Andrew Lloyd Webber, attended the premiere of the Phantom of the Opera, Madrid Spain
I’ve been a Lloyd Webber tragic since 1993, when my Year 3 class took a trip to see the Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat revival. Most kids came away clutching programmes; I came away convinced that “thinks in leitmotifs” was a normal human setting. By the time puberty hit, I’d graduated from faux-Egyptian calypso to the torrid reveries of Phantom, and a lifelong addiction was sealed.
So yes, shrinking Sir Andrew’s output to ten numbers was always going to feel like ordering a tasting menu at a banquet. Doubling the word-count merely lets me linger on the sauce. One unbreakable edict remains: “All I Ask Of You” is the summit. Everything else can fight for footholds below.
Picture the pitch meeting: “It’s Grand Ole Opry… but sung by a dining-car on roller skates.” Only Lloyd Webber could sail that past the investors without the aid of mind-altering chemicals. Dinah’s honky-tonk lament may spoof Tammy Wynette’s “D.I.V.O.R.C.E.”, but the music isn’t mere parody. Beneath the rhinestone twang sits a surprisingly nimble chord progression, one that sneaks in bluesy flattened thirds before firing off a cheeky diminished run at the punch-line (“Greaseball, that stinking cheat!”).
I saw the Wembley Park revival last year, surrounded by nostalgia-drunk thirty-somethings who’d once been eight-year-old trainspotters. When Dinah landed her outrageous final rhyme, the aisles shook with the kind of laughter you usually only get in theatres where the bar serves spirits by the miniature. It reminded me that Lloyd Webber’s broadest gags are still meticulously engineered, not unlike the bespoke Heelys under the cast’s boots.
Strip away the hydraulics and holograms and Sir Andrew turns chamber-poet. Emma (our unlucky-in-love Brit abroad) begs her current beau to break it to her gently on a Sunday, in the park, under a “grey sky.” The melody looks simple on the page: just two verses, a middle eight, a reprise. But listen closely and you’ll spot the sneaky modal switch on the word “time,” a harmonic cloud that hangs for a beat too long before dissolving back into major sunshine, exactly how denial feels in real time.
Marti Webb’s original recording is my desert-island version. She sings it like someone clinging to civility by her fingernails, every swell buckling under invisible sobs. Years later, I played the track to a friend freshly walloped by a breakup; she stared into the middle distance and murmured, “Just one song and I don’t even need ice-cream.” That, friends, is musical triage.
If rock opera is musical theatre’s adolescent brother noisy, rebellious, fond of questionable leather, then Herod is the drama kid who crashes the garage band’s gig wearing sequins and smuggling Freddie Mercury licks. The tune slithers between F-major honky-tonk and A-minor sleaze, as Tim Rice’s lyrics dare Jesus to perform miracles on command.
What I love is the cunning placement. We’ve just witnessed the Gethsemane anguish; the audience is primed for martyrdom. Instead, Lloyd Webber detonates a comedic hand-grenade, reminding us that cruelty often wears the mask of mockery. In Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, Tyrone Huntley’s Herod literally emerged from a backstage hot-tub, cocktail in hand, while a gospel choir side-eyed him from bleachers. It shouldn’t work. It absolutely does.
Whenever someone claims Lloyd Webber can’t do irony, I point them at this tango-tinted waltz. Che croons praise so silky it practically blushes, but the string pizzicatos snip holes in every compliment. Those high violin harmonics on “Did you believe in your wildest moments” mimic camera flashbulbs, adoration as interrogation.
I’ve replayed this track a lot during the age of influencer culture. Eva’s rise is intoxicating because it feels earned; Che’s warning is bitter because it’s true. No wonder the song found a second life in political campaign adverts, half the punters don’t realise it’s a takedown.
Confession: I once tried to learn the entire Mistoffelees choreography in my parents’ kitchen and cracked a light fitting with an over-committed jazz hand. Worth it. The trick of this number is its cumulative illusion: a verse that resets to tonic each time, giving the impression we’re stuck in harmless repetition, until the orchestra suddenly vaults a whole tone and the cat literally explodes into sparkles.
Musically, the magic lies in syncopation. The off-beat accents mimic sleight-of-hand; you hear one thing, then the accent arrives a hair early and presto! your expectation’s been palmed. Marketing departments pay millions to neuroscientists for that kind of brain-hack.
Joe Gillis’s title track always felt like a good noir sax solo away from perfection. Enter Jamie Lloyd’s 2023 revival: cameras, monochrome video feed, Tom Francis prowling through stage-door and out on to the grimy pavements of Soho as the orchestra snarled inside. Suddenly the score’s luscious minor sixths sounded like sirens, and Gillis’s cynicism felt painfully present.
Look at the chord under “The promises we made were not enough.” It’s a hot-wired C-major over a walking bass in A-flat, the musical equivalent of smiling through gritted teeth. Few composers write moral dissonance quite so literally.
Time to acknowledge the elephant in the orchestra pit: Lloyd Webber writes bangers. “Superstar” is built on a two-chord vamp that your brain recognises before the first downbeat. Add a choir chanting the syllables “Je-sus Christ / Su-per-star,” and you’ve got the prototype for every arena anthem from “We Will Rock You” to “Seven Nation Army.”
I’ve heard everything from ska versions to a 90s techno remix (file under “gloriously sacrilegious”). But nothing beats a full brass section punching out that D-minor riff while confetti cannons baptise the mosh-pit.
Yes, it’s been weaponised by talent-show hopefuls for decades. Yes, you probably know the modulation by muscle memory. None of that alters the fact that Trevor Nunn’s lyric grafted Eliot’s melancholic fragments onto a chord sequence so inevitable it feels carved into bedrock.
The master-stroke is the cyclical root movement: A, C, F, A♭ a circle that never quite resolves. Grizabella is trapped in her reminiscence; the song refuses to let her out. When that final B-flat arrives, it’s less a climax than a mercy killing. My first live encounter left me shaking like a cat in a thunderstorm, and I still flinch whenever an amateur revue queues up the backing track.
Before “Let It Go” hijacked every karaoke booth, there was Eva on the balcony, arms outstretched, a kingdom of Peróns inside her head. What fascinates me is how sly the melody is. The opening line hovers on the dominant for four bars suspense, withheld resolution mirroring a politician’s calculated pause before the applause line.
City folklore claims the Palladium’s roof tiles rattled when Patti LuPone first belted the final “Argentinaaa!” in ’79. Modern sound design has spared the infrastructure but not the goose-bumps. Watching Rachel Zegler deliver it to random Soho pedestrians this season, I realised the number’s true genius: it doesn’t belong in the theatre. It belongs in the square, weaponised as public address.
And so to the pinnacle. In act one, Lloyd Webber deploys all the gothic Sturm und Drang the 80s could muster: pipe-organ ostinati, synth arpeggios like phosphorescent cobwebs. Then, amid the candle-lit chaos, he gifts us a barcarolle so pristine it floats.
The secret is counterpoint. Raoul enters in E-major, Christine answers in B-major, and their lines entwine until, miraculously, they resolve on the same pitch. It’s musical marriage counselling: start separate, compromise, land together. No wonder wedding pianists keep photocopies in their gig bags.
I’ve seen Phantom on three continents. In Seoul, the couple sang in Korean and English simultaneously; in Hamburg, the staging perched them on an opera-house roof while a live snow-machine dusted the audience. Yet the emotional punch never varies. The final crescendo on “Say you’ll share with me one love, one lifetime” triggers adrenal fireworks even when I merely hum it on the commute. Proof, if any were needed, that sincerity wins the long game.
Could I have squeezed in “Gethsemane”, “Love Changes Everything”, or Whistle Down the Wind’s underrated title track? Absolutely—and tomorrow my ranking might shuffle like Starlight’s race-cars. That’s the curse and blessing of a composer who’s written more earworms than some national anthems.
But for now, this list stands, twice as verbose, hopefully twice as fun, and ready for your counter-arguments. Fetch your cast recordings, make yourself a strong tea, and let’s duel it out in the comments. Theatre, after all, is a contact sport.
Photo Credit: DepositPhotos.com
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