Smoochy Secrets from the Stars - SARAH BRIGHTMAN Jackie No. 857 June 7 1980

Pop Goes Shy Sarah  You Mail on Sunday Magazine 23 March 1986

Nightingale / Lyric, Hammersmith  23 December 1982 Financial Times (London, England)

The Phantom and the Chorus Girl European Travel & Life January / February 1988

Buxton Festival Financial Times Limited 10 August 1982

The Opera of the Phantom - Vanity Fair February 1988

 Sarah Brightman's new single Him - Record Mirror 30 July 1983

 The Perils Of Being Mrs. Andrew Lloyd Webber - Glamour March 1988

 Song & Dance - Radio Times August 1984

Living in Close Harmony in a Most musical marriage to ALW Hello!  13 May 1989

Sarah Brightman Before & After - Record Mirror dated 13 April 1985 

 Sarah Brightman article - title and paper unknown - 1988 / 89

Some of our favourite stars reveal the secrets of their first kiss

"When I was only twelve I was in a West End show called "I And Albert" I fell in love with one of the boys who was in the show and one day he actually kissed me. It was in the cloakroom and when it was over I really thought I knew everything."

Buxton Festival (article thanks to Christina)

Copyright 1982 The Financial Times Limited UK 10 August 1982 BYLINE: Arthur Jacobs

The way that the Buxton Festival has built itself into a cheerful, participatory event as well as one of artistic importance was well displayed in its closing hours on Sunday night. At the Opera House, British singers and instrumentalists plus Hungarian dancers were performing Kodaly's The Spinning Room, with a BBC recording van in attendance. Outside in the square, Morris dancers preluded the performance and in the interval the local brass band was playing. Afterwards the drizzling rain could not dowse the enthusiasm of the torch-light processions in which both the Morris dancers and the bands reappeared to greet the emerging patrons of the festival performance.

After the earlier, spectacular staging of Kodaly's Hary Janos which provided the great success of this year's festival, The Spinning Room itself was something of a disappointment in what was optimistically promised as a "British operatic premier," in an English translation by Elisabeth Lockwood. Operatic it was not. The instrumentalists of the Manchester Camerata occupied most of the stage, and the Sheffield Philharmonic Chorus stood in rows at the back, their sounds insufficiently powerful against the orchestra. In one small corner area to the right of the conductor (Anthony Hose), the four costumed principal figures appeared, with five male Hungarian folk-dancers making their passage round them. Kodaly's little opera, some 80 minutes long and full of delightful folk music arrangements, deserves either proper staging or a careful concert presentation.

In such restrictive circumstances it was particularly awkward to load one singer with two parts quite separate in the score -- the woman whose lover has fled with the police on his heels, and the neighbour who comes with her fellow-villagers to offer songs and dances during the man's absence. Linda Ormiston did splendidly in attempting this impossible task, with clear, expressive words and appropriate actions to match her richness of musical tone.

Even more of a novelty, indeed a first performance of an unexpected kind was Nightingale by Charles Strouse. The composer of Annie has written (both words and music) a work for child audiences which is a genuine opera, not a musical; it does not depend on amplified voices or on a relentless beat, or on the repetition of obviously catchy tunes. Harmonically it is quite inventive, especially the beginning of the second of two short acts. But the cast of adults and local children were wisely chosen not for operatic reasons (voice plus whatever else you can get) but also for acting and dancing ability and for being the right shape and size.

Sarah Brightman (late of Pan's People and, more recently, Cats) was in all ways a most attractive nightingale, showing no sign of strain in mounting to a high D, only a semitone short of Joan Sutherland's favoured top note. The mechanical bird as sung by Robyn Alexander and delightfully costumed by Claire Lyth provided a richly comic touch. Dwarfed by imperial guards, Linda Kitchen was an appealing maidservant and Peter Knapp contributed an Emperor correctly free of caricature.

Nightingale / Lyric, Hammersmith (article thanks to Christina)

Copyright 1982 The Financial Times Limited   23 December 23 1982 Financial Times UK BYLINE: Michael Coveney
 

We look to the Lyric each year for the unexpectedly enchanting by the way of seasonal shows, and this lively little opera by Charles Strouse, perhaps best known for the scores of Bye Bye Birdie, Applause and Annie, fits the bill perfectly. Like Arthur Jacobs earlier this year at the Buxton Festival, I welcome a beguiling new addition to the children's opera repertoire.

Children do appear in Peter James's production, as scarlet policemen, exotic animals and peasants of China. But Mr Strouse's score calls for mature operatic voices, and these are readily available. Andrew Shore's Narrator, Gordon Sandison's Emperor and Sarah Brightman's chirpy little grey nightingale are all performances of the first rank.

The story, derived from Hans Christian Andersen, is a moral fable about the nonsense of singing, or loving, to order. The sickly Emperor yearns for the nightingale to sing to him alone. One capturing her, he places her in a bamboo cage. She restores him to health and explains in one of several limber melodic numbers, that for a song to be beautiful, the singer must be free.

She then escapes and the Emperor installs a mechanical bird, plans to build the Great Wall and is suddenly confronted with the figure of Death.  All he in fact ever builds, along with Death and the returning nightingale, is a wonderful wall of sound, the construction of which entails the triumph of Life, an explosion of lanterns and tumbling, and the arrival of a carnival dragon.

These simple elements contrive to produce a ravishing spectacle, in which the costumes of Julia Fletcher and the designer, Jenny Tiramani, are seen to advantage against a moving landscape of red hexagonal structures and a forest of coiled wire foliage. Mr Strouse allows himself some jovial lapses into Broadway harmonics, but the overriding musical groove is reminiscent of Sondheim's Pacific Overtures: plan gently Oriental and tantalisingly melodious.

Interesting demands are made on each singer, but never at the expense of the story or a clear vocal line. There is nothing flashy, cheap or obvious about this musical. It may not even be ideal for the children this Christmas. But it is a serious and touching piece of work that repays attention and, I would imagine, a second hearing.

Sarah Brightman's new single Him

Robin Smith Record Mirror 30 July 1983

SARAH BRIGHTMAN’S life is a bigger soap opera than an episode of ‘Flamingo Road’. 

The sweet young thing with her single ‘Him’ is desperately in love with multi millionaire composer Andrew Lloyd Webber. The only trouble is that they’re both already married, but they’re planning to get divorces.

"Andrew and I are meant for each other I don t feel like a scarlet woman" says Sarah “You can’t feel guilty about falling in love.”

Her demure looks are a bit of a change from her days with Hot Gossip, when she used to bump and grind through steamy dance routines and her first hit single ‘I Lost My Heart To A Starship Trooper’. Andrew’s not exactly a dashing heartthrob himself, but he could be described as cuddly and he does have a huge mansion in Berkshire where the blissful couple are hoping to live.

Born in 1960, Sarah went to stage school to study all types of dance, drama and singing. She’s appeared in many musicals, including Andrew’s latest money spinner ‘Cats’.

And with her passionate love affair, she’s certainly getting the cream

Song & Dance - Radio Times August 1984

Ace British composer Andrew Lloyd Webber thinks he has found the perfect combination for the BBC screening of his musical Song and Dance: the popular dancer Wayne Sleep and his own wife Sarah.   He explains why to Peter Silverton

Making a Song and Dance - Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Song and Dance

Bank Holiday Monday 9.0o pm BBC1

‘IT’S JUST occurred to me this morning that, if. I’m not much mistaken. . .‘  - Andrew Lloyd Webber’s voice is not so much a stutter as the continuous, stumble of a toddler running full pelt across broken ground — ‘... it’s the 50th anniversary this year of the Rachmaninov Paganini, Rhapsody on the Theme of Paganini: 1934, 1 think. In which case it’s the 50th anniversary the greatest variation ever written on anything. Variation Nineteen is the greatest thing ever done in that form.’

The judgment is delivered with blunt but joyous finality. Lloyd Webber is a great  or as he would say, a really very extraordinary - enthusiast, never one to “choose a mere adjective when there’s a superlative for the savoury. His sense of politeness is also much too finely ‘tuned for him to remind the listener of the Lloyd Webber Variations on Paganini. Written for his cellist brother Julian, who described them as ‘the best piece of cello music since Benjamin Britten’ (love of understatement is clearly not a family tradition), they provide the music for both the second (dance) half of the Song and Dance diptych and the newly-composed ‘Unexpected song’ of the first (song) section.

Included for the first time in this video recording of a live show especially staged at London’s Palace Theatre, his ‘Unexpected song’ could only be added because Lloyd Webber was provided with a new singer, one with a three-octave range:   Sarah Brightman, former dancer with Hot Gossip, the voice behind the number six hit ‘I lost my heart to a starship trooper’ and the second Mrs Lloyd Webber.   Not, he insists, his choice but that of RCA/Columbia who financed the recording for the American home video market and who had been impressed by Sarah’s performance on the popular Merv Griffin Show.

Marti Webb was the original singer of the first solo half ‘Tell me on a Sunday’, the story of an English girl working in a New York hairdresser’s. But Sarah had the advantage of being younger than Marti. Webber urged the director,, Tom Gutteridge of The Hot Shoe Show, to put Sarah through the most rigorous of auditions. Then, after concurring with the casting of Wayne  Sleep as the lead dancer of the second half— a role he created  and writing some new sections with his lyricist, Don Black, he bowed out. ‘I thought it was all too, too, too...’ The stumble became a tumble. ‘.. . embarrassing.’ He twitched in his seat, more like a schoolboy than a multimillionaire talking on the astroturf roof of his extensive Soho offices, just round the corner from the Palace for which he paid £1,300,000 last year. Crumpled  clothes, hair, smile  and extremely freckled, he was basking in the pleasure of having just presented his new piece, a requiem mass, at the private arts festival which he holds each year in the grounds of his Berkshire country estate.

He watched the recording of Song and Dance with his ‘kids’ from the front row of the circle. ‘I tried to be quite detached about the whole thing but once Sarah started and got going, it was a very strange Sensation for me. On the one hand, I kept thinking this is very good and feeling genuinely pleased with her. On the other, increasingly feeling desperately nervous. It was the first time she’d ever gene out on stage and delivered a piece like that. It was like going to the first night again.

‘As it went on, it was so obviously gaining momentum that I kept thinking, well, something must go wrong. But the version they have is absolutely it. It’s not some sort of fiddled-around-with version. It is that performance. Blow me down if three days later it there isn’t this huge piece in the’ ‘Daily Telegraph by John Barber.’ Although no critics had been invited to the taping Barber had sneaked in. ‘This could be,’ he’d wrote, ‘a new star — not a word I use lightly.’ Webber continues: ‘At which point one gets a phone call from h the BBC saying can we see this video? If somebody had said to me eight weeks ago, just before this video was being made, that there would be a possibility of the thing to being shown on a major national television special I would have said, honestly, no way. As with everything about Song and Dance, the amusing thing is that it was completely unintended.’

Serendipity would indeed make an apt subtitle for Song and Dance. The song cycle, Tell Me on a Sunday, was dashed off by Webber and Black during breaks in   rehearsals for the New York pro- production of Cats. The dance was choreographed to fit the already composed Variations. Ironically,  these are Webber’s only two pieces of work to be included  in the Classical Record Guide.

Originally intended to fill a three-month gap in the Palace Theatre’s schedule, the resultant show — more a concert than a musical — had its run extended to six, then nine months, a year, and finally two years. The enthusiastic reception of the video ha rekindled interest in a Broadway production. Although vague soundings had been made before it was clear it needed considerable sharpening, some fleshing out of the girl’s character and ideally — her involvement in the all-dance second half.

Webber, who considers the connection between the show’s two halves the key to its success, has produced two new links for this version: the musical one of ‘Un­expected song’, the emotional one of a tiny hint at the end of the second half— the story of ‘a man looking for a relationship’ — that he does one day find the girl of his dreams and she is.  - the girl of the first half.

As in the original production of the show, the man is danced by Wayne Sleep-’quite simply, probably the most tech­nically remarkable dancer I have ever seen,’ was Lloyd Webber’s typically rococo claim. Sleep’s only being as high as a centipede’s eye has certainly made it difficult for him to establish him­self as a dancer and Webber thinks Song and Dance was the catalyst for his subsequent enormous success. His enthusiasm for Sleep’s performance — particularly its ‘Chaplinesque quality’ — in this version exceeds even his original estimation.

‘I must say I’ve never seen him pull the stops out to the degree he did on that Saturday night. I don’t remember, even when it first opened, him doing one as good as that. We’re very lucky because he’s a dancer at the absolute height of his powers now.’

If music is Webber’s full-time passion, Victorian architecture is his part-time passion. Recording the show at the Palace meant an. irresistible combination of pas­sions: his music, his wife, his Victorian theatre — which he’s recently begun the long and ex­pensive task of restoring.

Lloyd Webber is excited by the prospect. As he is by the video. ‘I think Tom Gutteridge has found a very clever way of doing something which I’ve never seen done properly before. He’s managed to find a way of getting it to appear that the performer is playing to the camera when it’s to the audience. It’s opened the door to the possibility of taking musicals which are perhaps a bit cumbersome to the cinema’s.

Sarah Brightman Before & After

Record Mirror dated 13 April 1985 

FROM DEEP within our vaults, in the rusty box marked ‘stars before they married multi millionaires’, our team of experts have discovered some interesting photographs of Sarah Brightman.

As she warbles ‘ Pie Jesu’, Sarah looks as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, but a few years ago she was a raunchy dancer with Hot Gossip and she had quite a hit with 'I Lost My Heart To A Starship Trooper’. Then she married Andrew Lloyds Bank — sorry Andrew Lloyd Webber, that man who’s written so many hit musicals that he makes a flyer every time he breathes in.

The happy couple share a cosy love nest somewhere in the country.

Born in 1960, Sarah studied all types of dance, drama and singing at stage school, and she’s appeared in hubby’s biggest money spinner ‘Cats’.

Don’t you agree she looks pretty purrfect in these pictures,

Pop Goes Shy Sarah

You Mail on Sunday Magazine 23 March 1986

Sarah Brightman is like a frightened doe expecting the sound of a shot. You can tell by her eyes she is certain the bullet is meant for her. She even sits in her chair nervously, a very serious child-woman waiting for the wounding question to be fired. Suddenly, she hears the crack of a hunting rifle.

‘I don’t want to get into this conversation,’ she says, those big eyes wary and her little hands clenched into baby fists. It is hardly a secret that Sarah Brightman has been bruised mightily by press interviews and criticism since she emerged from the relative anonymity of Cats into the harsh spotlight which was bound to follow the woman for whom Andrew Lloyd Webber left his wife. It comes as no surprise, therefore, when she stutters to a halt and remains still, just staring.  But then she answers.

‘I am a very shy person,’ she says. ‘I don’t find it easy if a lot of people come to stay or when I meet a lot of different people. But we are all frightened, we all have the same feelings, no matter what success you have had or how rich you are.’

Sarah Brightman wants very much to be liked — another trait she shares with almost everyone else — and she demonstrates this immediately by scurrying away to make tea because there is nobody else on hand to do it. Dressed in white boiler suit and jacket and black boots, she disappears into the depths of her husband’s office suite, high inside the Webber-owned Palace Theatre in London, and returns with tea and that apprehensive smile.

She is at ease only when talking about her work; about the success of the past, the demands of Lloyd Webber’s Requiem, which currently occupies much of her time, and the progress being made with The Phantom of the Opera, for the London stage this year. She recently returned from Chicago and another Requiem performance. It seems a punishing schedule.

‘Compared with what classical artists do, I don’t think so,’ she says. ‘I shall do three more Requiem performances and then that’s enough. The Phantom of the Opera will take up this year. I’ve been offered things for next year, classical things which I don’t want to do because I’m still training my voice. I’m not ready for a full opera yet — I must. continue to train the gifts I’ve been given by God or whoever.’

Whatever sniping there has been at 25-year-old Miss Brightman, rarely has it been directed at her talent. She is a fine dancer and has a voice blessed by angels. She also possesses a fierce ambition, the force that has been driving her since she was a child. ‘When I was very young I wanted to be a ballet dancer,’ she says. ‘Then I bought a Joan Sutherland record and enjoyed singing along with it. Yes, I’ve always been ambitious and knew then that singing would be my life.’

At 18 she had her first hit record, memorable for its title, if little else. But ‘I Fell In Love With A Starship Trooper’ turned out not to be the career springboard she hoped. ‘I didn’t do anything for a year afterwards,’ she says. ‘I thought I’d made it, but then I was a flop and I didn’t have enough experience to know how to cope with that. It taught me a lesson — that you find your real strengths when things go badly. I went back to class and did some modelling to keep myself going. And I began to realise there is a force in my career which takes me whichever way it wants.’

It took her into the London cast of Cats and subsequently into the arms of composer Lloyd Webber. Both were married at the time and the disapproving publicity which surrounded their liaison and — two divorces later — marriage, led to Miss Brightman being castigated whenever she opened her mouth, professionally or otherwise. She winces when asked about this period in her life, especially concerning the divorces that saw the departure of her first husband and the arrival into her life of two stepchildren, Imogen, eight, and Nicholas, six.

‘When I first got married I was 18,’ she says, ‘and 18-year-olds don’t know their own feelings about life. I was simply too young. As for the criticism, I knew at the time that it was to be expected. We know the way the world is, but, yes, some of the things written did upset me. I’ve been through a bad experience, which is why I’m wary of interviews now. Action is better than words, anyway. That’s how I’ve done it — I’ve let my work the talking.’

The volume as well as the quality of that work impressive. ‘Pie Jesu’, the Requiem duet she sang with 12-year-old Paul Miles-Kingston — looked of similar age on the video — was a highly nonconformist Top Ten hit single; she has triumphed in operetta, singing Valencienne in The Merry Widow at Sadler’s Wells, and the mitt release from Phantom sent Sarah and rock singer Steve Harley high into the charts. The show’s album, due in the spring, is eagerly awaited.

‘I hate to categorise myself,’ she says. ‘I love pop and love having a pop record in the charts although my pop records are of a rather serious nature. When Andrew said he wanted to release “Pie Jesu” as a single, it didn’t surprise me. Music is music and if people like the sound of it, they’ll go out and buy it. With The Phantom of the Opera will probably sign a short-term contract initially and then we’ll have to see. I want to continue training, but doing six shows a week will inhibit that. One can go on getting experience by working but I am very young at the moment and I want go on learning and learning.’

There was a suggestion that she had not want to work with Steve Harley because years ago had rather unkindly reviewed one of her records on radio and she was still smarting from the verbal slap. ‘That was just a joke,’ says Miss Brightman almost too quickly. ‘I was very pleased to work with him. Anyway, I didn’t say that.’

Once again she looks uncomfortable and gazes around the room, at the baby grand piano, boardroom-size table and the huge portrait of her as she appeared in Cats as if Steve Harley be hiding there somewhere. "I don’t bear grudges.’ she says finally.

The daughter of a Berkhamsted builder and the eldest of a family of six — her youngest brother recently celebrated his sixth birthday — Sarah seems still to be suffering from the culture shock involved in marrying music-machine millionaire Lloyd Webber. ‘I am not a rich  she says when money is mentioned. ‘I may be married to a rich man and I may earn good money, but it is not vast —just something that keeps you going. I never think about money and never did. I did The Merry Widow for the £80-a-week Equity rate.’

She admits to an inner restlessness, which makes it difficult for her to relax, and nerves that cause her considerable anguish every time she has to exercise that remarkable voice in public. ‘Even when I have absolutely nothing to do there is an undercurrent going on in my mind,’ she says with a sigh. ‘I am hopeless at sitting on a beach — when I have spare time I feel I’m wasting it. There is so much to see and so much to do."

‘And then when I work I just die. I’m sick before I do a performance — I’m bad for a week, maybe a fortnight before it. But once I’ve sung for just a few seconds, the voice takes over and I’m all right.’

Nerves or no nerves, Sarah Brightman’s workload most certainly means that the family she and Andrew both want must be delayed indefinitely, even though, at the time of their marriage, Andrew talked of them having children ‘immediately’. ‘I would love to have children, but I feel too much of a child myself right now,’ says Miss Brightman, who seems to have been getting younger by the minute during the afternoon. ‘I am not ready to have a child — I have so much more to learn. My thinking is that when I am in my 30s will be the right time to have children.’

The arrival of the make-up lady who is to prepare Sarah for a photograph session seems to perk her up somewhat, as if the presence of somebody else has removed the danger of being harpooned by an insensitive question. She watches the mirror with almost detached interest as she reminisces about some of her less successful professional ventures.

‘I did a concert with a well-known orchestra and conductor,’ she says in her little-girl voice, and I bit off a bit more than I could chew, if that’s the expression. Then a few years ago there was a part in a musical I really wanted, but I didn’t get it. I appeared in the show, but not in that part. I know I would have done it very well. I’m not a gambler, but I work tremendously on instinct. If! think it is right for me to do, I’ll go for it.’

Suddenly, scampering and chattering like his Spitting Image puppet come to life, Mr Lloyd Webber bursts in. A non-stop torrent of theatrical news and gossip tumbles from his mouth as he dashes helter-skelter around the suite, skirting his baby grand to draw curtains while looking for more curtains to draw. It is as if a cyclone has entered the room.

Mrs Lloyd Webber smiles at him fondly. Mr Lloyd Webber smiles at her the same way. Mrs Lloyd Webber almost visibly relaxes. Hanging above one of the doors leading out of the main room is a copy of a famous variety theatre sign. It reads: The world’s greatest artistes have passed through and will pass through these doors.

‘It’s funny, isn’t it?’ says Sarah Brightman. And for the very first time, she laughs.

The Phantom And The Chorus Girl

BY CRAIG HOROWITZ PHOTOGRAPH BY HARRY BENSON European Travel & Life January / February 1988

Andrew Lloyd Webber is lighting up Broadway with more candlepower  than any other stage composer.  His latest smash,  The Phantom of the Opera, stars his wife Sarah Brightman.

This is going to be one of those rare moments. While a half dozen gardeners trim the bushes, water the grass, and spread fertilizer around the new flower beds, Andrew Lloyd Webber readies himself to sit down at the piano. On the easel of the white Yamaha upright— located in the airy guest house of the composer’s seaside estate  - is Lloyd Webber’s handwritten score of The Phantom of the Opera, his latest musical sensation. The manuscript is open to a song titled “The Point of No Return,” a driving, triumphant piece of music that comes late in the show and helps move the action toward its conclusion. As Lloyd Webber pulls the bench under himself, a young maid in jeans never looks up from the mirror she’s polishing, and the boats drifting along the Mediterranean are transformed by a searing late-morning sun into little more than out-of-focus shadows. Finally, with a rather grim expression, Lloyd Webber lifts his hands to the keys. And then . . And then nothing. No emotion, no showmanship, no hint of pleasure at the opportunity to play his work for a few visitors. In fact, no audible sounds come from the piano at all. It’s as if someone disconnected the hammers. The reality, however, is that Lloyd Webber’s pale, fragile fingers are depressing the keys so lightly it would be impossible to produce any music. This piano pantomime is not a warm-up, nor is it some quirky ritual performed whenever he first sits down to play. It is simply that the intense, rumpled-looking Englishman is shy. So shy that even when cloistered on his twelve-acre estate in the quiet French town of St.Jean-Cap-Ferrat, he sits at the piano but doesn’t play because there are several people present whom he doesn’t know very well. Granted, he only sat down at the piano in the first place for picture-taking, and granted he is not by profession a performer. His diffidence is, nevertheless, a little hard to fathom because despite what he isn’t, he is Andrew Lloyd Webber, the most successful stage composer of our time.

In a field where the failure rate is virtually akin to that of playing the lottery, there has over the past fifteen years been one sure thing, an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. Since 1972, when Jesus Christ Superstar opened on Broadway, Lloyd Webber has filled more theatre seats around the world than any other living composer. And even the most unmusical amongst the audiences usually leave the theatre humming, whistling, or singing his melodies: songs such as “Jesus Christ ( Superstar,” Evita’s “Don’t Cry for Me  Argentina,” the title song from Starlight Express, and, of course, the Pucciniesque “Memory” from Cats.

In fact Cats, which Lloyd Webber often refers to as his annuity, has practically generated enough activity for an entire career. After more than six years, it still plays to sold-out houses both on Broadway and in London’s West End. It’s been staged in more than twenty-five cities around the world, and it’s grossed over $425 million—not counting merchandising items like T-shirts, coffee mugs, posters, and the like. Still, there are no signs that it’s slowing down. Lloyd Webber and Cats director Trevor Nunn are said to each earn royalties in the neighbourhood of $70,000 a week just from the North American productions.

And now, Lloyd Webber is about to add the hat trick to his collection of theatrical achievements. With the New York opening of Phantom, he’ll have three shows running on Broadway (Cats and Starlight Express are the other two) and three shows running in London’s West End. Every evening American audiences will crowd into Broadway’s Majestic Theatre and witness the same spectacle that has been taking place at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London for more than a year.

As they take their seats, theatregoers will see a stark, unadorned stage marked only by a few objects covered with drop cloths. But moments after the show begins, a wonderful staging feat occurs. Lights flash, smoke billows, backdrops slide, lightning strikes, a huge crystal chandelier climbs fifty feet to the  ceiling, and Lloyd Webber’s dramatic over­ture fills the hall, led by the pulsating rhythm of an organ; miraculously, the theater is transformed into the Paris Opera House of 1881, gilded cherubs, gargoyles, and all bbased on Gaston Leroux’s little-read turn-of-the-century novel, The Phantom of the opera is a kind of gothic, spooky amalgam of “Beauty and the Beast,” the Svengali saga, and boy-meets-girl romance. While the show has thirty-five cast members, a thirty-piece orchestra, a stage crew of thirty-five, and twenty dressers, the action centers around four principals: the Phantom, a demented genius who has been horribly disfigured since birth; Christine Daaé, the young chorus girl the Phantom is obsessed with and whom he turns into a star; Raoul, vicomte de Chagny, a young nobleman who’s also in love with Christine; and the Paris Opera House itself. All of the activity takes place inside this ten-story architectural marvel. Designed in 1861, it occupies three acres of land, still employs more than a thousand people, and is actually built on a subterranean lake that’s seven stories beneath the stage. And it’s through this cavernous, haunting structure that the Phantom - portrayed in a stunning performance by Michael Crawford roams in anguish.

Though Hollywood has had mixed results with the story, Phantom has provided Lloyd Webber with a structure that has enabled him to do the best work of his career. His lush, quasi-operatic score simply spills over with harmonic high points and even threatens at times to overpower the proceedings. But for the most part, his music serves the play beautifully, shifting seamlessly from lilting romantic melodies to driving, rock-inspired rhythms, to dramatic orchestral pathos. One critic gushed that Lloyd Webber’s score “pours melody out with the lavish rapture of a nightingale on LSD.”

The show also marks the first collaboration between Lloyd Webber and director Harold Prince since they worked together on Evita. With the help of production designer Maria Björnson, Prince has done a spectacular job of staging the proceedings. There’s a scene, for example, when the Phantom first lures Christine down to his cave beneath the opera house, that is musical theatre at its theatrical best. Backed by the beat of the show’s forceful title song, the Phantom and Christine descend what seems like miles of  catwalks, traverse a subterranean lake that’s lit by hundreds of floating candles, and arrive finally at the Phantom's lair. Here, he attempts his seduction with “The Music of the Night,” a soaring, mesmerizing song. “Let the dream begin,” the Phantom implores, “let your darker side give in to the power of the music that I write the power of the music of the night.”

On the Riviera, however, in the quiet town of Cap Ferrat, underneath the kind of spotless sky that causes outfielders to lose simple fly balls, Lloyd Webber seems as far removed from gothic tales of obsession as anyone could possibly be. In fact, he seems about as far removed from the musical theatre as anyone could possibly be. As he walks the hundred yards or so from the guest cottage to his Provencal farmhouse, he appears more like a whiz kid who’s made a fortune writing computer programs than a man who’s made a fortune writing theatre music. Nervous and ill at ease, he can seem incredibly rude to people who don’t know him. Ingratiating small talk is not part of the Lloyd Webber style. To get the curtain he hides behind to rise, it’s necessary to get him talking about the theatre. Suddenly he’s animated, effusive, and engaged—especially these days when he’s talking about Phantom.

“With Phantom I felt at long last that I’d found a plot with which I could really let go,” says the 39-year-old Lloyd Webber. “For a long time I’d been looking for something that would enable me to make a great romantic statement. And Phantom is a full-blown, red blooded musical. It’s the first plot in my whole career that is really what you’d call a conventional musical theatre plot,” he says, noting that his earlier shows pushed the

 boundaries of what was previously thought to be acceptable material. “One thing I’ve found is that if you’re writing about a fascist lady who runs Argentina, it’s jolly difficult to write a couple of great love songs.”

Lunch, he announces, will be at a small seaside café that’s about a five-minute walk from the house. He’s joined now by his wife, Sarah Brightman, a classically trained singer and dancer who stars as Christine in Phantom. They met when she auditioned for a part in Cats (“He was standing there in a wonderful sort of sixties flowered shirt, and I remember thinking, ‘What a very unusual man,’ she recalls), and it has been suggested that he wrote Phantom for her as an expression of his love. Though he doesn’t quite say that, he does say, “It would have been insane not to follow my instincts. I knew this was the perfect piece for her, and she brings something to it that is so hugely what I thought the book was saying.” She says, “I identify totally with Christine, and that’s why it’s been so wonderful to play the part. She is myself and I am in her.” It has also been suggested that there’s more than a passing similarity between Andrew and Sarah’s story and the story of Christine and the Phantom. And while she is the chorus girl who’s become a star and he is the brilliant if somewhat reclusive composer who’s helped her, it does seem to be stretching the point.

Walking along the dirt road towards town and past all the people headed for the beach, one is reminded of the story Lloyd Webber tells about Richard Rodgers, his idol and the man to whom he wrote a letter when he was 12 years old. Rodgers once told the young composer that the great thing about writing for the theatre was that he could walk down Broadway unrecognized even by a single person and yet look up at the marquees and know he was the man responsible for all those hit shows. This observation has great resonance for Lloyd Webber.

The Café Paloma is an informal, crowded restaurant right on the harbour where no special treatment is accorded the two stars. Neither made a reservation, but the maître d’ does find one last empty table by the water. In good French, Lloyd Webber orders wine and asks to see the fresh fish. He accepts Sarah’s advice on which one to have. She opts for pasta. With the beautiful hills of ESE and Monte Carlo visible across the inlet, conversation meanders back and forth across the Atlantic. Celebrated names are not so much dropped as they are discussed because of their relevance to specific events in Lloyd Webber’s life now. It’s an interesting mix. Director Ken Russell, whose bizarre work made him the perfect choice to do the Phantom video; director Steven Spielberg who, like Lloyd Webber, creates immensely popular work and possibly doesn’t get his due as an artist for this reason.

When Actors’ Equity in the United States threatened not to allow Sarah to recreate her role in Phantom on Broadway because they felt the opportunity should be given to an American actress, it was rumoured that Lloyd Webber was going to pull the show altogether and instead turn it into a movie with Spielberg. While Lloyd Webber says this is untrue, the two men are friends and would like to work together at some point (Spielberg has seen Phantom three times in London). In fact, the two are one floor apart in New York’s

Trump Tower, where Lloyd Webber has just purchased an apartment for $5.5 million “All my friends will laugh at me,” he says. However, he points out that since he and Sarah won’t spend much time in New York once her run on Broadway is completed, and since he didn’t really want to undergo the scrutiny of a co-op board, the apartment made sense for their needs. Sarah, other hand, is worried that the sixtieth floor apartment has windows that don’t open, which could create a problem. Taking care of her coloratura soprano voice means giving it plenty of moist air.

At some point the conversation turns to director Hal Prince. “When my musical Jeeves failed (the only flop in the Lloyd Webber oeuvre), Hal wrote me a letter telling me not to get discouraged,” he says between bites of fish. “That was my professional ebb. Then, several years later, we met at the Tony Awards, and he was going through a bad period. I immediately asked him to do Phantom. As it turned out he was dying to work on a traditional romance as well.” On the heels of their success with Phantom, the two men have formed an association to set up a theatre workshop and production company in New York to promote and encourage young talent.

“I wanted to give something back to the theatre and to New York,” Lloyd Webber says.

It’s an enterprise born more of his complete devotion to the theatre than to any special feeling about New York, a city where he has always been manhandled. Though his shows are commercially successful on Broadway, Lloyd Webber unfailingly takes a beating from the critics. “I still think my single greatest setback in New York was the original production of Jesus Christ Superstar. Because the show came into New York as a particularly glitzy, overdone production, my name has forever been associated with that kind of presentation,” he says, admitting that that production and the current production of Starlight Express (mounted on Broadway at a cost of $8 million) are not to his liking. “I would not stand up and be counted as a defender of Starlight Express,” he says candidly. “I never intended that piece for the theatre. However, given that it has been taken that route, this kind of production may well have been the only way to do it. And I do think it’s an innocent piece with a lot of fun in it, so I feel ambivalent about it.” Like Cats, which sprang from reading T. S. Eliot’s poems as a child, Starlight is also based on a Lloyd Webber childhood favourite England’s version of “The Little Engine That Could.” But what really sparked his idea was the enthusiasm for trains shown by his son, Nicholas (Lloyd Webber also has a daughter, Imogen; both children are from his first marriage). The music was actually written with an eye toward doing an animated film for children.

But Lloyd Webber’s biggest obstacle in New York is undoubtedly Frank Rich, the New York Times theatre critic. Rich has said, “Successful as Mr. Lloyd Webber is, his work can’t yet be compared seriously with Broadway’s best of any period. He’s primarily a canny, melodic pastiche artist. . . .“ Naturally, this doesn’t sit well with the composer. “I know with Frank Rich that I’m dealing with someone who is not, I’m afraid, a Lloyd Webber fan. But I do think something must be done about the power of the New York Times. At the moment we have a critic who has an extremely powerful personal vision about where he thinks musical theatre should go, and he’s not prepared to listen to the possibility that it can go any other way. This is terribly unfortunate and makes it very hard to get investors and to encourage new ideas.”

Despite the difficulties in New York, neither Lloyd Webber nor his wife seem particularly anxious about the reception Phantom will receive. She, of course, has to deal with the additional pressure of being the composer’s wife, which makes her an especially easy target. “I’ve been with that pressure for a few years now doing different pieces of Andrew’s, and I simply ignore it,” the 27-year-old says confidently. “If I’m good, then it’s going to be fine.  And when I do start a show, it’s like being in a tunnel. . . that’s all I can see.” Of course she’s strengthened by the knowledge that she’s starring in a proven vehicle and that she received uniformly good reviews in London. “When I was in Cats I remember standing backstage waiting to go on for the first preview in my Lycra costume, pink hair, wraparound tail, and face makeup, and thinking, ‘What’s this all about? Are they really going to believe we’re cats?’ It suddenly seemed ludicrous. But with Phantom, everything felt right about it from the beginning. Of course because it’s a conventional romance we also knew we were on pretty firm ground.”

For Lloyd Webber it’s a matter of the experience accumulated over the course of twenty years in the theatre.” I think in the end for a musical to work you have to give people an experience they can’t get anywhere else. A good musical of course needs structure, but to talk about what specifically makes a good musical sounds ridiculous because the elements seem so obvious great tunes, a good story, things like that. With Phantom I think it works ultimately because once you get on the roller coaster it’s a terrific ride, and it takes you there really safely. And you know you’re in the hands of. . . “ - he pauses for a moment and leaves himself out—”of a particularly talented director who knows exactly what he’s doing.” Being able to judge the climate also has something to do with what works. “The Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals and those kinds of plots had become unacceptable to people,” he says. “Through the late sixties and seventies people really did think them to be little more than sentimental twiddle. I used to be considered a fool for going to see South Pacific, which was my favourite musical, still is my favourite musical, and probably always will be my favourite musical.”

More than just a fool, people at one time though he was downright crazy. A precocious, talented child, he grew up in a musical household in the middle-class London neighbourhood of South Kensington. His father was an organist and the principal of the London College of Music, and his mother taught piano. There were always, he remembers, different kinds of music coming from every part of the small flat. Even when he was 8 years old, Andrew’s love of heater was obvious. He’d built a model theatre complete with a revolving stage, and with the help of his brother, Julian - who today is a world-renowned cellist - he wrote and put on musicals for family and friends.

“Rook and roll was just really breaking out,” he says, “but I was utterly hooked by the musical. When The Sound of Music came to London, it opened to a chorus of abuse, and I remember at my school people thought I was absolutely mad for even contemplating that a musical like that could be okay.” Lloyd Webber’s formal training was limited by his father to a year at the Royal College of Music, where he studied the rudiments of orchestration and conducting. He feared too much classical training would spoil his son’s natural melodic ability, which was so evident even then.

Based on a paper he’d written on Victorian architecture - still one of his passions - he won a history scholarship to Oxford’s Magdalene College. And though he dropped out after only a year of study, this was where he met Tim Rice, his lyricist for Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar, and Evita. “Though Tim wasn’t really interested in musical theatre at that point, I felt it was worth trying to grab him,” he says. Unlike Lloyd Webber, who seemed riot at all to be a product of his times, Rice ‘as caught up in the energy of the moment. Like everyone else in Britain who wanted to write songs at that time, Tim wanted to be a Beatle. It took a great deal of persuasion to get him to work with me.”

Their first big success was, of course, Jesus Christ Superstar. “Obviously it was a great idea of Tim’s to do, and obviously it did hit the mood at the time, but neither one of us could have predicted its success. It really was a series of accidents. I mean, no one even wanted to stage it, so we did it as an album, which was a great success.” Ironically, this developed into a standard, though often criticized, marketing technique for his shows. The Phantom score, for example, produced three top ten hits in London before the show even opened. The criticism comes from the feeling that clever marketing and publicity, rather than extraordinary work, are perhaps responsible for his success.

Lloyd Webber also makes the point that his early success was in some ways a mixed blessing. “When you have a very great early success, people can move in on it, and you don’t really have the experience or the confidence to say they’re doing things the wrong way. The other point is that people now look back over my early work and say things like this was naive or that was derivative, or whatever, and they forget how young I was. With Superstar it was the first time I’d ever heard any of my work scored for an orchestra. I mean, consider that the writers of Les Misérables, who are considered the new talents (Claude-Michel Schonberg and Alain Boublil, who were inspired to do musicals by Lloyd Webber’s work), are four or five years older than I am now.”

When lunch at Café Paloma is finished, we return to the guest cottage, which is where he and Sarah are living until the renovation is completed on the main house. It’s been more than a year and finally the end is in sight. A quick tour reveals that the two-story stone farmhouse is all marble columns and floors, big rounded archways and pale-blue walls on the inside.

One interesting security feature - a significant concern since the house will hold many pieces from Lloyd Webber’s collection of Pre-Raphaelite art, and since they don’t live here full time - is the electronically operated metal gates that shutter all the glass. They have also put in a pool, so Sarah can swim to keep her frail, 5’ 5” frame in shape. Down by the sea there’s a stone wall that a press agent claims has already been scaled several times by overzealous photographers. Given the couple’s stature in Britain, it’s not hard to believe.

Unquestionably, they are two of Britain’s biggest stars, especially where the Fleet Street tabloids are concerned. And in that peculiar way the British have of showing love for their own, Sarah and Andrew are regularly accused of everything from love affairs to temper tantrums to having more money than any Brit in show business except Paul McCartney. DOUBLE LOVE LIFE OF PHANTOM BEAUTY; MY PHANTOM AFFAIR; SLUGGING MATCH, MR. MUSIC AND WIFE OFFKEY; ANDREW LLOYD’S BANK are just a few of the recent headlines.

Any discussion of financial matters makes Lloyd Webber even more uncomfortable than usual. His wealth