Andrew Lloyd Webber was born on March 22, 1948 in London. Arguably the most successful composer of our time, he also remains among the most surprising. He has found inspiration in the unlikeliest sources: making music from the Old and New Testaments and from the text of the Mass, from an urbane Bloomsbury romance, from smoldering French and British gothics, rom a game called soccer and from the melancholy dream of Old Hollywood. He has made unforgettable musicals about just plain singing and dancing, but also about South American politics, British butlers, lovelorn phantoms and American trains. Even about cats -- and how many musicals boast Nobel Prize-winning lyrics? It is good to remember how strikingly original a theatrical concept it was to bring together the quirky, cool poems of T.S. Eliot with Lloyd Webber's knowing neoromantic melodies. "Cats," one of the longest running musicals in Broadway history, is but one such original gesture in a career marked by originality and surprise.
"No theatrical figure in the last 20 years has appealed so consistently to popular taste as Lloyd Webber," David Richards wrote in The New York Times. "Not just American popular taste or British popular taste, but worldwide popular taste. He has established the vogue for the sung-through musical, brought epic dramas and operatic emotions to the musical stage and helped prove that no subject is off-limits."
Lloyd Webber is the composer of "The Likes of Us," "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat," "Jesus Christ Superstar," "By Jeeves," "Evita," "Variations" and "Tell Me on A Sunday," "Song and Dance," "Cats," "Starlight Express," "The Phantom of the Opera," "Aspects of Love," "Sunset Boulevard," "Whistle Down the Wind," "The Beautiful Game" and "The Woman in White." He composed the scores of the motion pictures "Gumshoe" and "The Odessa File," and his setting of the Latin Requiem Mass earned him a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Composition. As a producer, his work has included not only his own musicals but also the Olivier Award-winning play "La Bête," "Lend Me a Tenor" and "Daisy Pulls it Off," as well as an acclaimed revival of Rodgers and Hart's "On Your Toes" and the groundbreaking West End and Broadway original presentations of A. R. Rahman's musical "Bombay Dreams."
"No theatrical figure in the last 20 years has appealed so consistently to popular taste as Lloyd Webber," David Richards wrote in The New York Times. "Not just American popular taste or British popular taste, but worldwide popular taste. He has established the vogue for the sung-through musical, brought epic dramas and operatic emotions to the musical stage and helped prove that no subject is off-limits."
Lloyd Webber is the composer of "The Likes of Us," "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat," "Jesus Christ Superstar," "By Jeeves," "Evita," "Variations" and "Tell Me on A Sunday," "Song and Dance," "Cats," "Starlight Express," "The Phantom of the Opera," "Aspects of Love," "Sunset Boulevard," "Whistle Down the Wind," "The Beautiful Game" and "The Woman in White." He composed the scores of the motion pictures "Gumshoe" and "The Odessa File," and his setting of the Latin Requiem Mass earned him a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Composition. As a producer, his work has included not only his own musicals but also the Olivier Award-winning play "La Bête," "Lend Me a Tenor" and "Daisy Pulls it Off," as well as an acclaimed revival of Rodgers and Hart's "On Your Toes" and the groundbreaking West End and Broadway original presentations of A. R. Rahman's musical "Bombay Dreams."
In 2004, he produced a film version of "The Phantom of the Opera," directed by Joel Schumacher. This season alone, Lord Lloyd Webber is producing a major West End revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein's "The Sound of Music," his own "Phantom of the Opera" is enjoying a new production in Las Vegas, and his "Evita" is once again conquering the West End.
Not just a stage creature, Lloyd Webber has written Top 10 singles for a wide variety of singers including Madonna, Sarah Brightman, Michael Ball, Cliff Richard, David Essex, Elaine Paige, Michael Crawford and Boyzone. Among his Top 10 albums are the original cast recordings of "The Phantom of the Opera," "Aspects of Love," "Cats" and "Jesus Christ Superstar," as well as studio recordings of "Tell Me on a Sunday," "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat," "Evita," "Whistle Down The Wind" and "Variations."
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