Preview '05-'06: Lloyd Webber on Broadway
A third Lloyd Webber-Tim Rice collaboration, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, was first seen locally in a brief off-Broadway engagement in 1976. But with the success of Evita, it was decided to try Joseph again, and a new off-Broadway production transferred to Broadway for a two-year run.
Thus far, Evita was Lloyd Webber's biggest New York smash. But that was nothing compared to the next Lloyd Webber piece to be imported to New York, Cats, which would play eighteen years and break the record as the longest-running show in Broadway history. Cats arrived in New York in the fall of 1982, just a few months after the Broadway transfer of Joseph. The unprecedented success of Cats began to solidify the domination of Broadway by the British pop opera that was only hinted at by Evita.
True, the next two Broadway Lloyd Webbers never quite managed to return their investments. Song and Dance hung on for a year thanks to a tour-de-force performance by Bernadette Peters, not to mention the composer's catchy tunes. Starlight Express lasted almost twice as long without evolving into the long-term blockbuster it had been in London.
The next Lloyd Webber show to hit Broadway was, of course, that theatrical phenomenon The Phantom of the Opera. Never in history did a show capture the public's attention more than this one. Like Evita and Cats, it took a Best Musical Tony. But nothing about the success of Phantom was quite like that of any show that preceded it. The most commercially successful musical of all time, Phantom is set to break Cats' record to become the longest-running show in Broadway history.
In terms of Broadway success, the '80s were Lloyd Webber's golden years. Nothing since then has caught on as his '80s shows had done. The downswing began in 1990, when Aspects of Love came to Broadway, received mostly negative reviews, and, after a year's run, closed at a loss. Sunset Boulevard 1994 played close to 1,000 Broadway performances, and was a financial failure largely because its running costs were so high. Sunset Boulevard took a Best Musical Tony, but it was largely by default, as it opened in a season where the show's only competition was a songbook revue, the highly successful Smokey Joe's Cafe.
Lloyd Webber's next major musical, Whistle Down the Wind, was to have opened at Broadway's Martin Beck Theatre in the spring of 1997. Instead, it became a road closer, surprising because it involved Lloyd Webber and director Hal Prince, not the sort of pairing that tends to close out of town. The team's previous collaborations were on Evita and The Phantom of the Opera. Whistle Down the Wind resurfaced for a lengthy run in London, but one that did not produce a Broadway transfer.
It was the first of two consecutive Lloyd Webber London shows not to hazard Broadway. The second was The Beautiful Game 2000, which failed after a year's run in London.
But Lloyd Webber clearly likes to be on Broadway. How else to explain the ill-advised Broadway production of By Jeeves in 2001? By Jeeves was a revised version of Jeeves, a rare London failure for Lloyd Webber in 1975, written with Alan Ayckbourn. On Broadway, By Jeeves earned indifferent notices and audience apathy. So little interest was there in the show that the television version that featured the Broadway cast was never even shown in this country after the production's brief New York run.
The importation of By Jeeves seems to have been motivated by Lloyd Webber's simultaneous desire to have a new show on Broadway and his awareness that Whistle Down the Wind and The Beautiful Game were unlikely for Broadway success.
And something similar can explain Lloyd Webber's next Broadway credit, one for which he did not compose the music. This was Bombay Dreams, which Lloyd Webber produced in London. Although he relinquished the rights to other producers for New York, the Broadway version was still referred to as "the Andrew Lloyd Webber production." Bombay Dreams lingered on Broadway for eight months but proved a costly failure.
If Lloyd Webber's Whistle Down the Wind and The Beautiful Game failed to make it to Broadway, the composer's latest London show, The Woman in White, is indeed coming our way. When it premiered last fall as the first show at London's Palace Theatre since the arrival of Les Miserables in 1985, it received mixed reviews. More significantly, New York Times critic Ben Brantley covered the opening and was not entranced by what he saw. Unlike such shows as Mary Poppins and Billy Elliot, both of which opened in the last London season to near-unanimous raves, The Woman in White did not earn the sort of critical reception that made a Broadway transfer imperative.
But it was soon announced that The Woman in White would indeed travel, and it's now set to open at the Marquis Theatre on November 17, a couple of months after the show celebrates its first anniversary in London. An announced winter tryout in Chicago was cancelled when the Marquis Theatre became available with the closing of the revival of La Cage aux Folles.
In addition to the composer's strong desire to maintain a Broadway presence, a couple of other factors seem to have motivated the Broadway transfer of The Woman in White. Unlike the scores for Whistle Down the Wind and The Beautiful Game, the Woman in White score finds the composer, at least to a degree, returning to the trademark romantic-gothic style that served him so well in Phantom and Sunset Boulevard. And that style is a natural for the material, a ghost/horror/mystery story adapted from the celebrated 1860 novel by Wilkie Collins.
Another factor that seemed to motivate the Broadway transfer was the fact that The Woman in White reunited the potent team of composer Lloyd Webber and star Michael Crawford. True, Crawford's stock as a Broadway star may have declined as a result of the disastrous Dance of the Vampires. But the return of the star to the Lloyd Webber fold was money in the bank, and for a time, it appeared that Crawford would also appear in the Broadway Woman in White, recreating the role of the villainous, rotund Count Fosco that he created in London.
But then Crawford took sick and left the West End production prematurely, to be replaced by Michael Ball, then Anthony Andrews and Simon Callow. It was then announced that Crawford would not play Count Fosco on Broadway. It would seem that one of the show's selling points vanished with the star's withdrawal from a role in which he had made a potent musical-stage comeback.
Perhaps Ball will now play Fosco on Broadway; he's scheduled to appear with New York City Opera in Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience in September, so he could rehearse Woman in White simultaneously. Ball is said to be quite good as Fosco, but Ball isn't the draw in this country that he is in the U.K.
As for the other leading roles, it appears certain that multi-Olivier Award winner Maria Friedman will make her Broadway debut in the central role of Marian Halcombe. One also imagines that two young American actresses who appeared in the London production --Angela Christian Anne Catherick, the woman in white and Jill Paice Laura Fairlie-- could repeat their roles in New York. Also rumored for the Broadway cast: Ron Bohmer and Adam Brazier.
Given Brantley's review and the fact that the score may not be the sort of thing to change the minds of Lloyd Webber detractors, The Woman in White could face a mixed critical reception on Broadway. Whether or not the show will catch on as it apparently has in London remains to be seen. In any case, composer Lloyd Webber will be back on Broadway for the first time in four years.