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Unmasked

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Unmasked

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Overview

"You have the luck of Croesus on stilts (as my Auntie Vi would have said) if you’ve had the sort of career, ups and downs, warts and all that I have in that wondrous little corner of show business called musical theatre."

One of the most successful and distinguished artists of our time, Andrew Lloyd Webber has reigned over the musical theatre world for nearly five decades. The winner of numerous awards, including multiple Tonys and an Oscar, Lloyd Webber has enchanted millions worldwide with his music and numerous hit shows, including Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, Cats, The Phantom of the Opera—Broadway’s longest running show—and most recently, School of Rock. In Unmasked, written in his own inimitable, quirky voice, the revered, award-winning composer takes stock of his achievements, the twists of fate and circumstance which brought him both success and disappointment, and the passions that inspire and sustain him.

The son of a music professor and a piano teacher, Lloyd Webber reveals his artistic influences, from his idols Rodgers and Hammerstein and the perfection of South Pacific’s “Some Enchanted Evening,” to the pop and rock music of the 1960s and Puccini’s Tosca, to P. G. Wodehouse and T. S. Eliot. Lloyd Webber recalls his bohemian London youth, reminiscing about the happiest place of his childhood, his homemade Harrington Pavilion—a make-believe world of musical theatre in which he created his earliest entertainments.

A record of several exciting and turbulent decades of British and American musical theatre and the transformation of popular music itself, Unmasked is ultimately a chronicle of artistic creation. Lloyd Webber looks back at the development of some of his most famous works and illuminates his collaborations with luminaries such as Tim Rice, Robert Stigwood, Harold Prince, Cameron Mackintosh, and Trevor Nunn. Taking us behind the scenes of his productions, Lloyd Webber reveals fascinating details about each show, including the rich cast of characters involved with making them, and the creative and logistical challenges and artistic political battles that ensued.

Lloyd Webber shares his recollections of the works that have become cultural touchstones for generations of fans: writings songs for a school production that would become his first hit, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat; finding the coterie of performers for his classic rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar; developing his first megahit, Evita, which would win seven Tonys Awards, including Best Musical; staking his reputation and fortune on the groundbreaking Cats; and making history with the dazzling The Phantom of the Opera.

Reflecting a life that included many passions (from architecture to Turkish Swimming Cats), full of witty and revealing anecdotes, and featuring cameo appearances by numerous celebrities—Elaine Paige, Sarah Brightman, David Frost, Julie Covington, Judi Dench, Richard Branson, A.R. Rahman, Mandy Patinkin, Patti LuPone, Richard Rodgers, Norman Jewison, Milos Forman, Plácido Domingo, Barbra Streisand, Michael Crawford, Gillian Lynne, Betty Buckley, and more—Unmasked at last reveals the true face of the extraordinary man beneath the storied legend.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062496980
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	03/06/2018
Edition description:	Large Print
Pages:	784
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.80(d)

About the Author

Andrew Lloyd Webber is the composer of The Likes of Us, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, Cats, The Phantom of the Opera, Sunset Boulevard, School of Rock, and many other productions. His awards include seven Tonys, three Grammys, seven Oliviers, a Golden Globe, an Oscar, two international Emmys, the Praemium Imperiale, the Richard Rodgers Award for Excellence in Musical Theatre, a BASCA Fellowship, and the Kennedy Center Honor. He was knighted in 1992 and was appointed an honorary life peer in 1997. He lives in London, where he own seven theatres, including the London Palladium.

Prologue xi

Overture and Beginners 1

1 Perseus & Co. 7

2 Some Enchanted Ruin 15

3 Auntie Vi 34

4 A Whiter Shade of Something That Didn't Taste Very Nice in the First Place 52

5 "Mr Lloyd Webber, Do You Like Cats?" 72

6 Enter Timothy Miles Bindon Rice 84

7 Teenage Operas, Pop Cantatas 104

8 Elvis with Mellotron and Tambourines 123

9 Any Dream Won't Do 140

10 "Did Judas Iscariot Have God on His Side?" 160

11 Love Changes Everything, But … 182

12 JCS Meets RSO 206

13 Jesus Goes to Broadway 231

14 A Bad Case of the Edward Woodwards 248

15 Suddenly There's a Valet 263

16 Syd 282

17 Driverless Juggernauts Hurtling Down a Hill 298

18 Eva and Juan 314

19 The Long Hot Summer and the Sound of a Paraguayan Harp 334

20 The Song that Cleared the Dance Floors 358

21 Imogen and Niccolò 374

22 Variations 388

23 Really Useful 410

24 Tell Me on a Sunday 428

25 "This Artfully Produced Monument to Human Indecency" 449

26 Shaddap and Take That Look Off Your Face 454

27 Mr Mackintosh 462

28 "All the Characters Must Be Cats" 475

29 Growltiger's Last Stand 502

30 Body Stockings, Leg Warmers and Meat Cleavers 529

31 Song and Dance, and Sleep 556

32 "The Most Obnoxious Form of 'Music' Ever Invented" 578

33 Miss Sarah Brightman 601

34 "Brrrohahaha!!!" 628

35 Requiem 648

36 Epiphany 658

37 "Big Change from Book" 671

38 Year of the Phantom 687

39 In Another Part of the West End Forest … 700

40 Mr Crawford 707

41 "Let Your Soul Take You Where You Want to Be!" 720

Playout Music 729

Acknowledgments 737

Appendix 739

From the B&N Reads Blog

Page 1 of

Editorial Reviews

“Unmasked (the title is a play on Phantom’s signature facial gear) will tickle music and theater geeks. It’s an insider’s inside account, highly readable, thanks to Lloyd Webber’s affable, intelligent voice

USA Today

The unworried Unmasked proves as readable as his hits are watchable.

Washington Post

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
THAT HAS...WIT, SURPRISE, CONTEMPORANEITY,
AUDACITY, AND AN
APPEALINGLY SHREWD SENSE OF THE OCCASION.

The New Yorker

In this memoir, Andrew Lloyd Webber tells a lovely, mildly self- deprecating anecdote about an encounter with Lorin Maazel. Maazel was rehearsing a performance of Lloyd Webber's classical Requiem, and during a break the composer asked the conductor to explain the minimalist music of Philip Glass.

Maazel tried. Here's Lloyd Webber on what happened next: "Abruptly he stopped and looked me in my glazed over face. 'Andrew, there's no point in my explaining this. You are a maximalist.' "

In a single pithy word, Maazel nails Lloyd Webber's preference for the grand musical gesture -- the soaring, emotional melodies that have captivated Broadway and West End audiences but often earned him critical disdain. There are many such pointed, intimate moments in Unmasked, whose title is ripped from the climax of Lloyd Webber's mega-hit The Phantom of the Opera. (In a 2018 reconsideration of the composer in the The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik called Phantom, still running in New York and London after three decades, "both absolutely terrible and sort of great.")

From a literary standpoint, Lloyd Webber's memoir, published in connection with his seventieth birthday, is something of a mess. It is sprawling and overlong, formally inelegant, at once needlessly detailed and riddled with lacunae. More surprising, Unmasked covers only the opening portion of the composer's career, through Phantom's creation and 1986 West End premiere. Lloyd Webber sums up his often rocky subsequent decades in an epilogue titled "Playout Music," in which he suggests that his financial and personal challenges have taught him "toe-curling truths about so-called friends and colleagues." Addressing why a single volume hadn't sufficed to chronicle his life to date, Lloyd Webber concedes that "my verbosity got in the way."

Unmasked mostly compensates for its self-indulgence with a sprightly tone, a high gossip quotient, and, best of all, a sense of authenticity. Readers gain entrée to Lloyd Webber's sensibility -- neuroses, obsessions, vanity, and all -- and to a turbulent backstage world in which his perfectionism about sound quality sometimes collides with the practicalities of making theater. He frets endlessly over royalties, reviews, and especially casting and learns from his idol Richard Rodgers that "critics were afraid of sentiment," a prescient warning indeed.

The young Lloyd Webber was, as one might expect, a musical prodigy, eager for accomplishment and acclaim -- though also a passionate aficionado of art and architecture. The son of a composer and music professor (his father) and an "ace piano teacher" (his mother), he dropped out of Oxford University to work with the lyricist Tim Rice on a series of "through-sung" musicals. Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, a pop cantata, began as a short concert for schools and was subsequently expanded. Jesus Christ Superstar launched as a rock album before becoming the duo's Broadway debut. The critically reviled, Tony Award−winning Evita, based on the life of Argentinian political leader Eva Perón, turned out to be their swan song.

For Cats, Lloyd Webber drew on the verses of T. S. Eliot; for Phantom, based on the novel by Gaston Leroux, he enlisted Charles Hart, as well as Richard Stilgoe. The great lyricist Alan Jay Lerner had originally signed on to work with Stilgoe, but lung cancer forced his withdrawal. Lerner's touching letter to Lloyd Webber bemoans missing out on "the wonderful opportunity it would have been to write with you."

He also missed out on Lloyd Webber's sometimes brutal frankness. The composer worries, for instance, about Patti Lupone's diction in the title role of Evita, for which she eventually won a Tony Award. (In a letter prior to the 1979 Broadway opening, he admonishes her to concentrate on her musical performance.) In the memoir, he lambastes director Tom O'Horgan (of Hair fame) for a Broadway production of Jesus Christ Superstar with "the vision and subtlety of Caesars Palace." He refers to Perry Como, who sings his theme for the film The Odessa File, as "Perry Comatose."

His early partner Rice provokes both admiration and irritation. He paints the lyricist as a dexterous rhymer and a "blond bombshell of an adonis" who regularly bedded ingénues and was easygoing to a fault. We learn that Rice nevertheless threatened legal action over the unauthorized inclusion of his lyrics in a hybrid early version of "Memory," the anthem from Cats. The breach has since been sufficiently repaired for Rice to permit his correspondence to be quoted.

Lloyd Webber makes clear that he himself was no saint. But he offers little emotional insight into the dynamics of his two failed marriages, both with women named Sarah. His first, at age twenty- three to eighteen-year-old Sarah Hugill, began with a head-over- heels infatuation, produced two children, and survived Hugill's near-fatal, misdiagnosed bout with diabetes-related blood poisoning. (A doctor had insisted she was suffering only from stress.)

That marriage famously fell victim to Lloyd Webber's romance with the soprano Sarah Brightman, whom he would eventually cast as Christine in Phantom. At once "devastated yet resigned," Hugill, to avoid divorce, was willing to allow him to lead a double life, Lloyd Webber says -- a heartbreaking detail. He declines but later buys her a country house.

The composer's union with Brightman turns out to be precarious, too. It fractures, he writes, after the singer has an affair with a keyboard player and he becomes involved with another woman, leaving Brightman "shattered." Her voice, he adds consolingly, "will always be very special to me." Because of the memoir's timeline, Lloyd Webber's third wife, Madeleine Gurdon, a retired equestrian to whom he has been married twenty-seven years, makes only a cameo appearance.

In more recent years, Lloyd Webber has struggled with prostate cancer, alcohol, and a series of musical near-misses and flops. (Ever heard of Stephen Ward, about one of the central figures in Britain's 1963 Profumo scandal? Lloyd Webber hopes to revamp it someday.) He rebounded in 2015 with School of Rock, still playing both Broadway and the West End. This idiosyncratic memoir will delight his many fans, provide invaluable grist for theater historians -- and perhaps inspire an even grittier and more revealing sequel.

Julia M. Klein, a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia, reviews theater for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Follow her on Twitter @JuliaMKlein.
Reviewer: Julia M. Klein

The Barnes & Noble Review

The unworried Unmasked proves as readable as his hits are watchable.” — Washington Post
“(Unmasked) is a gripping insight into a rich and intensely creative life.” — BBC America
“Unmasked (the title is a play on Phantom’s signature facial gear) will tickle music and theater geeks. It’s an insider’s inside account, highly readable, thanks to Lloyd Webber’s affable, intelligent voice” — USA Today
“An autobiography that has...wit, surprise, contemporaneity, audacity, and an appealingly shrewd sense of the occasion.” — New Yorker
“I laughed, I cried, it was better than Cats!” — Vanity Fair
“Mr. Lloyd Webber’s charmingly idiosyncratic, surprisingly endearing and ruthlessly entertaining autobiography.” — Wall Street Journal
“An enlightening look into Andrew Lloyd Webber’s early life and professional career.” — Broadway World
“THERE IS NOTHING ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER CAN’T DO...
THIS MEMOIR PROVES THAT HE CAN WRITE STYLISH
AND WITTY PROSE TOO.” — Sunday Times (London)

From the Publisher

An enlightening look into Andrew Lloyd Webber’s early life and professional career.

Broadway World

THERE IS NOTHING ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER CAN’T DO...
THIS MEMOIR PROVES THAT HE CAN WRITE STYLISH
AND WITTY PROSE TOO.

Sunday Times (London)

I laughed, I cried, it was better than Cats!

Vanity Fair

An autobiography that has...wit, surprise, contemporaneity, audacity, and an appealingly shrewd sense of the occasion.”

New Yorker

The unworried Unmasked proves as readable as his hits are watchable.

Washington Post

(Unmasked) is a gripping insight into a rich and intensely creative life.

BBC America

Mr. Lloyd Webber’s charmingly idiosyncratic, surprisingly endearing and ruthlessly entertaining autobiography.

Wall Street Journal

“Unmasked (the title is a play on Phantom’s signature facial gear) will tickle music and theater geeks. It’s an insider’s inside account, highly readable, thanks to Lloyd Webber’s affable, intelligent voice

USA Today

An autobiography that has...wit, surprise, contemporaneity, audacity, and an appealingly shrewd sense of the occasion.”

New Yorker

11/01/2017
Still going strong—three Lloyd Webber productions are currently playing on Broadway—the multi-multi-award-winning composer recalls his life, starting with his pet monkey-owning mum, and limns his creative process as well. With a 100,000-copy first printing.

Library Journal

Unmasked

Unmasked

Paperback(Large Print)

Paperback(Large Print)

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Overview

Product Details

About the Author

Table of Contents

Customer Reviews

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Overview

Product Details

About the Author

Table of Contents

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Customer Reviews