Don’t Cry for Andrew Lloyd Webber : The man with the Midas touch has ‘Phantom’ and three other hits playing now

England has its queen and its Andrew Lloyd Webber. The queen lives in her palace. Lloyd Webber owns the Palace. There is royalty and there is royalty.

Admired or berated, the superstar composer is the unofficial Lord of London. He has the singular distinction of having four shows in the West End: “Cats,” the roller-skating “Starlight Express,” “The Phantom of the Opera” and his latest musical-cum-opera, “Aspects of Love.” All four have monumental advance ticket sales. Two--”Cats” and “Phantom”--have long-running productions still going strong on Broadway.

The Los Angeles production of “The Phantom” opens May 31 at the Ahmanson Theatre, which has undergone extensive preparations to house “Phantom’s” high-tech wizardry and infamous “crashing” chandelier. Previews began Thursday. The show has an unprecedented advance of $15 million and counting. The previous box-office champ, “Les Miserables” at the Shubert Theatre, opened with a comparatively puny $8 million in the till. Producer Cameron Mackintosh expects “Phantom” to reside at the Music Center a minimum of two years. Orchestra seats are sold out into December.

At 41, the round-faced, brown-eyed Lloyd Webber is at a crossroads--artistically and personally. Divorced from “Sarah I” (Sarah Hugill, the mother of his two children) and married since 1984 to “Sarah II” (Sarah Brightman, whom he met when she played a small role in the London “Cats” and for whom he subsequently wrote the leading role of Christine Daae in “Phantom”), he feels on the threshold of a new maturity. “Knowing the pace at which I work,” he said, “I think the turning point for me--the second part of one’s life--has got to be right around now.”

His brown hair is still cut in the familiar page-boy style that he has worn for much of his adult life, but his manner has grown more assured. When interviewed in Knightsbridge at the swanky Capital Hotel for lunch, it was two days before the opening of “Aspects.” He exuded confidence and a certain playfulness (for which he has a reputation). Temperament (for which he also has a reputation), let alone arrogance, were nowhere to be seen.

What was evident was the drive, the single-minded dedication to work and almost slavish concentration on whatever project is at hand. That afternoon Lloyd Webber’s energies were fixed on last-minute changes--minor ones that to him meant getting “Aspects” right. When he was able to get his mind on “Phantom,” thoughts tumbled out of him faster than he could find words to put them in.

“ ‘Phantom’ is the total opposite of ‘Aspects,’ where everything has to be about detail,” he said over the rabbit pate appetizer. “What I have to change this afternoon will seem silly to you. It’s two French horn notes-- three French horn notes. But it’s important, because you’re writing for different sorts of forces and you’re not using broad poster colors. ‘Phantom’ is about broad poster colors.

“ ‘Phantom’ was a slight chapter of accidents. It was never an idea that I thought I’d write the music for. In 1983, I saw a production of the Ken Hill play (currently playing in San Francisco’s Theatre on the Square) when Sarah (Brightman) was asked to do the lead in that.

“I went along with Cameron Mackintosh and thought, ‘Ah, well, it’s quite a nice idea and it might be fun to produce.’ We tried to put everybody together with Jim Sharman, the director of ‘The Rocky Horror Show.’ It was never an idea for me to write at all.”

But Sharman was less enthusiastic and Brightman had other commitments and Mackintosh and Lloyd Webber decided to let it go. Then Lloyd Webber came across a copy of the 1911 Gaston Leroux novel in New York.

“I thought, this is an extremely muddled book in that it cannot make up its mind as to whether it’s a detective story, a horror book, a major love story or if it’s just supposed to be quite funny. What appealed to me was that by somewhat altering the plot it did seem that one could write a high romantic statement, which I’d been trying to write for some time.

“I gave it to Hal (Prince, who had staged the Lloyd Webber-Tim Rice “Evita,” that improbable fantasy on the life of Eva Peron). “He said, ‘If you really can match that with some Big melodies, with a capital B, we might really have something.’ So we did a version of it in the little theater at Sydmonton in the summer of ’85. Hal didn’t direct that, but Maria (Bjornson, who later created the sumptuous “Phantom” sets) designed it and I sort of directed.

“What came out of the whole thing was that clearly all of that music I was trying to write for that little ‘Aspects of Love,’ (a project that he’d started tinkering with as long ago as 1978) was all, really, the high romantic statement that is ‘Phantom.’

“It’s a very odd thing about ‘Phantom,’ ” he reflected. “There are times with certain musicals where, even if the whole thing is completely wrong--which this was in places at one time--organically it sort of comes together and people are prepared to suspend too close a judgment. I remember going to Alan Jay Lerner and saying, ‘We do need some help on the lyrics and you’d be wonderful, but Alan, the plot, when you really look at it, really is rather difficult.’

“He said, ‘Listen, dear boy, don’t ask questions. It works.’ ”

Prince was shown a video of the Sydmonton production and agreed to come aboard. The second act--which didn’t exist--was written and 12 months later “Phantom” opened. Two years had elapsed from the time Lloyd Webber read the book to the opening of the show at Her Majesty’s. A short gestation by his standards.

“Hal is as right for ‘The Phantom’ as Trevor (Nunn, who staged “Cats,” “Starlight Express” and the recent “Aspects”) would be wrong for it,” Lloyd Webber said. “It’s a great Hal Prince subject and because we’ve had that shorthand, he and I, over the years, we do get on very, very well.”

Prince says of Lloyd Webber: “He’s very professional, very much a theater man. He has a good, strong sense of what energizes that space. I share that. We understand each other at mid-sentence.”

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Prince and Lloyd Webber met in 1975 when Prince took “A Little Night Music” to London and Lloyd Webber suffered his one serious failure, “Jeeves,” a musical based on the P.G. Wodehouse stories, written with Alan Ayckbourn--a first-rate comic playwright but an inexperienced lyricist--and without Rice. To this day Lloyd Webber characterizes “Jeeves” as “Bloody awful. A total stinkeroony.” Prince wrote him a comforting note and invited him for a drink at the Savoy, where he was staying. Lloyd Webber went.

“I told him I was thinking of doing this musical with Tim (Rice) about Eva Peron and he said, ‘If you ever finish it, please come and play it to me.’ ”

They played it for Prince in 1976, when he was committed to “On the 20th Century.” If they wanted him to stage it, he told them, they’d have to wait--which they did.

“But I feel as if I’ve known Hal longer (than 1975),” Lloyd Webber explained, “because, as you may know, he wanted to produce and direct ‘Jesus Christ Superstar.’ What happened was that the telegram from him didn’t get to me until two weeks too late. I still have it. We (replied) six years later saying, ‘Very sorry. Rights on “Superstar” not available. However, have new piece.’ ”

(It was Tom O’Horgan, the director of “Hair,” who staged the American “Superstar,” with much the same edge of flaunted vulgarity that had characterized “Hair.”)

“It’s very interesting to me,” Lloyd Webber remembered, “that the whole public perception of my music, everything I try to stand for, would have changed in America if Hal had done ‘Superstar.’ ”

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Lloyd Webber’s eclectic, glamorous-to-glitzy, hugely successful ventures have also made him one of England’s richest men.

Just how rich is understandably guarded. “Andrew Lloyd Webber could burp into a microphone,” David Land, his first manager, has been quoted as saying, “and it would be a smash hit.” If ostensible wealth is any measure of success--if not necessarily talent--the evidence speaks for itself.

This uncontested Prince of Piccadilly has the Midas touch and the credentials: A private jet, a luxury duplex in London’s classy Belgravia district, a 12-room suite in the stratospheric regions of Manhattan’s Trump Tower, a 10-acre waterfront spread at St. Jean-Cap-Ferrat on the French Riviera, and the ultimate home base at Sydmonton--a 1,500-acre storybook spread in Newbury, 90 minutes outside London, complete with sheep in the meadows and a small theater.

“Cats” just celebrated eight years in the West End, surpassing the previous holder of London’s longest-running-show record, none other than “Jesus Christ Superstar.” Internationally, “Cats” is Lloyd Webber’s single highest grosser, with companies stretching from Europe to Australia.

“Aspects of Love,” which is based on a novella by David Garnett and which opened April 17 at the Prince of Wales, set another kind of record: It had an advance of 4.5 million (about $7.7 million) and was sold out through Christmas before a single review ever hit the stands. That amount has ballooned to 6 million (about $10.8 million). “Love Changes Everything,” one of the show’s top tunes, was a British hit single before the show opened. The album won’t be out until September.

Earlier, there was “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,” written with Rice (1968), a sweet and zany take-off on the biblical Joseph that indirectly led to “Jesus Christ Superstar” (1971)--and “Evita”(1978).

Between “Cats” (1981, based on T.S. Eliot’s “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats”) and “Phantom” (1986), there were the moderately successful “Song and Dance” (1982), the “Song” part of which had an earlier incarnation as “Tell Me on a Sunday”; the overblown “Starlight Express” (1984, developed with Nunn) and a Requiem (a 1985 setting of the traditional liturgical texts that also generated a No. 1 single in Britain).

His other holdings include a 40% share in The Really Useful Group, a producing, marketing, publishing and management company that owns the West End’s Palace Theatre and is the parent organization of the Really Useful Theatre Company, “Phantom’s” co-producer with Cameron Mackintosh. The Palace, where “Les Miz” is playing, was fully renovated by Lloyd Webber, who has a passion for Victorian architecture. It also houses Lloyd Webber’s and the Really Useful Theatre Company offices.

The sheer size of “Cats’ ” success is what prompted the establishment of the Group in 1983, its name inspired by the Really Useful Engine, a character in a children’s story that was a Lloyd Webber favorite. In 1986, the Group went public, netting Lloyd Webber $20 million while allowing him to retain ownership of 40% of the stock. The offering was unusual. It fundamentally meant investing, as an observer put it at the time, “in a one-man band.”

Yet despite his affluence, Lloyd Webber is relatively indifferent to such status symbols as clothes or cars. He dresses simply and these days, when not in his Bentley, he tools around London in his own cab (with driver)--a device that allows him to beat the traffic and undesirably high visibility at once.

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Certainly public acceptance of Lloyd Webber’s music is evident in those hot album sales, those hit singles and the long lines at the box office, but critical acclaim has been harder to come by.

Lloyd Webber and Rice were credited with putting rock into the musical (though “Hair,” in 1967, and the Who’s “Tommy,” in 1969, did as much or more). But the pair was also accused of sensationalism (with “Superstar” and “Evita”), and Lloyd Webber has been called derivative, sentimental, addicted to the musical grand gesture and manipulative with his audiences--more a Salieri than a Mozart, though one can hardly deny his large gift for melodic invention, which he himself dismisses precisely because, for him, it seems so easy.

“I hoped that with ‘Phantom’ people would really see what (my music) was achieving,” he said. “It isn’t derivative. People can’t say they come to ‘Phantom’ purely for the way it looks . It’s been a hugely successful album. It sold 3.5 million double sets. Again, if you look at the way he (Prince) has directed that show, in the last 15 minutes when the Phantom and Raoul and Christine are together, nothing happens.

“Perhaps because I live here, because I don’t particularly like to go out and promote myself and talk about things endlessly, and also because I’ve been successful--which I’ve also been grateful for--people don’t always understand what the intention behind some of my pieces really is.

“Perhaps they don’t see that ‘Starlight Express’ was genuinely meant to be a bit of froth and somebody letting down their hair, which you can do once in your life.”

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The yearning for a level of classicism comes naturally. Lloyd Webber grew up in a distinguished musical family. His father, composer William Lloyd Webber, was director of the London College of Music. His mother, Jean, who lives in Kensington, taught piano. His younger brother, Julian, is a cellist. Lloyd Webber pere , who died in 1982, is credited with adding the Lloyd to Lloyd Webber, “for purposes of identification,” insists the fils , “not pretentiousness.”

Andrew Lloyd Webber says he got his musical education “internally, with my family. I had lessons with a famous teacher (Ernest Paxton) who taught me the French horn. I was also to a great degree self-taught.”

How influential was his father?

Lloyd Webber demurs.

“He and I were people passing in the night. His musical preferences were very much of a different background to mine. He was one of the great proponents of Bach. Stravinsky or Shostakovich were not heard in our house. I’m much more into the emotional aspect of music, not the academic.”

This is further borne out when he’s asked to list the composers who influenced him.

“There’s something in all composers that may have an influence, of course, but Prokofiev is No. 1. He’s the greatest melodist of the 20th Century--other than Paul McCartney. Also Stravinsky, Verdi, Puccini, Purcell and Bach, after all, but not in any way anyone could see. Only structure. And Richard Rodgers, without shadow of a doubt. He was utterly dumbfounding, even in his later years. He could cut through where no one else could cut through.”

Is he, as conductor Lorin Maazel, a staunch supporter, has said, “leery of dissonance”?

“No. Dissonance is something I absolutely, passionately love,” he countered. “The most intriguing part of music. Melody’s a very intangible thing about a very small number of notes. To be melodic is most important, but without dissonance you’re not progressing music anywhere.

“For me opera is the form. There can be no turning back.”

And long gestations.

“Yes. ‘Cats’ I must have thought of even as long ago as the time ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ was around. ‘Superstar,’ of course, did come quite quickly. The dean of St. Paul’s (School, for whom he and Rice wrote “Joseph”) told us ‘Why don’t you do the story of Jesus Christ,’ and we said ‘No, oh no.’ But Tim pursued it. . . . It’s terrifying to realize that ‘Joseph’ is now over 21!

“But looking back over everything, a lot of work was achieved and an awful lot was written when we were very, very young. Because a lot of it happened so long ago, people don’t realize that I’m now, with ‘Aspects,’ at the same point (Stephen) Sondheim was when he started ‘Company.’ ”

Lloyd Webber attributes his breakup with Rice, which happened after “Evita,” to “professional rhythm.” Since then his lyricists have been T.S. Eliot (“Cats”), Don Black (“Tell Me on a Sunday” and “Aspects”) and Charles Hart (“Phantom” and “Aspects”).

“Charles came into the ‘Phantom’ situation,” he said, “to help out when Alan Jay Lerner died. He’s very well musically trained himself. There are certain things that you can’t do as a lyricist unless you have a musical background. For instance the septet in ‘Phantom’ where you’ve got seven people all singing at full tilt.”

Is success problematic?

“I never like to think about it,” he said, “because I genuinely do only write what I want to write. I don’t think very much about what’s going on outside of me. People are too analytical and don’t realize that, as a musical dramatist, when you find a particular subject (that interests you), you’re then the servant of that subject.

“It fascinates me that people think of you in terms of your last show and not in terms of the body of work. They find it difficult to understand that it could be perfectly possible for me to have been trying out, venturing myself in public, with something like my Requiem Mass because where else can I do so? It’s a piece that I’m very pleased that I wrote, but a piece that I got about 60% right.

“A close friend, who also happens to be a music critic in London, said to me, ‘If you’d done this in a gym in Brooklyn, people would have said it was a (suspect) deliberate move.’ That’s the difficulty. In the end you can’t worry about it.”

The criticism that “Cats” is a one-song show Lloyd Webber dismisses as “absolute rubbish. In that regard, it’s interesting to remember that the first performance of ‘Cats’ took place without ‘Memory.’ It wasn’t there. It was a developed afterthought. Because it comes at a very emotionally charged moment, any half-decent song would have been fine.

“If you took any one of the tunes of ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ and put pop-oriented lyrics on it, or commercial love lyrics, probably many of them would be far better known than they are today. But they’re not, because I tried to keep everything within the drama itself.

“Look at ‘Evita.’ It’s a miracle to me that a song called ‘Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina’ was successful and is still performed. It’s the lyrical content and the subject that have to be taken into account, otherwise you’re not a musical dramatist.

“Romance requires you to show large emotions. And, as Garnett says, it’s possible to have two emotions at the same time. If you rendered ‘Aspects of Love’ cold, sterile, you’d emasculate it.

“ ‘Starlight’ was supposed to be a little animated cartoon about Cinderella, in which the steam train would be Cinderella and the diesel and the electric were to be the ugly stepsisters and the midnight special was the fairy godmother. We did it as that in the first performances. It got taken--in hindsight, against my better judgment--into something that it really was not,” Lloyd Webber said, lamenting the way the show grew into a major extravaganza.

“Trevor (Nunn) felt that it had a value in bringing audiences to the theater who normally don’t go to it. And even though ‘Starlight’ is not and never will be, as it turned out, one of my favorite shows, it’s interesting to see how many letters we get saying, ‘I went to see the Requiem or I saw “Evita” on tour because my kids so liked “Starlight Express.” ’

He also prefers the London “Cats” to the inflated New York version, but concedes things were different then.

“We’re talking 1981, ’82 in America. ‘Les Miserables’ hadn’t existed; ‘Phantom’ hadn’t existed. I hadn’t had a show in America since ‘Evita.’ We were in the position--Cameron Mackintosh and I--of raising money for an English musical that people were iffy about.

“There was pressure to make the production bigger. I would be very wrong to say that I didn’t go along with it. And when ‘Starlight’ came back-to-back with the revamped ‘Cats,’ everybody thought, ‘Well, he’s just into big productions.’

“In fact, it intrigues me that both ‘Cats’ and ‘Phantom’ worked just as well at Sydmonton with practically no sets or costumes on a stage a third the size of this room!

“ ‘Phantom,’ though, is a big piece. I don’t think any production could match the intention better than Hal’s. Just like (his) ‘Evita.’ ‘Evita’ was cold. It had a kind of Brechtian style that Hal is absolutely the master of. If you don’t like ‘Phantom of the Opera,’ there’s nothing anybody can say, because you can logically demolish ‘The Phantom’ in two sentences.

“But there are people, there are critics--like (Jack) Kroll in Newsweek or Kevin Kelly in the Boston Globe or Clive Barnes--who adore ‘Phantom.’ You can’t argue it. If ever there was a piece that needed size and scale, it’s ‘Phantom.’ I stand by everything that’s been done with it.”

Lloyd Webber won’t be in Los Angeles for the “Phantom” opening. He’ll be in Vancouver to look in on a symphonic concert of his music (with singers) that, so far, has played only in England. If things go well, Toronto is next, and then perhaps a tour of the United States. Does he ever take time out?

“I may very well surprise everybody by doing something I’ve wanted to do for ages--and will do at one point--which is to actually take a couple of years away and write a book about Victorian architecture. I’ve even contemplated going back to university,” said the Oxford dropout.

“But it wouldn’t be realistic,” he quickly corrected. “I have a feeling the book would take more than two years, by which time. . . . But I thought, actually, to do some art criticism. My interest in architecture has always been huge. I don’t know . . . ,” he sighed. “I don’t know that I will be allowed ever to get that time.”

Are there any new Lloyd Webber projects in gestation?

“For the first time in a long time, not--except this book, which is probably this weekend’s thought.”

Lunch over, it was back to the theater in his London cab. Lloyd Webber needed to catch “The Pyrenees” number in “Aspects.” Spirited into a subterranean room with a TV monitor focused on the matinee in progress, his attention reverted fully to the work at hand. There were those three French horn notes to take care of.