Musical Mondays: Lloyd Webber 4

onwards from Phantom

Strictly speaking I should begin with Starlight Express, but the year is running to its close and I can’t be bothered.

Somebody on Substack recently complained about the modern trend to invert older stories and ‘rehabilitate’ the villains by giving them sad biographies, or different priorities, or ‘lived experience’ (which can, after all, cover a multitude of sins). One of these was the Phantom of the Opera.

We moderns do like psychological complexity.

I have some sympathy. This isn’t the venue for theological disputation, but (largely on the principle of privation-of-good) I find it difficult to imagine anything that simply is evil, especially if existence itself is good. Very few people commit acts of evil because they wish to commit acts of evil per se.

That said, the Phantom has opened himself to evil. This is important because it adds serious weight to the plot, or it should. I’m not sure it actually does.

I wrote in MM 1 about ‘Music of the Night,’ which is a little too close to being pretty where it should present the allure of evil. “Close your eyes and surrender to your darkest dreams” is not an invitation you should want anybody to accept. In that sense, the seductive quality of the music could be chilling yet it too often sounds like a romantic ballad. I am almost tempted to conclude that it’s too clever for its own good, but conceivably I’m over-thinking.

As a whole, the show (London 1986, Broadway 1988) is not one of psychological complexity. Bloom & Vlastnik comment that Phantom’s “assets include a soaring score (and a tip of the hat to Mr Puccini),” which, if not exactly damning with faint praise, is not wildly commendatory. Mark Steyn calls it Lloyd Webber’s best score, arguing that “this story and these characters were perfectly matched to his broad, sweeping, soaring melodies.” This too is interesting for what it doesn’t say.

John Kenrick pulls fewer punches: “The lush score featured uninspired, babbling lyrics [by Charles Hart]… Lloyd Webber’s bombastic, sentimental style made no attempts at depth or insight, but it went down easily.” Steyn again: “Go into the Gents at Her Majesty’s Theatre and listen to the guys at the pissoirs: ‘Say you’ll da-da da-da da da da-da…’ It’s a hit tune that has words only because it has to.” (This refers to ‘All I Ask of You,’ the lyrics to which are rose-scented filler from second-rate operetta. I’m more resentful than usual because Charles Hart became enormously wealthy in his twenties as a result of writing lyrics, which nobody really values, to one show).

It was at Yale that I heard Stephen Sondheim, in conversation with someone I can’t remember, use the phrase ‘whistling the scenery’ in reference to Phantom of the Opera. Is it any good? I’ve seen it and enjoyed it but I don’t feel the need to see it again. It’s better than Cats, I guess…

Mark Steyn thought that Aspects of Love (1989) took Lloyd Webber’s ‘sung-through’ style to absurd lengths. Singing every word lessens the value of the actual songs, moving Steyn to comment that this was the first show in which more drinks were ordered in the libretto than the interval. The source is a cheap and shallow novella, which isn’t a great start, and the show produced one-and-a-half memorable songs, lyrics by Don Black and Charles Hart.

“Other pleasures, and I’ve know many; / afternoons in warm Venetian squares” I always felt, semi-seriously, would sound better as “afternoons with warm Venetian squares.” Any genuine cosmopolitan would surely refer to ‘Venetian squares’ as piazzas, whereas we can all imagine having lunch with a warm Venetian square, who would probably treat us to a bottle of wine.

‘Love Changes Everything’ is justly famous, but I still think the lyrics tread water. And anyone writing in English should have been aware that, given the tune, “love changes everything, / hands and faces, earth and sky” will instinctively be heard as “hands and faces, knees and toes.” And anyway, love changes hands??

I just wish Roger Moore hadn’t bailed from the show two weeks before opening. So he couldn’t sing with an orchestra, so what? Rex Harrison learned…

Sunset Boulevard was, to everyone’s surprise, a classical book show, i.e. there was dialogue from which the songs naturally arose. Given the source material, Billy Wilder’s film, this was a sensible decision. Don Black and Christopher Hampton¹ wrote the lyrics and the productions (1993 London, 1994 Broadway) were generally well-received. (Despite this, and despite the fairly long runs, they lost money. This is what comes of worshipping the set design). But the score has hardly entered the popular vocabulary (using ‘popular’ in a very context-specific sense). It might reasonably be argued that any show providing two outstanding songs is doing better than most and, for all I curl a lip at Don Black, ‘With One Look’ and ‘As If We Never Said Goodbye’ are first-rate:

“The whispered conversations in overcrowded hallways
So much to say not just today but always...
We'll have early morning madness
We'll have magic in the making
Yes, everything's as if we never said goodbye”

The great Glenn Close demonstrating that you don’t actually need fancy scenery

This is great because the unusual vocabulary (‘overcrowded hallways’) is both thoroughly natural and also creates a natural rhyme with ‘always’; not only that, but the internal rhyme in the second line (say / today) adds impetus to the emotion. The lack of rhyme in the next three lines would usually annoy me, but - whether consciously or not - this structure repeated throughout the song works very effectively as a sort of liminal agitation between dialogue and song, between silent and sound, between past and present. It’s an advance and a withdrawal, a recapitulation and an assertion, a question and an answer. What might usually be a standard quatrain of resolution is planted half-way through, where it acts not as a climax but as a fulcrum:

“I don't want to be alone
That's all in the past
This world's waited long enough
I've come home at last!”

This is interesting, characterful writing.

And then what happened? Did the culture decide that Lloyd Webber was yesterday’s man? In some sense this was bound to happen as there are fashions in everything. It’s not that his musicals did badly, compared to any normal standard, but they weren’t destined to bed down for years on Broadway. A quick chronological inventory:

Whistle Down the Wind - gave us ‘No Matter What,’ reason enough to ignore it.

The Beautiful Game - Ben Elton was another unwise choice of lyricist.

The Woman in White - ‘I Believe My Heart’ sounds like the prototype for ‘The Song That Goes Like This’ from Spamalot.

Love Never Dies - the Phantom sequel was known as ‘Paint Never Dries.’

Stephen Ward - ran less than four months in the West End (and coincidentally closed on the same day as Tim Rice’s flop, From Here to Eternity).

School of Rock did rather well. I am unfamiliar with this work so my silence should not be taken as implied criticism.

Cinderella - please, everybody, don’t mess with fairy tales. I would (and will) say the same about Sondheim’s Into the Woods.

To repeat, I am no authority to assess Lloyd Webber’s music. I do think that the work of his lyricists has not been of the very top rank, but I do not know the extent to which that can be placed at his door. In consequence, however, his musicals (and most of the sings thereof) are not of the very top rank.

To give him one final piece of credit, the song he and Rice wrote for the film version of Evita, ‘You Must Love Me,’ was better than most songs written for film versions of musicals. The ambiguity of the title is high-grade Rice.

1. The second Lancing alum after Tim Rice to write for Lloyd Webber.