Marginal Maestro For All His Success, Andrew Lloyd Webber Makes Music That Fails To Reach Us
The story goes that the night Oscar Hammerstein II died in 1960, the entire cast of “The Sound of Music” - which was still playing on Broadway - gathered onstage after that evening’s performance and wept.
They wept, according to one cast member’s account, not because they had all known Hammerstein personally but because they felt somebody and something important had been taken from them.
I thought about this story after a week or so of listening to the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Lloyd Webber is clearly the most successful composer of musical theater of our time, maybe ever. His shows - “The Phantom of the Opera,” “Cats,” “Evita,” “Sunset Boulevard” and a half-dozen others - have earned him millions, some say billions, of dollars.
Yet the place that his music occupies in our collective heart seems weirdly negligible. He seems to be a rich and famous composer whose music is not really liked very much.
In fact, for all the capacity of his shows to lure people into theaters, the songs themselves actually arouse a kind of anger in certain listeners.
Especially critics.
Margo Jefferson, a New York Times theater critic, spoke for a lot of her colleagues recently in a Sunday piece: “Mr. Lloyd Webber is a composer of lurid, melodramatic surfaces. His music has never shown itself capable of emotional depth or wit.”
She went on to characterize the score of “Sunset Boulevard,” Lloyd Webber’s current Tony-winning blockbuster, as “abysmal.”
Those aren’t words of mere disappointment or uninterest. They’re words of derision, indignation.
But forget critics. Regular people, too, have a tenuous relationship with Lloyd Webber’s music, even while they pour out many dollars to witness the spectacles his music accompanies.
Think about this for a moment: Lloyd Webber has roughly 10 shows in currency, including several of the most lucrative in history. But how many of the hundred-odd songs from those shows have become true standards, well-loved chestnuts of the sort that people gather around and bellow at parties or campfires or in bathtubs?
A tiny number, really. “Memory,” perhaps; “Music of the Night,” maybe, along with “That’s All I Ask of You.” And “I Don’t Know How To Love Him,” which made it onto the pop charts in two versions almost a quarter century ago. But even these, I would wager, could not be negotiated all the way through by many regular folks.
How to explain this? How can Lloyd Webber be so successful while his songs fail to reach us?
A few thoughts:
There is a vague recycled quality to many of Lloyd Webber’s songs. Another way of expressing this is that Lloyd Webber has, possibly unconsciously, and well within the permissible guidelines of plagiarism law, lifted musical ideas from others.
Within the music theater world, this issue has become a kind of dark standing joke. On one of the public forums on the Internet, devoted to musical theater issues, several popular files are reserved exclusively for the sport of tracing Lloyd Webber tunes to their suspected source of, uh, inspiration.
The lyrics to Lloyd Webber songs are, more often than not, weak. This may not be that noticeable in our age of generalized bad musical theater lyrics. But Lloyd Webber’s tunes would certainly be easier to take to our bosom, and to stick there, if they were set to more enterprising lines than “Try not to get worried, try not to turn on to problems that upset you, oh don’t you know everything’s alright (sic).”
Other reasons Lloyd Webber’s tunes may have difficulty taking their place as standards lie outside the music itself.
For one, the Broadway musical has been marginalized within the mass musical culture. A generation ago, the tunes from “West Side Story” or “My Fair Lady” were all over the radio dial as soon as the show opened. The TV variety shows, notably Ed Sullivan, would also furnish a national showcase for these songs. As a result, everybody knew them, whether they had seen the show or not.
Today, the nearly exclusive rock orientation of most radio stations, as well as MTV and VH1, locks out music that isn’t perceived as belonging to one of the industry’s narrowly drawn pop/rock formats.
Finally, maybe we as audiences have just become a little jaded. We’re jaded by spectacle, a point that has been amply made with reference to Lloyd Webber’s ever more bloated theatrical creations, particularly “Sunset Boulevard.”
We’re maybe also jaded by the magnitude of his empire, and his vast resultant wealth, which we are simultaneously titillated by and resentful of. We think that this empire should bestow on us a transcendent experience each time we step into the theater.
“A lot of this comes down to expectations,” says Ken Mandelbaum, the critic for Theater Week magazine.
“‘Phantom’ is not a great musical, but it’s really quite an attractive show, and much of the music works really well within the context of the work. Isn’t that enough?”
The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Steve Metcalf The Hartford Courant