in the years that followed.

  Even while Evita was still running, Lloyd Webber began exploring new territory. In 1978 he worked with his brother Julian on the Variations, a set of pieces built on the 24th Caprice by Paganini. The album reached number two in the UK pop chart, and its main theme was adopted as the signature tune for ITV's South Bank Show, a programme that ran for 32 years. That same year he also composed a theme for the documentary series Whicker's World and wrote the instrumental "Argentine Melody" for the BBC's coverage of the 1978 FIFA World Cup in Argentina.

• 5. Cats, Phantom, and the Record-Breaking Eighties

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  Cats opened in 1981 and ran for 21 years at its London home, logging 8,949 performances before closing. Lloyd Webber had set aside conventional lyricists entirely, turning to the published poetry of T. S. Eliot as his text. Elaine Paige, who had originated the lead in Evita, created the role of Grizabella in Cats and reached the UK Top 10 with the song "Memory". On Broadway, Cats ran for 18 years, a record that would only be broken by the composer's own next landmark production.

  Starlight Express opened in 1984 to mixed reviews from critics, but audiences were undeterred. It ran for 7,409 performances in London, placing it among the longest-running West End shows, and the German production at a custom-built theatre in Bochum, which opened in 1988, holds the Guinness World Record for most visitors to a musical in a single theatre.

  In 1985, Lloyd Webber premiered a Latin Requiem Mass at St. Thomas Church in New York on the 24th of February, dedicating it to his father William, who had died in 1982. The work was inspired partly by an article he had read about Cambodian orphans. It earned him a Grammy Award in 1986 for best classical composition, and the Pie Jesu was certified silver in the UK Singles Chart.

  The Phantom of the Opera followed in 1986 at Her Majesty's Theatre, adapted from the 1911 Gaston Leroux novel. Lloyd Webber wrote the role of Christine for his then-wife Sarah Brightman, who played it in both the London and Broadway premieres alongside Michael Crawford as the Phantom. Harold Prince directed again, as he had done on Evita. In January 2006, Phantom overtook Cats as the longest-running show in Broadway history, and on the 11th of February 2012 it played its 10,000th Broadway performance. The Broadway production closed on the 16th of April 2023 having totalled 13,981 performances.

• 6. Controversy and Plagiarism Claims

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  Dutch composer Louis Andriessen offered a blunt public assessment of Lloyd Webber, saying he had "yet to think up a single note." The charge of plagiarism has followed Lloyd Webber through his career, and not all of the cases ended in his favour. Lloyd Webber's biographer John Snelson acknowledged a melodic similarity between the andante movement of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in E minor and "I Don't Know How to Love Him" from Jesus Christ Superstar, while arguing that Lloyd Webber brought new dramatic tension and harmonic treatment to the borrowed material.

  Pink Floyd bassist Roger Waters pointed out that the opening organ riff in "The Phantom of the Opera" and the riff in the band's 1971 track "Echoes" share very similar notes in a similar sequence. Waters said the resemblance was "probably actionable" but chose not to pursue it in court. A more formal legal challenge came from the Puccini estate in 1987, which sued Lloyd Webber over similarities between "The Music of the Night" and a recurring melody in Giacomo Puccini's 1910 opera La fanciulla del West. That case was settled out of court with details undisclosed. The songwriter Ray Repp also brought a court claim alleging that Lloyd Webber had taken a melody from his song "Till You"; the court ruled in Lloyd Webber's favour.

  The composer's response to such accusations has tended toward the oblique. Snelson's defence of the Jesus Christ Superstar case noted that whatever the melodic origin, the song "works in its own right as its many performers and audiences can witness" - a pragmatic measure of originality that Lloyd Webber's commercial record broadly supports.

• 7. Life Beyond the Stage

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  Lloyd Webber was born on the 22nd of March 1948 and has been married three times. His first marriage, to Sarah Hugill, took place on the 24th of July 1971 and ended in divorce on the 14th of November 1983. They had two children: Imogen Lloyd Webber, born on the 31st of March 1977, and Nicholas Lloyd Webber, born on the 2nd of July 1979. Nicholas died on the 25th of March 2023 at the age of 43 following an 18-month battle with gastric cancer.

  His second marriage, to the soprano Sarah Brightman on the 22nd of March 1984, ended on the 3rd of January 1990; the two have remained close friends and professional collaborators. His third marriage to Madeleine Gurdon took place on the 9th of February 1991, and together they founded the Watership Down Stud in 1992 and later expanded their equestrian interests by purchasing Kiltinan Castle Stud near Fethard in County Tipperary, Ireland in 1996.

  The Sunday Times Rich List of 2019 ranked him the wealthiest musician in the UK, with a fortune of £820 million, placing him ahead of Paul McCartney. He is a serious art collector with a particular focus on Victorian painting, and an exhibition from his collection at the Royal Academy in 2003 was presented under the title Pre-Raphaelite and Other Masters. A Picasso portrait he owned became the subject of a dispute over its provenance under the Nazi regime; after an out-of-court settlement that left ownership with his foundation, he sold it at auction on the 23rd of June 2010 for £34.7 million.

  In late 2009 he had surgery for early-stage prostate cancer and declared himself cancer-free in January 2010. He has been candid about a lifelong battle with alcoholism, telling The Telegraph in April 2026 that he had been sober for 18 months. He began collecting wine at the age of 15 and has announced a 2026 Christie's auction to sell the remainder of that collection.

• 8. A Career That Keeps Moving

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  Prince Edward, the youngest son of Queen Elizabeth II, commissioned a short musical from Lloyd Webber and Rice in 1986 to mark the Queen's 60th birthday; the result was Cricket, first performed at Windsor Castle. Several of its tunes were repurposed for later shows. That same willingness to treat each project as a source of raw material for the next has characterised much of Lloyd Webber's method.

  In 2016 he became the first musical-theatre composer since 1953 to have four shows running simultaneously on Broadway, a feat previously achieved by his own heroes Rodgers and Hammerstein. In 2018, when Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Variety Special, Lloyd Webber became the thirteenth person to have won an Oscar, an Emmy, a Grammy, and a Tony. His memoir, Unmasked, was published that same year.

  His 2021 musical Cinderella, with a book by Emerald Fennell, earned some of the best reviews of his career. A 2021 feature in Variety noted that he appeared to have been "reanimated creatively" at the age of 73, praising both School of Rock and Cinderella for a "lightness and wit that had been missing from his work." In 2023 he was one of twelve composers invited to write a new piece for the coronation of Charles III and Camilla; his anthem, "Make a Joyful Noise," was performed during the enthronement of Queen Camilla. His next announced musical will adapt the 2006 film The Illusionist, with lyrics by Bruno Major and direction by Jamie Lloyd.