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      Andrew Lloyd Webber Brings the Music of the Night Back to ‘Phantom’

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      After a long pandemic pause, “The Phantom of the Opera” is returning to Broadway with some help from its creator.“The Phantom of the Opera,” the longest-running show in Broadway history, resumes performances Friday.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesAndrew Lloyd Webber looked pleased.He was standing over the large orchestra pit of his musical “The Phantom of the Opera” at the Majestic Theater on Broadway, hearing the instrumental “Entr’Acte” from the top after a half-hour of detail work — more emphatic delivery here, more passionate lyricism there. He held his hands at his hips, a contented smile on his face.“That’s great, much better,” he said after the ensemble finished. “It just needs to be played like it’s on the edge, all the time.”Lloyd Webber, the composer of some of the most famous musicals of the past five decades — in a wide stylistic range from the radio-ready rock of “Jesus Christ Superstar” to the maddening tunefulness of “Cats” and the lush Romanticism of “Phantom” — was in town from Britain to prepare for the reopening on Friday of the longest-running show in Broadway history.Andrew Lloyd Webber visited the musical to rehearse the pit orchestra with its conductor, Kristen Blodgette.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesVisits from composers are rarely afforded to musicals as settled in as “Phantom,” which opened at the Majestic in 1988. But because the pandemic kept it shuttered for over a year and a half, its return is more like a revival; the production’s tech has been spruced up during the pause, and the cast and orchestra were rehearsing the material as if it were new.And that’s exactly how Lloyd Webber wanted it to sound, he told the musicians during rehearsal on Thursday, by way of some personal history.“I remember when I was a boy I managed to get a ticket to the Zeffirelli production of ‘Tosca’ at the Royal Opera House,” Lloyd Webber said, recalling how he had always heard that Puccini’s melodrama was a potboiler not worth the price of admission. Yet Franco Zeffirelli, the Italian director with an extravagantly cinematic sensibility, “decided that he would shake up the cobwebs.”On Thursday, Lloyd Webber also worked on the duet “All I Ask of You” with Meghan Picerno and John Riddle, the show’s current Christine and Raoul.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York Times“What I just remember is, Tito Gobbi and Maria Callas that night, in the second act, made an impression on me that I’ll never forget,” he continued. “It was just extraordinary, because the critics were saying, ‘Oh my gosh, this is actually the greatest score.’ I’m not trying to say this is the same thing, but it’s just that we have to approach everything now as if it’s the very, very, very first time.”“Phantom” may not be Puccini, but its score — thick and lavishly orchestrated — shares more with opera than most Broadway musicals. It calls for an unusually large ensemble of nearly 30 players, about a third of whom have been with the show since 1988. “Today I don’t think we would be able to do that,” Lloyd Webber said during an interview between rehearsals. “I think everybody’s forgotten what a real orchestra can sound like.”During the pandemic shutdown, Lloyd Webber was one of theater’s fiercest and most outspoken advocates.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesGiven that size, Lloyd Webber was particular about amplification on Thursday, preferring to let the instruments sound as acoustic as possible. But the orchestra needed to give more to make it work; virtually all of his notes to the conductor, the associate musical supervisor Kristen Blodgette, were about adding emphasis to a score that is already brazenly emphatic.“You can make a little more of that phrase,” he said at one point; at others: “We want the audience in our grip,” “It’s just a little undernourished” and “I think that can really come up a bit, I would treat it as appassionata.”He was joined by David Caddick, the production musical supervisor, who wanted for more of the same, asking the strings to “play into the shape of the melody” during a section of the “Entr’Acte” based on the soaring duet “All I Ask of You,” and reminding them to “make every melody sing out.”The “Phantom” orchestra is unusually large, consisting of nearly 30 players.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesWhen some of the cast later came onstage — to rehearse the operatic set piece “Prima Donna” and “All I Ask of You” — Lloyd Webber at times seemed to be channeling Hal Prince, the show’s legendary director, who died in 2019, guiding the singers in their understanding and delivery of lyrics on a level as small as single words. “I’m one of the only ones left who was here on the ground floor,” Lloyd Webber later said. (The choreographer, Gillian Lynne, died in 2018.) “But I was very close to Hal on this.”In the scene leading up to “Prima Donna,” for example, he welcomed more joy and comedy. He told Craig Bennett, who plays Monsieur Firmin: “It’s great fun if you can say ‘To hell with Gluck and Handel, have a scandal’ — it’s the inner rhyme, isn’t it? That’s the game, savoring every moment because there are some good lines there.”And to Meghan Picerno and John Riddle, the show’s current Christine and Raoul, he said while running through “All I Ask of You”: “I think that what we’re perhaps not getting is that they’re like teenagers in love. It needs to be more earnest. Say ‘One love, one lifetime’ as if you really mean it. Just run with it. The more of that there is here, the more of an antidote it will be to what comes in the second act.”A poster for the show outside the theater. “I do always love to hear it,” Lloyd Webber said of the “Phantom” score.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesAgain, this is uncommon; such attention from a composer is more likely to be given to a new show, such as Lloyd Webber’s latest, “Cinderella,” which opened in London this summer after a series of pandemic delays. During that time — and throughout the shutdown — he was one of theater’s fiercest and most outspokenly frustrated advocates. And when “Cinderella” at last debuted in the West End, its opening night was also a milestone for being that musical’s first performance for a full-capacity audience.It’s an ordeal that could make for a chapter of the awaited sequel to his memoir, “Unmasked,” which follows his life and work only until “Phantom.” “Oh, I’m not writing that,” he said in the interview between rehearsals, adding with a puckish grin: “There’s too much I know. I’d rather write another show, and get ‘Cinderella’ here.”But first, he had “Phantom” to open the next day. And a rehearsal to return to. As he stood up from a lobby chair to walk back into the house, he said, “I do always love to hear it.” More

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      Why ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ the Album Has Always Rocked

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      When I discovered the record, it felt like the bizarre offspring of my deepest, dorkiest passions: theater and dad rock.I’m here to spread the good word of “Jesus Christ Superstar,” the album.It’s a little odd that a record so rapturously received, at least in the United States in the early ’70s, is now mostly left off best album lists, and didn’t secure a lasting place in the rock music canon.Then again, perhaps it was inevitable that “Superstar” the album would end up eclipsed by “Superstar” the stage show, which followed a year later. It’s natural to think of the album as an artifact of the theatrical experience, rather than as a singular artistic vision in its own right, because that’s the way it usually works. It can be tough, for new listeners, to hear the music for the theater.Maybe it’s just that no serious rock connoisseur wants to admit to digging the guys who did “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.”Excuse me, for a moment, if I come off as weirdly defensive about the work of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. The night my parents met, my mother, a former singer, was performing “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” onstage. She has still never seen “Evita.”Revisiting the 1970 album via the recent release of the 50th anniversary edition, I’m as excited by it as I was when I was 15 and listened to it for the first time. My high school classmates were wallowing in their teenage angst listening to Limp Bizkit and Korn — this was around the turn of the millennium — and here I was, immersed in the bizarre offspring of my deepest, dorkiest passions: theater and dad rock.But for me, tuning into a Judas-centered retelling of the Passion of the Christ felt like a kind of rebellion too. I was obsessed with the song “Gethsemane (I Only Want to Say),” which epitomized emo before that musical term existed, and the electric-shock scream of Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan, in the role of Jesus, railing at an unresponsive God. (“Show me just a little of your omnipresent brain!”) While “Superstar” isn’t overtly anti-religious, the impertinence of it gave a young, questioning Catholic a lot to think about.Like a lot of music I loved, and still love from that era, it was kind of preposterous. The “Superstar” overture alone — surely one of the most unsettling rock record openers, let alone musical overtures — features harrowing electric guitar, synth, strings, boisterous brass, and a choir dropped in from a horror movie. The whole thing is more Roger Waters than Rodgers and Hammerstein. Indeed, those musical ingredients can be heard in Pink Floyd’s “Atom Heart Mother,” released in the United Kingdom the same month as “Superstar.”The musical tracks for “Superstar,” Rice explained during a podcast, were laid down in a haze of marijuana smoke — at the same London studios where the Rolling Stones recorded “Sympathy for the Devil” — with each day’s session beginning with a half-hour jam session. Most of the musicians had played Woodstock behind Joe Cocker. Gillan recorded his vocals in three hours and played a gig with Deep Purple that night.It’s no wonder “Superstar” rocks.From the get-go, there’s “Heaven on Their Minds,” whose guitar riff has an evocative directness right up there with Metallica’s “Enter Sandman.” It also has Murray Head as Judas screaming “Jesuuuus!” and sounding kind of blasphemous doing it. How often do you want to blast a showtune — the term seems inadequate here — as loudly as possible? How many classic musicals kick off with a sound and atmosphere worthy of heavy metal? (Not counting “Les Misérables,” whose opening number features the chain-gang clink of actual heavy metal.)On the other end of the spectrum is “I Don’t Know How to Love Him,” a moment of tuneful introspection not miles away from Carole King’s “Tapestry,” which was the second-highest-selling album of 1971 behind “Superstar.”If one thinks of “Superstar” as a concept album, it’s that rare one that tells a compelling, coherent story, more narrative driven than Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” or The Who’s “Tommy,” with none of the vaporous verbiage of a lot of rock music at the time. The whole thing is built, as Lloyd Webber is fond of saying, “like a cast iron boat” — a rock radio play, or a stage show for the proscenium of the imagination. In music industry parlance, it’s all killer, no filler.Rice, the former aspiring pop star that he was, has always excelled in down-to-earth lyrics that make outsize characters thoroughly relatable. It’s partly why the lead vocal performances here hit you in the gut. When Yvonne Elliman’s Magdalene cries “He scares me so,” you believe her. When Murray Head’s Judas chokes out the same line, in his own anguished version of that song — Lloyd Webber, ever the skillful deployer of the poignant reprise — you believe him, too.When it comes to Lloyd Webber’s musical audacity, it can sometimes feel as if it’s not just rock snobs that underrate “Superstar,” but also self-professed musical theater lovers.Rice, left, and Lloyd Webber are now musical theater royalty. Yet some of their work remains underrated by musical fans.Again, it may seem strange to suggest that the composer of “The Phantom of the Opera,” sometimes considered to be one of the most successful pieces of entertainment, is underrated by musical fans. But it’s precisely because of that kind of commercial success that Lloyd Webber is taken for granted, dismissed as a populist composer of the kinds of hummable melodies that might, say, pacify a temperamental president.This is unfair to the composer who, on “Superstar,” was having his way with the kinds of time signatures that were dazzling fans of Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Just listen to “The Temple,” its feverish 7/4 time signature is a nod to Prokofiev’s equally tumultuous seventh piano sonata, with nary a beat to take a breath. Even more impressive is “Everything’s Alright,” probably the catchiest tune ever written in 5/4. And I include Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” in that.That’s not to mention Lloyd Webber’s essential, monumental achievement here, of creating 90 minutes of music deftly combining orchestra, rock band and a small army of vocalists. Let’s just say that Stephen Sondheim, who happens to share a birthday with Lloyd Webber, doesn’t have a monopoly on musical complexity, psychological depth and conceptual ambition.Lloyd Webber and Rice became musical theater royalty. But before that, they were a couple of shaggy-haired youths who captured the disparate music of the era like few other musicals until “Hamilton.” There was nothing like it in 1970, and there’s not been a lot like it since. More

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      ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ at 50: What Was the Buzz?

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      It was the spring of 1970, and Yvonne Elliman, an 18-year-old singer and guitarist from Hawaii, had just finished performing at a London nightclub when a breathless young man rushed the stage.“You’re my Mary Magdalene!” a wide-eyed, 22-year-old Andrew Lloyd Webber announced.“I thought he meant the mother of God,” Elliman, now 69, said in a recent phone conversation, explaining that she had been unfamiliar with the biblical story. “He was like, ‘No, no, no, no, it’s not the mother, it’s the whore.’”They had a laugh, and she went on to sing the part in “Jesus Christ Superstar,” the seminal rock opera by Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, for the concept album, the first arena tour, the original Broadway production and the feature film.The musical, which opened 50 years ago on Oct. 12, 1971, turned the story of one of history’s most notorious executions into a splashy spectacle. In doing so, it married rock and musical theater, ushering in Broadway’s British invasion of the 1970s and 1980s and paving the way for shows like “Les Misérables” and “The Phantom of the Opera.”But the nearly 90-minute concept album came first in 1970, because, as Lloyd Webber recalled recently to The Telegraph, no producer wanted to put “the worst idea in history” onstage.“We never knew how it was ever going to get staged,” Lloyd Webber, 73, said in a recent phone conversation. “So it wasn’t a collection of rock tracks or something put together. It had to be read to you and you could understand — the dramatic context of the whole thing had to be the recording.”Jeff Fenholt in the Broadway production. The rock opera portrays Jesus as simply a man, who loses his temper, doubts God and gets caught up in his own celebrity.Bettmann, via Getty ImagesThough the album fizzled in England, the rock opera with a full orchestra and gospel choir took off in America, climbing to No. 1 on the Billboard charts by February 1971. A year after its release, the initial album had sold 2.5 million copies in the United States.“We were staggered by the success,” Rice, 76, the show’s lyricist, said in a video call from his home in Buckinghamshire, England. “MCA let us make a single — two unknown guys — with a huge orchestra and a rock section. And with rather a controversial title. And it worked.”A national concert tour followed in 1971, and audiences packed stadiums to hear Elliman (Mary Magdalene), Carl Anderson (Judas) and Jeff Fenholt (Jesus) belt out hits like “I Don’t Know How to Love Him,” “Heaven on Their Minds” and “Gethsemane (I Only Want to Say).”“It was crazy,” Elliman said. “I was asked to go to a hospital and put my hands on a girl who’d been in a car accident. I didn’t know what to say — I held her hand and sat with her. But a few weeks later, her parents wrote to me that she got better immediately after me seeing her.”Broadway OpeningAndrew Lloyd Webber was 23 and Tim Rice was 26 when their show opened on Broadway on Oct. 12, 1971, at the Mark Hellinger Theater on 51st Street.Bettmann, via Getty ImagesAt last, they got the green light: Broadway.Tom O’Horgan (“Hair”) was tapped to direct after Lloyd Webber missed a telegram from the director Hal Prince, who had expressed interest. “The one person I’d have loved to have seen do it would have been Hal Prince,” Lloyd Webber said in the interview. “Would it have turned out differently? Would it have been good? I don’t know.”The show, which narrates the last seven days of Jesus’s life through the eyes of one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, opened at the Mark Hellinger Theater on 51st Street to an audience that included Lloyd Webber, 23, and Rice, 26. But in a joint interview with The New York Times later that month, both men practically disowned their director.“Let’s just say that we don’t think this production is the definitive one,” said Lloyd Webber, who in later years would call O’Horgan’s $700,000 staging a “brash and vulgar interpretation” and opening night “probably the worst night of my life.”Reviews were mixed. Dick Brukenfield of The Village Voice praised Lloyd Webber’s “energetic music” but noted that the ocular dazzle — the sets included a large special-effects “chrysalis,” a bridge of bones, and a giant set of dentures — distracted from the story. “It looks like a record that’s been reproduced onstage with visual filler by Tom O’Horgan,” he wrote.The New York Times critic Clive Barnes panned the production, writing that it “rather resembled one’s first sight of the Empire State Building. Not at all uninteresting, but somewhat unsurprising and of minimal artistic value.”Cries of “Blasphemy!”Opening night attracted crowds of leaflet-bearing Christian and Jewish protesters, who regarded what The New York Times writer Guy Flatley called “the strutting, mincing, twitching, grinding, souped‐up ‘Superstar’” as theatrical sacrilege.“Going into the theater it’d be ‘Blasphemy! Blasphemy!’” said Ben Vereen, now 75, who played Judas.Lloyd Webber added: “I’m not convinced that Robert Stigwood, our producer, might not have actually orchestrated one or two of them. I think it might have had a much rougher ride today than it did then.”Rice and Lloyd Webber were accused of denying the divinity of Christ and making a hero of Judas, who is the unambiguous villain in the New Testament. Jewish leaders were alarmed that the musical made it appear as if Jews were responsible for Jesus’s crucifixion, which they feared would fan antisemitism.“We were criticized for leaving out the Resurrection,” Rice said. “But that was not part of our story because, by then, Judas was dead. And his story was over.”Conservative Christians were also startled by the sexual overtones between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, the prostitute who finds herself falling in love with him.“I’d get evil letters from people who said they wanted to kill Mary so Yvonne could come out again,” Elliman said.But Rice is clear: There was never an affair in the “Superstar” story line.“I would imagine he would have been a very attractive man and yet not somebody who was out looking for a girlfriend,” he said. “He was somebody who was charismatic and powerful. And, and this woman is slightly afraid of that, maybe afraid of what her own feelings are.”Jesus and JudasBen Vereen, center, played Judas. The character was inspired by the Bob Dylan lyric “Did Judas Iscariot have God on his side?” from the song “With God on Our Side.”Bettmann, via Getty ImagesJesus Christ, played by Jeff Fenholt, loses his temper, doubts God and gets a bit caught up in his own celebrity. He’s simply Jesus, the man, with all the attendant problems and failings.“He could feel pain,” Rice said. “If he was only a god, then things like a crucifixion, which is a horrible, horrible torture and death, wouldn’t really be a problem. If he’s a man, whether or not he’s a god, he has to suffer. He has to have doubts.”Those doubts are most on display in the “Gethsemane” rock scream, in which Jesus pleads — with a wailing G above high C — for God to let this cup pass from him.“We wanted to have a rock tenor who contrasted with the voice of Judas,” Lloyd Webber said.Vereen, who was cast as Judas, was nominated for a Tony Award for the role. He said the biblical account of the relationship between Jesus and Judas left him room for interpretation.“Jesus never wrote the book, and Judas never wrote the book,” he said. “All we hear is the hearsay of these men from the disciples in the Gospels.”Inspired by the Bob Dylan lyric “Did Judas Iscariot have God on his side?” from the 1964 song “With God on Our Side,” Rice set out to humanize the New Testament’s unambiguous villain.“I thought, well, ‘This is a very good character, which I can expand from what’s in the Bible, because there isn’t very much in the Bible,’” Rice said. “He was a human being. He had good points and bad points. He had strengths and weaknesses.”At first, Vereen said, he struggled to understand his character’s motivation. Then, after combing through the Bible, he came up with a theory.“Hypothetically speaking, maybe Judas really loved Jesus more than any of the other disciples and wanted him to be the hero that ruled the country,” Vereen said. “And he felt that if he betrayed him, the Israelites would rebel and put Jesus in the role.”A Musical Radio PlayYvonne Elliman as Mary Magdalene. She was one of the few actors to not only perform on the concept album, but also to appear in the Broadway show and the movie.Rolls Press/Popperfoto, via Getty ImagesBecause the show began as what Lloyd Webber calls a musical radio play, meant to be listened to straight through for 90 minutes without any visuals “on a turntable, in those days,” he said, he had to come up with strategies to keep the listener’s attention.“A lot of that has to do with how you plant themes and how you deal with them,” he said. “My idea for the overture was to introduce every ingredient that I could think of within the musical palette we were going to hear through the rest of the recording.”And then those themes recur, one by one, as when the whole of the overture is mirrored in the trial of Jesus before Pontius Pilate, or when a song reappears with a twist, like “I Don’t Know How to Love Him.” To Mary Magdalene it’s a love song about Jesus; when it returns as a motif sung by Judas as a lament, the lyrics change: “He’s not a king, he’s just the same/As anyone I know/He scares me so.”“Judas understood Jesus, and he obviously was clearly obsessed and loved him,” Lloyd Webber said. “And then at the same time, you’ve got this woman, who was also, if you follow the Bible, clearly very, very much in love with him.”And then, of course, there’s the musical’s oddball track.Herod, Paul Ainsley’s glitter-flecked, platform-sandaled drag queen, commands the son of God to “Prove to me that you’re no fool/walk across my swimming pool” in “King Herod’s Song (Try It and See).” The bouncy ragtime number serves as comic relief after Jesus’s gut-wrenching “Gethsemane” aria.“It’s taking a conventional showbiz number and making it something really very, very nasty,” Lloyd Webber said. “When Herod turns around and says, ‘Get out of my life!,’ that’s a number that’s gone wrong.”Rice said: “Musically, I think it’s a brilliant stroke on Andrew’s part. Just as everything’s getting heavier and heavier and heavier, and suddenly you have a very catchy melody. We wanted people to almost be misled into thinking, ‘Oh, well, you know, maybe it’s going to be a happy ending.’”The Show’s LegacyWith $1.2 million in advance sales, the Broadway show sold out almost every performance for the first six weeks. But the hype quickly dimmed. It ran for 711 performances in all and failed to win a Tony Award despite five nominations, including one for best score.But the musical’s legacy has endured, spawning three Broadway revivals (in 1977, 2000 and 2012), a 2012 Lloyd Webber-produced televised competition series to cast the titular role for a British arena tour, a 2018 televised NBC production that starred John Legend as Jesus and resulted in Emmy wins for Rice and Lloyd Webber — and now the 50th anniversary American tour, interrupted by the pandemic, that resumed performances in Seattle late last month.“51 years since the album came out … blimey!” Rice said.Lloyd Webber, looking back, said, “Everything I was doing was all instinct.” He added, “Yes, I’d had some amateur productions, but we’d never had anything in the professional theater — and I don’t know whether that would have influenced us for good or bad.”He thought for a second.“Without sounding immodest” — he chuckled — “it’s actually rather good.” More

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      ‘The Doors Didn’t Open Easily’ on Her Path to ‘Cinderella’

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      The choreographer JoAnn M. Hunter has quietly become an important figure in the world of musical theater, especially with her work for Andrew Lloyd Webber.LONDON — Midway through Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new “Cinderella,” the male ensemble throws itself into a thrusting, muscle-popping number that perfectly illustrates the musical’s fictional setting of Belleville, a town devoted to beauty in all its superficial forms. It’s also laugh-out-loud hilarious, a sly take on an objectification more usually embodied by a female chorus, and a witty amplification of the musical’s reimagining of the Cinderella myth.That dance (which incorporates kettle bells), and all the others in this West End production, is the work of JoAnn M. Hunter, a longtime Broadway performer and choreographer who has quietly become an important figure in a field that boasts very few women, and even fewer women of color.“A great number of choreographers go their own way,” Lloyd Webber said in a telephone interview, “but JoAnn is completely different, a wonderful collaborator who you can really talk to about what the show needs. She is hugely important to the look of the show.”“Cinderella,” which finally opened on Aug. 18 at the Gillian Lynne Theater here after multiple pandemic-related delays, has a book by Emerald Fennell (“Promising Young Woman”) and lyrics by David Zippel (“City of Angels”). It’s Hunter’s third collaboration with Lloyd Webber and the director Laurence Connor, after the 2015 Broadway production of “School of Rock” and the much-lauded 2019 West End revival of “Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.”Carrie Hope Fletcher as Cinderella in the new West End production. Tristram Kenton A few critics jibed at Fennell’s rewriting of the Cinderella story: The heroine, played by Carrie Hope Fletcher, is a spirited, grumpy Goth; Prince Charming is M.I.A.; and his younger brother, Prince Sebastian (Ivano Turco), is the shy and awkward hero. But most reviewers concurred that the new musical is a great deal of fun, helped along by the wittily inventive, hugely varied dances that characterize Hunter’s style.“JoAnn M. Hunter’s choreography keeps it all swishing along, from blowzily romantic waltzes to homoerotically charged rapier skirmishes,” Sam Marlowe wrote in The I.Hunter, who is in her 50s, was born just outside of Tokyo, but grew up in Rhode Island with her Japanese mother and American father. She and her older brother were the only mixed-race children in their community. “I got taunted quite a lot, and I didn’t understand what was different about me,” she said.Ballet, which she started studying at 10, proved a savior. “In dance class I didn’t feel different at all,” she said. “I was just a dancer, with dancer friends. I always wonder if that’s why I fell in love with the art form.”At 16, she went to New York City on a summer dance scholarship. One night she bought a standing-room ticket for Bob Fosse’s Broadway musical “Dancin’.” As she watched, she made a silent vow: “I’m not going back home. This is where I belong.” What she saw, she said, was the possibility of “expressing all those things inside you.” Her family, she added, “never hugged, never said ‘I love you.’ But onstage I saw you had permission and freedom to show your feelings.”She went back to Rhode Island just long enough to tell her mother she wasn’t returning to high school, then moved to New York, taking dance classes, working at Barney’s and attending audition after audition, but staying under the radar in spite of her efforts. “I couldn’t get arrested at the time,” she said wryly.After working at the Opryland USA theme park in Nashville in the early 1980s (“we sang, we danced, we did four shows a day; I loved it”), she was hired for tours of “West Side Story” and “Cats.” But she experienced long periods of joblessness and insecurity.There was hardly any diversity on Broadway in the late 1980s, she said, and she felt acutely aware of looking different than the “beautiful tall blond girls” at auditions. “People would look at me, and say, ‘What are you?’” she recounted. “I would answer, ‘whatever you need me to be.’”She played the white cat in “Cats” for 15 months, and began to gain confidence. Then, in 1989, she had an experience that was pivotal for her subsequent choreographic career. She joined the cast of “Jerome Robbins’s Broadway,” an evening-length show of selections from Robbins’s choreography for musicals like “Fiddler on the Roof” and “On the Town.”The ball scene in “Cinderella.” A theater critic credited Hunter with choreography that keeps the story “swishing along, from blowzily romantic waltzes to homoerotically charged rapier skirmishes.”Tristram Kenton“Jerry was a tyrant,” she said, “but I adored working with him, and I think I was absorbing so many lessons without thinking about it. He was unsurpassed at telling a story through movement.”Ensemble roles in Broadway shows (“Miss Saigon,” “Guys and Dolls,” “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying”) followed, and soon Hunter began to work as a dance captain, the ensemble member who can teach the choreography for every character. While she was performing in “Thoroughly Modern Millie” in 2002, the director, Rob Ashford, asked her to be his choreographic associate.“JoAnn was always the smartest person in the room as well as the best dancer, and I knew she would be invaluable,” Ashford said in a telephone interview. Hunter, who had just gone through a divorce, wasn’t so sure. (She said her initial response was “aaarghhhh.”) But she had to take the chance.“She is a real problem solver and a great collaborator,” Ashford said. “In a musical, a choreographer has to get inside a director’s head and translate that vision into their own creation. She was always about the goals of the show.”The director Michael Mayer, who hired Hunter to oversee Bill T. Jones’s choreography for “Spring Awakening” in 2006, said in a telephone interview that one of her great gifts is to “understand why the steps are there, what the characters are trying to accomplish through the movement, and how the movement is in conversation with the rest of the elements of the show, even though at that point she hadn’t made up the moves.”Hunter’s first independent choreography for a musical was for a 2008 U.S. touring production of “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.” “I remember thinking, I’m never going to know unless I try this,” Hunter said. “And if I’m bad, not too many people will have seen it!”Asked whether she thought this kind of insecurity was particularly rife among women, Hunter looked thoughtful. Perhaps, she said. “Men tend to try things without worrying if they have the experience.” She added that the paucity of female choreographers on Broadway didn’t help her confidence.Although there are still relatively few female choreographers working on Broadway, this has begun to change: Camille A. Brown, Michelle Dorrance, Ellenore Scott and Ayodele Casel are all choreographing upcoming Broadway shows. Hunter agreed that women are now somewhat more visible in musical theater. “It’s amazing to think as a dancer I only ever worked with two female directors, Susan Stroman and Tina Landau,” she said. “At the moment these issues are at the front of our brains, as is racial diversity. I hope it’s something enduring, not a fad.”When she choreographed “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” she added, she was still too fearful about a choreographic career to give up the insurance having an Equity card provides. “I am afraid of failure; we all go through life thinking, ‘I’m going to be found out,’” she said. She laughed. “I’m still petrified.”Hunter’s choreography, the director Rob Ashford said, “has the great gift, which she learned from [Jerome] Robbins of ‘just enough,’ of never taking longer than she needs.”Charlotte Hadden for The New York TimesHer first Broadway commission came from Mayer, with the short-lived revival of “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.” Then came “School of Rock.”Hunter said she had worked closely with Lloyd Webber on “Cinderella,” both on Zoom during lockdown, and in person from August last year. “People don’t really understand that a choreographer on a musical does much more than the dance sequences,” she said. “You move people around, deal with the transitions, where the audience’s focus should go. You have to be totally connected to the vision of the composer, writer and director.”The choreographer also often works with a dance arranger, she added, who adapts the score for dance sections. “A script direction might say, ‘goes into a dance moment,’” she explained. “But I think, ‘What do we want to say here?’ You might want a Latin feel, a tango rhythm, a French chanson, as a way of making mood and story more understandable.”For the “Muscle Man” dance in “Cinderella,” for instance, she thought about what the musical was trying to say and suggested a sound equivalent. “They are such macho, testosterone guys, and I had the idea of using kettle bells, which sounds like something dropping and is funny.”For “Cinderella,” Lloyd Webber did the dance arrangements himself. “I sketched out what I thought the dance music should be,” he said. “Then JoAnn took that, and actually stayed very faithful to it, but we added accents and she would ask for elements that the dance might need. It’s a really important collaboration, because you can’t look at the dance if you can’t listen to the music; it has to be good.”Hunter said that while she doesn’t read music, she has an acute sense of instrumentation and rhythm. “I just say things like ‘I don’t want it so pingy-pingy!’” she said. “That way I can make funny funnier and sexy sexier.” She added, “I always want every movement to tell a story. When Prince Sebastian dances at the end, I told Ivano, it’s not about the dance, it’s about you speaking up for yourself.”Her choreography, Ashford said, “has the great gift, which she learned from Robbins, of ‘just enough,’ of never taking longer than she needs.”Hunter, who last year directed and choreographed “Unmasked,” a concert retrospective of Lloyd Webber’s career, is working as both director and choreographer on “SuperYou,” a new musical written by Lourds Lane. Hunter described it as “a superhero, self-empowering piece about women finding their own voice” and said she hopes it will go to Broadway.Hunter added that she was still frequently the only woman on a creative team. “I’ve worked with great people, but the doors didn’t open easily,” she said. “I still feel I am constantly proving myself.” More

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      Review: Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Delayed ‘Cinderella’ Is Worth the Wait

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      After months of pandemic-mandated postponements, the British composer’s new show finally had its premiere. It’s fun.LONDON — “Cinderella” finally got there, albeit well past midnight. Five weeks after the show’s aborted July 14 premiere, and with numerous other dates offered and then dropped along the way, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new musical at last opened here Wednesday at the Gillian Lynne Theater.And, guess what? The long-awaited show from the 73-year-old industry veteran turns out to have been worth the wait. “Cinderella” is a big, colorful production, painted in deliberately broad brushstrokes by the director Laurence Connor, that turns a time-honored story (somewhat) on its head. The result may not be quite the theatrical equivalent of its heroine’s cut-glass slipper, but it nonetheless looks set for a sturdy West End run. Best of all: “Cinderella” is fun.Lloyd Webber has been unusually visible of late as a newly minted activist, making headlines here throughout the pandemic to score points against the British government and demand that theaters be allowed to open; this musical is on more familiar territory. Cinderella, a societal outcast, is a bit like the rejected Phantom in “The Phantom of the Opera,” and that show’s mask gets a visual reference toward the end of “Cinderella’s” first act, when the scraggly-haired, dowdy-looking “scullery wench” (Carrie Hope Fletcher) of the title is given a beauteous makeover. She finds herself in the care of a Godmother (Gloria Onitiri), who would seem to be a dab hand at plastic surgery, and within minutes Cinderella is covering her face as part of the treatment.Her inevitable prince, too, turns out not to be the Prince Charming of legend, who is reported missing at the show’s start, but his shy and gawky younger brother, Sebastian (the sweet-faced Ivano Turco, only a year out of drama school). Cinderella’s childhood friend and lover-in-waiting, Sebastian could as well be the young Joseph from “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,” if that earlier musical’s cheerfully asexual hero had been allowed a libido. (“Joseph” and “Phantom” are both back up and running in the West End.)Ivano Turco (Prince Sebastian) and Rebecca Trehearn (the Queen).Tristram KentonThe score tilts heavily toward the power ballads that tumble from this composer’s pen; one or two could be trimmed to the benefit of an overlong production. The aggressive number “Bad Cinderella” early on establishes the gifted Fletcher’s clarion-voiced rebel as a troublemaker amid the manicured environs of the show’s “picturesque” French setting, where everyone is devoted to beauty and physical perfection. (That would explain the frequent emergence among the townsfolk of various muscled, bare-chested men, apparently on loan from a Chippendales revue.)Sebastian gets an earworm number of his own in the emotive “Only You, Lonely You,” which ends with the same sort of money note as “Love Changes Everything,” from Lloyd Webber’s “Aspects of Love.” Elsewhere, in a second-act waltz, we clock nods toward Rodgers and Hammerstein, who wrote their own “Cinderella,” and, separately, to Edward Elgar at his most ceremonially British; a showstopping duet, “I Know You,” for the Queen and the Stepmother, by contrast, has a more Gallic tinge.Those supporting roles are played to comic perfection by Rebecca Trehearn and Victoria Hamilton-Barritt: A florid Hamilton-Barritt, in particular, vamps across Gabriela Tylesova’s elegantly shifting sets like an Edward Gorey figure who has had too much to drink. Trehearn, for her part, raises haughtiness to a high art: “I can’t lose my head,” she announces. “Where would all my hats go?”Here, as elsewhere, you feel the enlivening touch of a collaborative team that includes Tony-winner David Zippel (“City of Angels”) whose lyrics rhyme “nondescript” with “ripped” while also accommodating the story’s swoony romanticism. The notably bawdy book is by Emerald Fennell, an Oscar-winner this year for her script for “Promising Young Woman,” who springs several narrative surprises along the way — an important one will be immediately clear to those who read the cast list. (And surely her appearance in “The Crown” as Camilla Parker Bowles equipped Fennell for a musical that features its own royal wedding.)Carrie Hope Fletcher as Cinderella with Victoria Hamilton-Barritt, second from right, as the Stepmother, and Laura Baldwin and Georgina Castle as the stepsisters.Tristram KentonIn keeping with other musicals like “Wicked,” to which “Cinderella” owes an evident debt, the emphasis here is on learning to love and trust your inner beauty, rather than seeking approval elsewhere. In context, it’s no accident that Cinderella tells Sebastian, in a moment of mock petulance, “I can’t help being a legend,” before coming to realize that she might actually deserve that exalted status.I doubt “Cinderella” itself will ever be a show of legend, but its fairy-tale rewrite feels like a happy corrective to grim times: Cinderella arrives at the ball, by which point the audience has had one, as well.CinderellaAt the Gillian Lynne Theater, in London; andrewlloydwebberscinderella.com. More

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      Andrew Lloyd Webber Delays ‘Cinderella’ Musical in West End

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      The composer and producer blamed Britain’s coronavirus restrictions for the delay.One day before Andrew Lloyd Webber’s much-anticipated “Cinderella” musical was slated to open in London’s West End, and two days after a cast member tested positive for the coronavirus, the prolific composer and producer announced on Monday that opening night would yet again be delayed.“I have been forced to take the heartbreaking decision not to open my Cinderella,” he said in a Twitter statement. “The impossible conditions created by the blunt instrument that is the Government’s isolation guidance mean that we cannot continue.”Lloyd Webber’s announcement initially did not specify whether the production was closing for good or just being postponed, though a spokeswoman for him later clarified that the show’s opening was delayed, not canceled, and that they hoped to open the show “soon, but it’s very difficult under the current conditions.”The composer’s statement was likely an attempt to try and force the British government to change its rules on quarantine for actors and crew. Last month, he made newspaper front pages with comments promising to open “Cinderella” at full capacity “come hell or high water” — even if he faced arrest for doing so. He quickly pulled back from the plan after learning his audience, cast and crew risked fines for breaching British coronavirus rules.With its story and book by the Oscar-winning screenwriter Emerald Fennell (“Promising Young Woman”), the $8.2 million musical had been set to star Carrie Hope Fletcher in the title role, and had been in previews at half capacity at the Gillian Lynne Theater for about a month.Lloyd Webber, 73, has been pressuring the government for more than a year to allow theaters to open at full capacity. In an interview with The New York Times earlier this month, he said protocols that required a show to cancel performances because one member of the cast came into contact with someone who tested positive could be the death knell for a musical like “Cinderella.”“The trouble is, we wouldn’t be able to carry on,” he said. “We can’t carry on hemorrhaging money each week, because at 50 percent we do. It’s almost unthinkable, but there comes a time when you just have to hand in the towel.”A surge of coronavirus cases in Britain, driven by the Delta variant, has also been shuttering London’s other West End theaters after members of productions like “Hairspray” at the London Coliseum and “Romeo and Juliet” at Shakespeare’s Globe tested positive earlier this month. And London’s Riverside Studios announced that “The Browning Version,” which had been set to open next month starring Kenneth Branagh, has been canceled.Despite a rise in cases that has driven England’s daily average to 39,950 — approximately double the level just two weeks ago — virtually all social distancing and mask requirements were removed on Monday, prompting widespread “Freedom Day” celebrations.But for those involved with “Cinderella,” the news was grim.“Cinderella was ready to go,” Lloyd Webber said in the statement. “My sadness for our cast and crew, our loyal audience and the industry I have been fighting for is impossible to put into words.” More

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      Andrew Lloyd Webber’s New Act: Activism

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      LONDON — Andrew Lloyd Webber, 73, has for decades been a household name in Britain for his flamboyant, quasi-operatic musicals. Now, he’s becoming known for something more unexpected: activism.For over a year now, Lloyd Webber — who redefined musical theater with shows like “The Phantom of the Opera” and “Cats,” and served for years in the House of Lords — has been harassing Britain’s conservative government to get theaters open at full capacity, at times making scientifically questionable claims along the way.This June alone, he made newspaper front pages here after pledging to open his new “Cinderella” musical “come hell or high water” — even if he faced arrest for doing so. (He quickly pulled back from the plan after learning his audience, cast and crew risked fines, too.)He went on to reject an offer from Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain that would have let him do a trial opening of “Cinderella” without restrictions because it left other theaters in the lurch; take part in legal action against the government demanding it release results of research into whether coronavirus spread at cultural events; and to tell an interviewer he regretted caucusing with Britain’s Conservative Party when in the House of Lords because the party was now failing to support the arts and commercial theater.“The way he’s done it is like something out of his musicals — it’s loud, it’s over the top,” said Arifa Akbar, the chief theater critic for The Guardian newspaper.A scene from Lloyd Webber’s new musical “Cinderella,” which is now playing to reduced capacity audiences, despite his wishes.Tristram KentonJames Graham, a leading playwright (whose “Ink” played Broadway in 2019) said approvingly that Lloyd Webber had become “a big thorn in the government’s side.”Theater has been one of the industries hit hardest by the pandemic. In New York, most Broadway theaters do not plan to reopen until September. In England, theaters have been allowed to open with socially distanced and masked audiences for brief periods, with the West End most recently reopening on May 17.But Lloyd Webber has, impatiently at times, urged the government to provide clarity on when theaters can reopen at full capacity, complaining that they were forced to remain shut or enforce restrictions far longer than other businesses.Now the government seems to be giving him the clarity he sought: it plans to lift most remaining restrictions on July 19.“I never wanted, never intended to be the sort of spokesman for the arts and theater in Britain,” Lloyd Webber said in a recent interview at the Gillian Lynne Theater, where his musical “Cinderella” was in socially-distanced previews. “But there came this strange situation where nobody else seemed to be.”Outside the theater, several theatergoers praised Lloyd Webber’s new role. “I’ve never been his biggest fan — I’m more a Sondheim fanatic,” said Carole Star, 70. “But if I see him tonight, it’ll be difficult not to hug him.”“I could cry at what he’s done this year,” she added.Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice last September at a socially distanced London performance of their musical “Jesus Christ Superstar.”David Jensen/Getty ImagesBut others said they were glad he had pulled back from the threat to fully reopen before the government decided to allow it. “I admire his passion, but I hope he keeps things safe,” said Samantha Fogg, 25.Lloyd Webber, who participated in vaccine trials, said he had been driven by “a real sense of injustice” that theater has been treated differently than other parts of British life. He complained that in June, tens of thousands of soccer fans were allowed in stadiums — “everybody singing completely pissed,” he said — while theaters could only open at limited capacity and amateur choirs were not allowed to sing indoors. (Scientists have been clear that outdoor events are far safer than indoor ones.)The British government’s attitude to the arts was “dumbfounding,” he said.But health officials are not impressed with a theater composer’s opinions on the safety of fully reopening.In June, the British government released a report on a series of trial cultural and sporting events. The events, mainly held outside for people who could show that they had tested negative, only led to 28 potential coronavirus cases, it said, but the data had to be interpreted with “extreme caution.” And the study was conducted before the more infectious Delta variant began sweeping Britain.The report “basically says everything’s completely safe,” Lloyd Webber claimed. But Paul Hunter, a British academic specializing in epidemics, said in a telephone interview the report did “not in any way” say it was safe to reopen indoor theaters. (He said he approved of the government’s plan to reopen at full capacity on July 19.)When the pandemic first hit Britain, Lloyd Webber tried to show that theaters could reopen safely by adopting measures like those that were keeping his “Phantom of the Opera” running in Seoul. Those included requiring audience members to wear masks, doing temperature checks at the door and spraying theaters with disinfectant.Thanks to strict protocols, the composer’s “Phantom of the Opera” played to full audiences in Seoul.Woohae Cho for The New York TimesLast July, he spent over 100,000 pounds, about $140,000, to stage a trial at the Palladium theater in London to prove such measures worked.“I’ve got to say this is a rather sad sight,” Lloyd Webber said that day, as he looked out over a largely empty auditorium. “I think this amply proves why social distancing in theater really doesn’t work,” he added. “It’s a misery for the performers.”That event didn’t lead to any major reopening of theaters, and Lloyd Webber said his frustrations grew as Britain let airplanes fly at full capacity, and people return to pubs, restaurants and garden centers with abandon. Last September, he sarcastically told a group of politicians that he had considered turning the Palladium into a garden center so it could hold performances again.“I am absolutely confident that the air in the London Palladium — and indeed in all my theaters — is purer than the air outside,” he added, despite the growing scientific consensus that it was far safer to be outdoors than in.Lloyd Webber’s breaking point came last December, he said, when theaters were allowed to reopen for a handful of performances only to be forced shut again as cases rose, even though shops were allowed to stay open. “You saw scenes of people literally cheek by jowl, no distancing, nothing,” he said.“That’s the point I realized this government has no interest in theater,” he added. “Once I realize that, I didn’t see any reason to hold back.”He later clarified that the government had been right to shut down theaters at that point (there were over 25,000 coronavirus cases in Britain on the day the West End shut, and in a matter of weeks they peaked at over 60,000). Lloyd Webber said he didn’t feel he’d ever called for reopening too early. “I think everybody thought things would get back earlier,” he said.Lloyd Webber, who owns significant real estate in the West End, has been the most outspoken critic of the British government’s commitment to the arts during the pandemic.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesOther British theater figures, such as the producer Sonia Friedman, have also made headlines by urging the government do more for theaters, but none have garnered as much attention as Lloyd Webber, who along with being a composer, owns substantial real estate in the West End.Lloyd Webber, whose personal wealth has been estimated at £525 million, reported that it was costing his company £1 million a month just to keep his seven theaters closed, and said that he had to mortgage his London home to raise funds. But he insisted money was not behind his advocacy. “My main concern is to just get everybody back to work,” he said.“I don’t think money’s got anything to do with it,” Julian Fellowes, the creator of “Downton Abbey,” who wrote the book for Lloyd Webber’s “School of Rock,” said in a telephone interview, adding, “He’s a man on a mission and you can tell.”But Lloyd Webber has not escaped criticism in his own community. In April, it was reported that the orchestra for “The Phantom of the Opera” in London would be slashed in half when it reopens, with percussion, harp and oboe replaced by keyboards.“When I see him get on his soapbox, part of me wants to applaud him and part of me wants to take him to task,” Matt Dickinson, a percussionist who lost his job, said in a telephone interview.Asked about this, Lloyd Webber said he was not the show’s producer, and pointed out that during lockdown he had recorded a set of orchestral suites that employed 81 freelance musicians.Ivano Turco, left, and Rebecca Trehearn in “Cinderella,” which has been given a contemporary spin thanks to a book by Emerald Fennell (“Promising Young Woman”).Tristram KentonLloyd Webber remains an extraordinarily busy — or driven — man. As well as trying to produce and finish “Cinderella” — whose book, by Emerald Fennell, the director and screenwriter of “Promising Young Woman,” gives the fairy tale a contemporary twist — he has been involved in a £60 million refurbishment of the Theater Royal, Drury Lane.Even as he explored old churches in Hampshire the other day, he said, he could not escape his newfound role in politics, saying that people would tell him, “We cannot believe that the government could have treated the arts in the way it has.”But sometimes he clearly is happy to highlight it. When the government set the reopening date of July 19, Lloyd Webber wrote on Twitter that he would add a special “Freedom Day” performance and a gala with proceeds benefiting Britain’s health care system.“I am thrilled,” he wrote, “that at last it seems theaters can finally reopen!” More

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      England’s delayed reopening is a blow to culture and nightlife.

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      LONDON — Andrew Lloyd Webber last week promised to open his musical “Cinderella” in London’s West End on June 25 — even if it were illegal to do so.“We are going to open come hell or high water,” he told The Daily Telegraph, a British newspaper. If Britain’s government tried to stop him because of rising coronavirus cases, he had one response, he added: “We will say: Come to the theater and arrest us.”Now, Mr. Lloyd Webber, 73, has his chance to go to prison — although he doesn’t appear to want to take it.On Monday evening, Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain said that social distancing would continue in England until July 19, at least — almost a month later than originally planned.The decision, announced at a televised news conference, was made because of a rise in coronavirus cases linked to the Delta variant. An average of 7,278 cases per day were reported in United Kingdom in the last week, an increase of 127 percent from the average two weeks ago. Deaths are rising but still very low, with an average of nine a day over two weeks.Scientists remain at odds over exactly how serious a threat it poses in Britain, however, with some arguing that the most dire predictions about rising hospitalizations underestimate the effect even the current level of vaccinations have on breaking the link between the number of new cases, hospitalizations and deaths.United Kingdom Coronavirus Map and Case CountSee the latest charts and maps of coronavirus cases, deaths, hospitalizations and vaccinations in United Kingdom.“I think it’s sensible to wait just a little bit longer,” Mr. Johnson said, adding that the delay would allow more people to be fully vaccinated.The delay was a gut punch to the British cultural world, which has been desperately seeking an end to social distancing.The delay leaves “thousands of jobs hanging in the balance,” Julian Bird, chief executive of UK Theater, a trade body, said in a statement. A quarter of nighttime businesses cannot survive longer than a month without new government support, the Night Times Industries Association, which represents clubs and pubs, said in a news release.The biggest blow may be to England’s nightclubs, which were told for the fourth time that they could not reopen at all, even with distancing. Nightclubs in Britain have been closed since March 2020, and over 150 events were planned in London alone for the weekend of June 25, including a sold-out 42-hour-long party at Fabric, a famed club that can hold 1,500 people.Those were all immediately canceled.“It’s really, really frustrating,” Cameron Leslie, one of Fabric’s founders, said in a telephone interview. He had hired over 100 staff over the past month, expecting to reopen, and now was not able to furlough them. “You can only be pushed and tested so far before our entire sector can’t respond anymore,” Leslie added.Stuart Glen, the founder of The Cause, another London club, said in a telephone interview that the delay would cost him “hundred of thousands” of pounds and force him to rearrange 40 events. He’d had enough, he said. “I think everyone should riot if July doesn’t happen,” he said. “They can’t control people like this,” he added.“It’s so devastating for so many people,” said Yousef Zahar, a D.J. and co-owner of Circus, a nightclub based in Liverpool, that in May held two pilot events featuring 6,000 maskless dancers.Theaters, museums and music venues were allowed to reopen with distancing last month, but larger venues and all nightclubs have remained firmly shut. Mr. Lloyd Webber has repeatedly said that glitzy productions like “Cinderella” — which has a 34-strong cast and is already weeks into rehearsals — are financially unviable in half-full theaters.For those hoping to attend the opening of“Cinderella,” it was still unclear if the show would go on.“We’re working hard behind the scenes to make sure everyone gets to the ball,” the show’s producers said in a statement posted on Twitter. More