Andrew Lloyd Webber & Tim Rice Reunite to Pen New Songs for The Wizard of Oz

After a 34-year “break,” celebrated musical collaborators Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice are reuniting to write new songs for Lloyd Webber’s planned stage adaptation of The Wizard of Oz. In an interview published in London’s Mail, Lloyd Webber revealed the forthcoming collaboration, asserting, “We’ve always been close over the years; it’s just that we’ve never found anything that we wanted to do.”

Lloyd Webber wrote the music and Rice the lyrics for the hit musicals Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita. They split before Lloyd Webber tackled the megahit musical Cats (with lyrics from T.S. Eliot poems) and Rice joined ABBA’s Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus to write lyrics for Chess. In recent years, Rice has contributed lyrics to Disney musicals such as The Lion King and Aida, which earned a dismissive comment from Lloyd Webber in the interview: “I don’t think I could write songs for…cartoons.”

The stage version of The Wizard of Oz is scheduled to open in February 2011 at the London Palladium, a theater owned by Lloyd Webber. The show has gotten plenty of advance publicity via a British TV reality casting series won by Danielle Hope, who will play Dorothy.

“The fact is that The Wizard of Oz has never really worked in the theater,” Lloyd Webber said in the interview. “The film has one or two holes where in the theater you need a song. For example, there’s nothing for either of the two witches to sing. Tim and I are doing quite a specific thing, because we know what’s missing.”

Displaying his ever-present dry humor, Lloyd Webber expressed a serenity about sitting down at the piano again with the man who helped him get his start in the theater. "Will it work? We’ll see. Will we shout at each other? I don’t think we’ll do that.”