I was just watching the Andrew Lloyd Webber celebration on ITV1... I think Andrew Lloyd Webber is one of the greatest people in theatre and was looking forward to watching the show, which turned out to be a disappointment.
So I thought, rather than lamenting over how it was a disappointment, we could put things right and have our own celebration of Andrew Lloyd Webber's work! In true ShowTunes DIY fashion, let's start our celebration!
In the show, Lloyd Webber said he wished he'd had a regular collaborator... Though I think he's worked amazingly well with many lyricists, his best pieces are probably those he wrote alongside Tim Rice (though there are some notable exceptions!). Here's my childhood favourite - Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat.
So I thought, rather than lamenting over how it was a disappointment, we could put things right and have our own celebration of Andrew Lloyd Webber's work! In true ShowTunes DIY fashion, let's start our celebration!
In the show, Lloyd Webber said he wished he'd had a regular collaborator... Though I think he's worked amazingly well with many lyricists, his best pieces are probably those he wrote alongside Tim Rice (though there are some notable exceptions!). Here's my childhood favourite - Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat.
Like 'Joseph's Coat', many of Lloyd Webber's greatest show tunes were written for duets or ensembles. Here's a beautiful song from Starlight Express (currently one of my absolute favourites)... In fact, this was my shower song for a considerable amount of time!
Isn't that a great song?! As was mentioned on the show, Andrew Lloyd Webber is an expert at taking bizarre ideas and making them so good that people no longer think of them as nuts! A musical where all the characters are trains...?! Not long before Starlight Express, Lloyd Webber had had a similar inspirational moment in the form of 'Cats'. It's worth taking in the choreography at the beginning of this video - it's incredible!
'Cats' is one of Andrew Lloyd Webber's most famous and most successful musicals. It's not quite the most successful though - still performing to packed houses after 25 year's on London's West End, The Phantom of the Opera is an incredible musical... Not quite as rousing and upbeat as some of his others, but special all the same:
Andrew Lloyd Webber's repertoire is so varied that it is extraordinarily difficult to sum in up with a few songs. For the final song in this post, I could pick from Tell Me On A Sunday, Evita, Aspects of Love, Whistle Down The Wind, Jesus Christ Superstar or so many others... But I'm going to go for the title song from 'Sunset Boulevard' as Lloyd Webber classic number 5!
What's your stand-out Lloyd Webber show tune?