This hour-long song cycle is about as understated as Lloyd Webber gets. The Wizard of OzĪ bit of a weird one: this 2011 musical marked Lloyd Webber’s first project with Tim Rice in aeons – yay! But it was also explicitly an adaptation of the iconic 1939 film, retaining all of its original songs, and much of the script – hmm! The result was solid enough, but essentially underwhelming. This sequel to ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ looked good but lacked its predecessor’s campy panache or killer tunes. No, it’s not as bad as everybody says it was. But this first priapic, then self-righteous romp through the Swinging Sixties isn’t it. Maybe there is a good musical to be made from the scandal of the eponymous society osteopath, destroyed by the Profumo Affair. In reality, this adaptation of the classic Brit flick – torturously transposed to the American South – was ponderous and dull. On paper, the pairing of Lloyd Webber and Meat Loaf’s songwriter Jim Steinman sounded agreeably bombastic. Teaming up with Ben Elton to write a very earnest original story about Ireland during The Troubles is possibly as bad an idea as either of them have ever had, and they have both had some truly terrible ideas. The Beautiful GameĮven at their worst, the truth is Lloyd Webber’s scores are rarely the main problem with his musicals, but his choice of lyricists not named ‘Tim Rice’ is often catastrophic. It runs permanently in a custom-built arena in a German city called Bochum: they can keep it. Why? Sure, the standard response is, ‘It’s for kids.’ But honestly, our nation’s youth have enough on their plates without having to worry about the love lives of a bunch of frisky steam engines. From his great ’70s works with Tim Rice to his ’80s enormo-success and his more, ah, mixed years since, here’s our ranking of his major musicals, from the genuinely great stuff to the shows that history would probably have been better off forgetting. Love him, hate him or express total indifference to him, there’s little denying that Andrew Lloyd Webber remains Britain’s most popular ever composer of musical theatre.
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