Andrew Lloyd Webber, Hit Man : The Critics Howl, the Tickets Sell and the Maestro Just Keeps Going (and Going and Going).

DID YOU NOT KNOW ABOUT THE horse?” Anthony Pye-Jeary is inquiring excitedly. “His name is . . . is . . . Frank Rich .”

Frank Rich was, until recently, the New York Times’ lead drama critic and the pundit who most bedeviled composer Andrew Lloyd Webber. Frank Rich is also a racehorse owned and christened by Lloyd Webber, a four-legged repository of his private revenge.

Pye-Jeary chuckles. He’s an old friend of Lloyd Webber and so is in on the Frank Rich joke, one part of which is that Lloyd Webber’s mount is a gelding , it has been--you know, ha ha-- desexed . The other part is that Frank Rich--the horse--had been running poorly until, as Pye-Jeary recounts, “They put a tongue strap on him. They tied the tongue down. So Frank Rich runs for the first time with a tongue strap. And wins ! Really, really ! This is true! It sounds like a joke! But he had his tongue strapped down and the horse won!”

Pye-Jeary’s rising glee attests to just how satisfying pay-back can be. To fathom his joyful hysteria, one must consider this: From the perspective of Lloyd Webber’s crowd, Frank Rich--the man--is a pen-wielding bully who has been using wittily phrased insights to beat up on their long-suffering chum for years. In 1988, for example, Rich wrote that “The Phantom of the Opera” was “a victory of dynamic stagecraft over musical kitsch.” And just this past July, when Lloyd Webber’s latest concoction, “Sunset Boulevard,” had its world premiere in London, Rich complimented the composer on his “surprisingly dark, jazz-accented” music but suggested that Lloyd Webber and company go back to the drawing board on everything else: “Its creators have the time . . . to search for means other than hydraulics to make their show lift off.”

And it’s not as if Frank Rich has been alone in his scorn. Lloyd Webber is fair game for the Fourth Estate and, it seems, anyone else who cares to comment. Take “Cats,” for example. This Lloyd Webber revenue mill has become an equal-opportunity gag-line. It’s big, it’s bourgeois and it won’t go away. David Letterman can exploit it for yuks with the same ease that playwright Paul Rudnick did when he inserted a running goof on “Cats” in his off-Broadway hit “Jeffrey.” “Have someone come out in a cat suit,” Rudnick says, and the next thing you know, “there’s this roar of laughter. This is very useful in a comedy.” Of course, not all Lloyd Webber-bashing has such harmless intentions. Several years ago, Malcolm Williamson, the Master of the Queen’s Music, explained to reporters how he assessed his countryman’s mass appeal: Lloyd Webber’s music is “everywhere,” he said, “but then so is AIDS.”

For his part, Lloyd Webber doesn’t tell Frank Rich stories--not about the man and not about the horse. Indeed, with his accumulation of successes, he shouldn’t have to care what any critic thinks. Lloyd Webber’s 11 productions include best-sellers like his first hit, “Jesus Christ Superstar,” in 1971, “Evita,” “Cats” and “The Phantom of the Opera”--the last two alone have been worth $3.5 billion worldwide. Now comes “Sunset Boulevard,” which set advance-sales records in London and has been selling out the Shubert Theatre in Century City since its American premiere there last month. Among his many believe-it-or-not career statistics is the fact that on this very night, tickets will be available for a sanctioned Lloyd Webber production at 37 different locations on our planet. In London’s West End, six Lloyd Webber shows are running concurrently; on Broadway, three.

Nevertheless, today, sitting in the cool shade of the stone veranda at his rented Beverly Hills estate, Lloyd Webber is talking (and talking and talking) about his critical notices. “As an artist, I’ll always pick up something if I feel it is constructive.” Lloyd Webber’s distinctive delivery combines plummy English diction with sentences that conclude in a mumble. “I mean, what you should be reading is, ‘ This is a really interesting direction. I wish there was more of it.’ That’s what criticism should be about.” He utters this last statement as if he truly believes it’s the job of reviewers everywhere to assist in the refinement of an Andrew Lloyd Webber production.

When he’s relaxed, Lloyd Webber can be a self-deprecating charmer. When he’s uncomfortable, he’s a bundle of nervous tics, given to bouts of head-bobbing, foot waggling, stomach rubbing or hiccuping. On this afternoon, this is how his anxiety is expressing itself: Into his mouth goes the tip of his thumb, which is milky white, very clean and well-manicured. Later, he briefly licks his middle finger, his index finger, then his pinky. Nothing on Lloyd Webber’s face indicates that he’s aware of performing these small ablutions.

And all the while, he is politely holding forth about his detractors, about their pretense and their pack mentality. He seems to take pride in always having run against the elitist grain. Even when he was a dweeby teen, he’d boldly defend Victorian paintings and Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals to his stuffy headmasters. “They were always considered sentimental rubbish,” says Lloyd Webber, who happens to own one of the world’s most valuable Pre-Raphaelite art collections. It’s in this spirit that Lloyd Webber hears his work dismissed as hopeless schlock and reconfigures the assaults into a badge of honor: “I’m the least politically correct composer in the world,” he declares. “I am .”

The bad rap he gets, he theorizes, comes from the spontaneity of his creative process. So much of his work “has been done in public,” he says, that people think it just materializes “without, um, the pain of creation that really, um, has to go on.” (His no-sweat reputation might also come from his own past admissions that “Evita” was re-orchestrated during previews and that he dashed off a 35-minute musical called “Cricket” in three days.) “It’s been very easy to have a go at my music,” he admits weakly. “I’ve been, uh, very lucky and very popular. And I think people don’t always realize just how much you try and put into everything. I mean, to the best of your ability.”

Glancing at his watch, Lloyd Webber regretfully excuses himself. It’s several weeks before “Sunset Boulevard” will open in Los Angeles and he must dash off, with his driver, on one of his myriad rounds. Just as he readies himself to leave, he furtively moistens a forefinger. And for some reason, one half expects Lloyd Webber to hoist his glistening digit into the warm California air to see in which direction the wind is blowing.

VARIOUS MEMBERS OF THE NEWS MEDIA ARE SQUISHED THREE DEEP against a dingy wall in a Hollywood rehearsal hall. Four feet away, and too close for comfort, what looks like the entire “Sunset” chorus line is vocalizing and briskly hitting its marks. The numbers are adroitly executed but one can’t help noting that some of the ensemble members are tossing panicky smiles over their shoulders. Who wouldn’t get the jitters, performing without the security of a proscenium, just blasting away like a giant singing telegram, in the faces of the gawking press? And where are the big stars in this musicalized remake of the Billy Wilder film classic? Where is Glenn Close, who will play Norma Desmond? Or George Hearn, who plays Desmond’s gloss-topped driver Max? It is later explained that Close wasn’t “ready” for this mini-preview; nobody ever mentioned where Hearn was hiding out.

The event bumps along awkwardly, perhaps because of its quaking but determined host. Lloyd Webber’s quick brown eyes never really meet anyone’s gaze. The best he can do is stand alongside a baby grand piano, rocking back and forth, his hands twitching nervously at his hips, while silently mouthing love ballad lyrics that two cast members are singing.

He is nothing if not 100% invested in his work. “I worry about the content of my shows,” he confesses, “to the point that I think about them all the time .” He frets so much over his vast network of productions that it drives him to make spot-check visitations to any city on the map where a show of his is playing. Just to make sure everything is running in tip-top shape, he’ll-- surprise! --appear unexpectedly and frighten everyone right out of their Flexatards. As a case in point, he has visited the Las Vegas production of “Starlight Express” four times, even though, having licensed the rights away, he isn’t even involved in it.

With “Sunset Boulevard,” Lloyd Webber’s perfectionist bent has been greatly tested. Every news clip on the making of the London production included documentation of all that went awry. First there was the malfunctioning main set, a high-tech 18-ton prop that would, without human provocation and rarely on cue, shift forward or rise toward the rafters like the Starship Enterprise, occasionally with startled stagehands on board. Then the reviews rolled in, and like Frank Rich, most of the critics gave with one hand and took with the other.

Almost immediately, Lloyd Webber began to institute endless alterations for the Los Angeles opening. He fiddled not just with the score (which he “very arrogantly” calls “my best”), but also with every detail imaginable.

The London reviews found the stage characters lacking all chemistry, when the film was all about the creepiness of a sordid love triangle formed by a fading film star, her paid honey-boy and his girlfriend. So Lloyd Webber, with Christopher Hampton and Don Black, who worked together on the book and lyrics, came up with hundreds of minute script adjustments.

The notices had also said the tunes were agreeably hummable, but where was a showstopper like “Memory” or “The Music of the Night” from “Cats” and “Phantom”? Lloyd Webber added a zotzy number “Every Movie’s a Circus”--”for the younger people.” John Napier’s gilt-splashed set was dazzling, according to the papers, but inappropriately glitzy. In Los Angeles, Norma Desmond’s shut-in environment became more claustrophobic.

Lloyd Webber indulged his own second-chance desires as well. He can barely contain himself when describing the incorporation of some of his trademark flash--a reproduction of an antique touring car--into the L.A. action. It was Billy Wilder’s idea (Wilder has been serving as the Lloyd Webber team’s unpaid oracle). “I mean, we physically couldn’t (include the automobile) in London,” says Lloyd Webber peppily, “but we’ve found a way (in Los Angeles) that we can . We’re going to do it. It’s going to happen ! The old car will be there !”

But most of Lloyd Webber’s uncapped fix-it enthusiasm was devoted to the casting. In London, the press corps found the square-shouldered belter Patti LuPone too invincible to capture Norma Desmond’s cracked fragility. So Lloyd Webber tapped five-time Academy Award-nominated actress Glenn Close as the pivotal female lead. She is a Serious Actress, so she fits into Lloyd Webber’s time-honored formula of gilding fluff with substance. And she is also a movie star, which usually has sure-thing drawing power.

Weeks later, when the revamped “Sunset” opens, Lloyd Webber’s new casting pays off. For the most part the critics coo over Close. “Stunning,” says The Times’ Sylvie Drake, and--miracle of miracles--the New York Times, in the form of Vincent Canby, raves: “Ms. Close’s performance is ravishing” on its way to delivering a glowing thumbs-up. Time, USA Today and radio and TV also hand out mostly positive notices. Even so, there is plenty of Lloyd Webber blood drawn. “Grandiose camp, flashy but surprisingly dull,” says David Ansen in Newsweek. “More confident . . . but no better,” complains Daily Variety. “Wildly overblown,” admits Drake.

And the disparaging rumbling never quite dies down. The word, at one point, is that Close, singing at the edge of her range, won’t hold up to eight larnyx-punishing shows a week: Broadway trouper Betty Buckley, they say, has already been placed on 24-hour red alert. (“This absolutely isn’t true,” insists Lloyd Webber’s media consultant, Peter Brown.) Tongue-waggers point out that the double-CD cast album has so far loitered drowsily on the racks. (An L.A. cast album may be in the offing.) Some even predict that “Sunset” will never make it to the Great White Way: New York audiences are notoriously picky, thus the risk-factor of staging such a pricey show is greater there.

Certainly all of this chit-chat might yet come true. On the other hand, it might just be more of the flop-lust that grows stronger with the birth of each new Andrew Lloyd Webber production. Back in 1974, he came out with an effort called “Jeeves,” which even Lloyd Webber says was “ a complete disaster” and “catastrophically received.” But it didn’t sidetrack his campaign toward world domination--the source of so much of what irritates the legions of Sir Andrew bashers. What they all seem to wish most for him is a huge bomb, the kind of failure that could bring the Lloyd Webber machine to a grinding halt.

IN ENGLAND, LLOYD WEBBER’S HEADQUARTERS IS A 10-BEDROOM, SIX-STORY townhouse in London’s exclusive Belgravia district (not to be confused with his English country mansion, his villa in the south of France or his Trump Tower apartment in New York). When he is there, he can find no peace. The switchboard blinks constantly. Even in the upholstered depths of his chauffeur-driven, midnight blue Mercedes 600 SEL with the VCR, satellite-informed traffic monitor and fully stocked fridge, there is a back-seat car phone to distract him.

Life must have been simpler for Lloyd Webber when he was a newly minted phenomenon. Back then, he had his first partner, Tim Rice, in his corner, towering protectively over him, sharing the burdens. When the two aspiring songwriters met, in 1965, the 17-year-old Lloyd Webber was so sure of their future together that he dropped his history studies at Oxford and moved Rice into his family’s South Kensington flat.

By that point, Lloyd Webber had already composed eight musicals. It was a family thing--his father, William Lloyd Webber, was a skilled pianist who eventually became the director of the London College of Music; his mother, Jean, was a piano teacher and his brother, Julian, is a cellist. Bill Lloyd Webber had gotten Andrew’s first creation, “The Toy Theatre Suite,” published when he was 9. Apparently this was a rare display of fatherly support: According to Michael Walsh’s coffee-table Lloyd Webber biography, when young Andrew informed his dad of his professional intentions, he merely grumbled back, “If you ever write a song as good as ‘Some Enchanted Evening,’ I’ll tell you.’ ”

After a few false starts, Rice and Lloyd Webber turned “The Wonder Book of Bible Stories” into “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,” first produced in 1968. Big-time success came with “Jesus Christ Superstar.” “Superstar” rode the rock-opera trend and introduced Lloyd Webber’s sack of tricks--catchy pop songs, broad-stroke dramatic arcs, open-throated arias and, later, special effects. From the onset, what Lloyd Webber has delivered is entertainment designed to overwhelm. His musicals guarantee not just jaw-dropping staging, but crescendo after string-filled crescendo as the heart-swelling backdrop to an easily readable story line. And Lloyd Webber hammers the hooks home, making it impossible for theatergoers to walk out onto the street without at least one melody stuck in their heads. In other words, Lloyd Webber treats his customers as if their enjoyment meant more to him than anything. The package took American musical theater by surprise.

“In a way, everyone writing on Broadway was so aware of the back catalogue they couldn’t crawl out from under it,” explains Mark Steyn, musical theater correspondent for the Independent in London. “They knew too much. Andrew and Tim were so ignorant of it they could more or less get away with anything. They managed to do what Broadway failed to do, which was to keep faith with the pop quality that American musicals always had 50 or 60 years ago.”

In the early ‘70s, Lloyd Webber liked to mention publicly that his and Rice’s names would soon be inextricably linked, “like Rodgers and Hart.” But, in fact, Lloyd Webber seemed to get an adrenaline charge from attempting to prove that Rice was dispensable. In 1974, the ill-fated “Jeeves” was his first Rice-less venture. They temporarily reconciled for “Evita,” which was one of Rice’s ideas, then Lloyd Webber tried out other lyricists to medium-cool results.

Finally, along came “Cats,” Lloyd Webber’s first genuine post-Rice triumph. To launch the production, based on T.S. Eliot’s “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats,” he mortgaged one of his houses and withstood the belly laughs his concept got on both sides of the ocean. He says he was snubbed by every major American choreographer: “Twyla Tharp said it was not possible. Bob Fosse said no way.”

After that, the Rice-Lloyd Webber team tried several short-lived reunions. There was “Cricket” in 1986, their gift to Queen Elizabeth on her 60th birthday. (Later, Lloyd Webber shanghaied several tunes from “Cricket” for “Aspects of Love,” which rendered Rice’s lyrics worthless and ensured that the piece would never be produced again.) Their relationship now seems to exist only contractually, through shared credit and royalties on “Joseph,” “Superstar” and “Evita.” Rice has moved on to Disney, writing pretty lyrics for animated features like “Aladdin.” When asked to comment on his ex-partner, Rice merely sighs and offers up this freighted remark: “It’s not my dream way of spending an hour, talking about Andrew.”

So now Lloyd Webber goes it alone--not counting, of course, his phalanx of gentle publicists, assistants and assorted suits. He commissions the lyricists he wants to work with and he retains the final say-so over what they write. He has a hand in casting every touring group. And Lloyd Webber is also the near-absolute ruler of his jumbo business-side fiefdom, the Really Useful Group.

In the ‘80s, Lloyd Webber took the Really Useful Group public; but by 1990, dismayed over having to please stockholders and market forces instead of just himself, he was determinedly buying back stock. It was a financially bruising proposition. A year later, he bartered off one-third of the newly privatized RUG to PolyGram, the British entertainment mega-corporation, for roughly $130 million. The London press called it a “sweetheart deal”--a top-of-the-market sale that took him out of debt, kept him in the majority position and put all those precious creative details squarely back into his own well-manicured hands. These days, his staff says, he’s worth in the neighborhood of $450 million.

His friends brag about his entrepreneurial craftiness; his critics are not so sanguine. Lloyd Webber’s far-flung productions, says the Independent’s Steyn, are the theatrical equivalent of fast food. “McDonald’s can maybe introduce one new item every two years because they’re so busy ensuring that a Big Mac tastes exactly the same in Reykjavik as it does in Kuala Lumpur. But they can’t be as inventive and fresh as they might be, and that’s a similar thing with Andrew,” Steyn says. “This is musical theater on a scale undreamt of by anyone before--identical productions in every major town in the world. It sounds like a nightmare and it is a nightmare, because it’s boring. You get off the plane and go, ‘Well, here I am in Budapest--what’s there to see?’ And there’s ‘Evita’ and ‘Cats.’ But in sheer business terms, you’ve got to give him credit.”

David Mason, his pal and appointed art acquirer, says Lloyd Webber is famous for calculating the angles on everything. “He’s got an animal instinct,” he says. “He’s like Rasputin. Shrewd isn’t the word for it.”

Ask Lloyd Webber’s intimates for some other descriptors and they’ll paint the affectionate portrait of a man who must make for a complicated buddy. At one moment, he is the instigator of no-sleep trips, city-hopping with his wife, Madeleine, and various cohorts in his chartered 12-seater jet. At the next moment, he is the lover of baroque practical jokes, the type that are hysterical to those in the know and not as funny to those on the receiving end. He is at his most beguiling, they say, when sharing his most recent score, hunched over a piano, swaying to the chordal progressions and narrating the scenario to a one-person audience.

Then there are his bleaker traits: The downside of being a king-hell businessman is incorrigible competitiveness, everyday stinginess and a potentate’s ability to desert longtime compatriots without so much as an explanation. In December press conferences, Lloyd Webber said he was baffled-- baffled! --by rumors that he was displeased with Patti LuPone’s Norma. (LuPone was his megastar in “Evita.”) Out of the TV lights, however, he edges a little closer to poison. Glenn Close, he says, “is a joy and fun to work with. Which I must say is a change from, shall we say, another Norma we’ve had.” Later, when reminded of this not-so-subtle dig, Lloyd Webber angrily recants: “I will be cross with you,” he says, pale-faced and just this side of supremely ticked-off, “if you don’t quote me properly on this . I’m a great admirer of Patti’s; she’s a superb performer. But what she must do is to understand not to be threatened. Patti just needs to just relax a bit. That’s all. And not worry.” That said, his frail shoulders relax, and just as swiftly as his barely bottled rage bloomed, it dissipates.

His temper tantrums are legendary, and his friends claim the best prescription for them is to start creeping toward the exits. It is Gillian Lynne, who choreographed “Cats,” “Phantom” and “Aspects,” who suggests that it’s in the aftermath of his vitriolic explosions that the essential Lloyd Webber makes a rare cameo appearance. This she learned from a “Cats”-in-progress confrontation, where a scarlet-faced Lloyd Webber furiously informed Lynne that her work was so dreadful that he was withdrawing his score. It was their first collaboration, and Lynne didn’t know that he “sort of does this once a show.” Lynne sassed him back--”If Jerry Robbins can do a ballet without music, so can I”--and then retreated to her dressing room to await her pink slip.

But when summoned back to the stage, Lynne discovered that it wasn’t her head that Lloyd Webber wanted, but a conciliatory bearhug from his Gilly. In the deserted theater stalls, Lynne found him “sitting and looking miserable. He put his arms around me and said, ‘It will be all right, won’t it?’ ”

“ARE YOU LISTENING?” PETER BROWN WANTS TO KNOW. Brown is Lloyd Webber’s friend of 23 years, as well as his media consultant. He is standing in the green-carpeted study of Lloyd Webber’s temporarily roofless 16th-Century country mansion, Sydmonton Court, in Berkshire, England. Lloyd Webber is off in Holland, attending the opening of yet another “Phantom,” so Brown has arranged for some quality time with just the house.

Despite the owner’s absence, the place is filled with distractions. Right next to the front door is a freshly grouted indoor jacuzzi that looks big enough to accommodate the bewhiskered cast of “Cats.” On the periphery of the missing roof, there are muddy-booted workmen replacing the Victorian blue tile. Deep within the dark corridors, where the walls are decorated busily with gothic stars and angels, there are rosy-cheeked maids vacuuming their way through an off-season spring cleaning.

Every window frames yet another grassy perspective of this 4,000-acre-plus estate, and as far as you can see, every element on the landscape--the bare-limbed cedar and ash trees, the fat grazing sheep, the husk-beige cornfields--is the property of Lloyd Webber. So is the nearby stone church where the annual Sydmonton Festival is staged: Every summer, in this damp little space, Lloyd Webber likes to consumer-test his work on a house packed with urban swells and locals. On the roster for this year’s 20th anniversary festival is the return of “Jeeves,” which Lloyd Webber, in his compulsive mender-of-botched-projects way, has expressed the urge to “have another go at.”

The tour covers a maze of showcase chambers, such as the formal dining room with a mahogany table that seats 36. It also reveals many signs that a family actually lives here. From the look of things, the oversized kitchen and a tatty-looking television nook are the central hangouts; the claw-footed furniture has comfortably dented cushions. Propped up on every available surface are photographs of the clan, Andrew and Madeleine, his 31-year-old third wife, smiling their tentative smiles, and the distinctly Lloyd-Webberish-looking offspring--Imogen, 16, and Nicholas, 14, from the first marriage, and Alistair, 18 months, and William, 4 months, from the third. But tabloid readers who’ve tracked Lloyd Webber’s love life would instantly be captivated by the group shots, specifically the ones that include Sarah Tudor Hugill, Lloyd Webber’s first wife, or his Eliza Doolittle second spouse, Sarah Brightman, the ingenue whose voice inspired “Phantom.”

It’s often been said that what horsewoman Madeleine Lloyd Webber brings to her power-marriage is the calming effect her presence has on her husband. (“He was far more thermonuclear pre-Madeleine,” says a friend.) And while Lloyd Webber is still an insecure mixer, you’d never know it from reports that during weekends and holidays Sydmonton’s guest rooms are routinely filled with happy visitors. A proliferation of celebrity snapshots, like the one of Madeleine with former President Ronald Reagan and wife Nancy, sit on Sydmonton’s drawing room mantlepiece.

But what gets top billing among the objects on display here is Lloyd Webber’s invaluable Pre-Raphaelite art collection. His interest in art began while gazing at the 19th-Century stained glass that surrounded him as a student at London’s Westminster School. From there, he drifted to the Pre-Raphs, which he decided to start purchasing because, as he blushingly admits, “they were so cheap.” When he made his first acquisition, the Victorians were so far out of favor that a Rossetti drawing cost him only 15 pounds. Since then, he’s snapped up so many masterworks that they form a thick racing stripe of gold-framed paintings that runs through almost every room at Sydmonton. Everywhere, there are pieces by artists such as Burne-Jones, Brett, Hughes and Leighton. In the drawing room is his latest prize, Rossetti’s “A Vision of Fiametta,” a full-length portrait of a pale-skinned, red-haired beauty over whose head circles the Angel of Death. It cost a reported $4.5 million. His most expensive painting--$17.7 million--is not a Pre-Raphaelite, but an 18th-Century Canaletto, “The Horse Guard’s Parade.” He bought the painting because he found it “a thumpingly good picture.” And these are just a fraction of what he adoringly refers to en masse as “the love of my life.”

The following afternoon, Lloyd Webber, back from Holland, is chatting amiably in a clangorous Picadilly restaurant about his future agenda. He is ready to dive back into movie-making, even though his lucky streak with film adaptations began and ended in 1973 with Norman Jewison’s antic “Jesus Christ Superstar” (which Lloyd Webber had no real ties to and didn’t much care for).

As usual, Lloyd Webber plans “to be involved with everything artistically.” But he also readily admits that he doesn’t “know anything about films at all.” (In just a few weeks, word comes down that he has chosen Gary Lucchesi, who most recently was head of production at Paramount Pictures, to serve as his show-biz teacher and Hollywood point man.) Still, he enthusiastically ticks off the projects in the works: PolyGram is developing a feature version of “Aspects of Love,” possibly with John Schlesinger as director; Warner Bros. is ready to cash in on “Phantom” groupies; “Evita” is an on-again, off-again Oliver Stone/Disney project. (At press time, Disney announced that it is definitely back on.) And Lloyd Webber also has hired British playwright Tom Stoppard to write a screen version of “Cats.” T.S. Eliot’s creation, he says, will become a “dark” full-length animated feature.

He also shares the story of a recent meeting with Sarah Brightman, his second wife. (Their marriage was a scandal--when their affair started, she was a wild-haired chorine in “Cats.” He was still wed to Sarah Tudor Hugill, whom he had met at an Oxford party.) Though their messy divorce after six years of marriage filled the British gossip rags, the two remain so friendly that Lloyd Webber has decided to produce an album of her warbling rock versions of his songs. So, in Amsterdam, they met for lunch right under the noses, he says, of neglectful paparazzi. “In theory,” he insists, “that would have been one of the great pictures of all time,” and, because he is an inveterate businessman, you can almost see him toting up photographers’ lost income.

He adds one more element to the Lloyd Webber agenda--an expanding art collection. He heads the Andrew Lloyd Webber Art Foundation, a charitable organization that purchases artworks intended for public exhibition in Britain and, he hopes, at the museum he would like to construct at Sydmonton. It would be in a modern building, he says, that could also house the theater for the annual festival. “You can’t open the family house to the public,” he explains. “It’s not that big. Also, people would probably be coming for the wrong reasons anyway.” In the meantime, Lloyd Webber is making moves to expand his personal collection, looking away from the Victorians and at early Picassos and Medieval paintings.

For all the injurious wisecracks he hears about everything else he attempts, few question the breadth and importance of his art collection. And perhaps with the foundation and the museum, Lloyd Webber envisions himself, finally, being swept toward unqualified respect from the aesthetes. When he is asked which he values more--his art or his music--he says, with obvious passion, that he loves his art, but his “music has got to be first.” But not long ago, David Mason, Lloyd Webber’s art dealer, posed to him the very same question. The collection, he answered, is “the most important thing in my life.” “Nonsense,” returned Mason, “your music must be the most important thing.”

“No,” Lloyd Webber assured him. “One day, you’ll see. The music is the means to an end, and the end is my art collection.”

AT THE THURSDAY NIGHT American premiere of “Sunset,” the early returns are definitely favorable. To begin with, the gala actually is, well, fun. In London, the expected horde of above-the-title celebrities never materialized, but in Los Angeles, Lloyd Webber has pulled in old-time Hollywood royalty: Ronald and Nancy Reagan, Lana Turner, Angela Lansbury, Carol Channing. So what if Sarah Brightman, drifting languidly up the long red carpet to the Shubert’s entrance, gets a much bigger hand than her tuxedoed ex-spouse?

By the closing notes of the first number, the audience is already applauding (which will be repeated after nearly every song)--and the set gets the expected oohs and aahs . But during intermission, the lobby buzz starts to rub a bit of the shine off the evening: “Well,” remarks one grim-looking fan, “it’s not as bad as I thought it would be.”

As the reviews trickled in over the next few days, Lloyd Webber had this comfort: Frank Rich--the man--wasn’t there to kick him around anymore. Not that there is much question what Rich might have said, if he’d had the chance. As Peter Brown has advised his client, “He doesn’t like what you do. He doesn’t like what you’ve done to the American theater. Therefore he is never going to like anything you do. Why don’t you just let it go?”

Forty-eight hours after the Los Angeles “Sunset” debut, Lloyd Webber seems to have taken his old friend’s emotional advice and run with it. His butler, Isaac, moves quietly through the Beverly Hills rental, organizing his employer’s imminent departure. Madeleine, dressed in blue leggings and a thick sweater, waves hello as she dashes upstairs. Outside, a cold, hard rain splashes down, and Lloyd Webber, sitting on an overstuffed floral couch, professes total contentment. No matter that most of the reviews are decidedly mixed--Lloyd Webber wants to accentuate the positive. The score overall, he says, is “certainly an eight or a nine out of 10.”

“I’m done,” Lloyd Webber says with finality--”Sunset” is complete. In a few hours, he and his family will board their private jet to return to England and, after a rest, his next move will be to decide what exactly will happen next with his rejiggered “Sunset.” How can he incorporate the changes in London? Will the next version end up in New York? “We’re looking at all of the theaters in the United States which could take it,” he says. And if that location happens not to be Broadway, he hastens to add, it’s “not because we don’t want to go to New York, it’s because we can’t find the theater in which to put it.”

Nearby, on a long, low coffee table, an immense arrangement of white lilies is turning brown at the edges and starting to droop. Whenever he falls back into contemplation, Lloyd Webber looks a little worse for the wear as well. The post-curtain partying on Thursday night went on and on, with 20 of his closest friends (some of whom he had flown in from England), staying until 5 a.m. And occasionally, his face crumples completely--his mother died just days before “Sunset” opened after a long illness, having given orders that no one upset their plans in the event. Mostly, however, Lloyd Webber remembers to smile. He indulges in just one minor nervous gesture, tugging repeatedly at the bottom of his nose. And he comes back again and again to the “reviewers” who almost never let him down--his fans. The day after the opening, they were out in force. “We took (in) more than half a million dollars. That’s unbelievable. And I’ve just been told that there’s a queue around the corner at the Shubert--with umbrellas and everything.”

He perches himself right at the edge of the cushy sofa. “I would say it’s a much better set of reviews than I’ve ever had,” he says one more time. “We could put together, really, the best quote-ad of any musical I’ve ever done.” And then his fingers move upward, grab his nostrils, and tug.