Just turned 73, Andrew Lloyd Webber bounds through the magnificent Regency foyers of the Theatre Royal Drury Lane like a young lion. “Pevsner called these the finest rooms of their time in London,” he declares as we pause for a breather under the great rotunda. “All I really want to do is leave them, and the whole theatre, in better shape.”
A simple declaration but it conceals years of research, planning, perseverance and whatever the word is for a rich man pouring vast dollops of his own dosh into a project that has become, if not an obsession, then certainly a consuming hobby. Lloyd Webber bought “the Lane” in 2000 but only now is his epic mission nearing completion. He and an army of surveyors, scholars, architects, painters, brickies, chippies and sparkies have spent more than two years on three huge tasks.
The first is restoring the front of house to the palatial glory envisaged when Benjamin Dean Wyatt, financed by the brewer Samuel Whitbread, built the present theatre in 1812. The second is remedying the deficiencies of the auditorium inserted in 1922. And the third is filling every nook and cranny of the huge Grade I listed edifice — more than 300ft from portico to back wall — with artworks, old and so new that the paint is still drying.
All of which is being accomplished with funding entirely from the Bank of Andrew, Lloyd and Webber. Dare I ask what the total damage is? “Well, let’s put it this way,” Lloyd Webber says. “Sheridan [the playwright who ran the Lane in the early 19th century] went bankrupt, and I’m not convinced I won’t. Restoring it has cost roughly £60 million. But I don’t run theatres for profit, never have. I’ve been very, very lucky. This is a way of putting something back in.”
As he admits, it’s also a way of channelling what he calls his “other love” — architecture. “I’ve always wanted to own a really good country house and I’ve ended up with an estate [Sydmonton Court in Hampshire] that’s a concoction of every different style from Tudor to last week.”
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So getting his hands on the Lane — famously haunted by three centuries’ worth of thespian ghosts and occupying the oldest theatre site in London still in use (the first Theatre Royal was built in 1663) — was like buying a really top-notch stately home? “Yes,” Lloyd Webber says. “I’m a gothic revivalist at heart. I went up to Wellingborough recently to look at that amazing gothic revival church [St Mary the Virgin] built by Ninian Comper. After that I began to wonder if I shouldn’t install an exquisite little Virgin Mary statue somewhere in the theatre.”
He hasn’t gone that far but he has ranged widely to renew the theatre’s decor. In the entrance foyer, for instance, the old confectionery kiosks have been beautifully recreated using new mahogany. How did Lloyd Webber get his hands on that restricted species? “They came from St Nicholas Abbey in Barbados,” he replies. “From trees blown down in a hurricane 20 years ago. They had a whole container load so we went over and said, ‘We can buy this from you.’ Then we got a cabinet-maker to carve the kiosks for us.”
The public spaces, once covered in overbearing red wallpaper and carpets, have been transformed, and Wyatt’s superb cantilevered staircases, crassly boxed in 100 years ago, have been uncovered and beautifully renovated. Original marble floors have been restored and delicate Regency-style pastels predominate throughout. “We pinched the colour scheme from a late 18th-century house, Woodhall Park in Hertfordshire,” Lloyd Webber says.
One result is to make these spectacular public rooms more resonant. “You could hold concerts here,” I say as we pass through the Grand Saloon. “That’s exactly the idea,” Lloyd Webber says. “I aim to have all the public spaces open during the day, and musicians feeling that they can play here any time. It’s ridiculous to have a great space like this in Covent Garden and nobody using it.”
The theatre will reopen with Disney’s Frozen — The Musical, at some still-uncertain date this summer, but in the interests of architectural integrity Lloyd Webber has been strict with Disney too. He has stopped the company from plastering the theatre’s front with advertising.
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“We are putting it on the building down the road instead,” he says. “I hate advertising on theatres. The theatre itself should be the advertisement. Years ago I got into trouble with the Society of London Theatre when I took all the neon off the Palace Theatre [which he owned until 2012]. They said, ‘You’ve set a precedent that will harm ticket sales.’ I replied, ‘It doesn’t seem to be harming Les Misérables, thank you very much.’ ”
Lloyd Webber, it transpires, has other idealistic plans for the Lane. “I was lucky enough to see Gielgud do The Tempest here,” he says. “On the last night he broke Prospero’s staff and declared that this theatre would be lost forever to everything except musicals. I’m determined to prove him wrong. You see we’ve put the statue of Shakespeare in pole position as you come in? My ambition, once Frozen closes, is to have a Shakespeare season here.”
That’s not all. After reading an article about the young artist Maria Kreyn in Vanity Fair, Lloyd Webber became interested in the Brooklyn-based daughter of Russian émigrés whose paintings mix the flamboyant figurative style of Caravaggio with a swirling surrealism. “I think she’s really interesting because she can actually paint, which might otherwise be a disadvantage these days,” Lloyd Webber says.
So he commissioned her, big time. She has produced eight enormous canvases, each based on a different Shakespeare play. Soon they will be hung around the theatre’s grand staircases but when I am allowed a peek they are leaning casually by the side of the stage.
“Probably only ten people have seen them so far,” Lloyd Webber says. They are astonishing — not so much depictions of the plays as complex psychological interpretations of characters such as Lady Macbeth and Prospero. “I don’t know what the art critics will make of them,” Lloyd Webber says, “but I’m pretty sure the audiences for Frozen won’t like them much. Too bad!”
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We are standing, like Rex Harrison and Stanley Holloway in My Fair Lady, right under the mighty proscenium. The largest stage in London, it has been given a new grid that can handle the biggest weight-load of scenery and lighting pretty well anywhere, with a 60ft-deep basement from which scenery can rise if necessary. “And the orchestra pit is also gigantic,” Lloyd Webber says. “We could do Wagner here! What slightly saddens me is that Frozen, because it comes from a New York theatre with nothing like this size of stage, will only use a fraction of what our stage can do.”
The 1922 auditorium has been transformed. To create greater intimacy between performers and audience, Lloyd Webber has eliminated 300 seats so that the circle, stage and back wall of the auditorium can be brought forward and the place reseated to give punters more width and legroom. “We gave away the old seats to any theatre that wanted them,” he says. “So there are lots of rather orange relics of the Lane scattered across the country.”
The new seats incorporate an in-joke. When the 1812 theatre was built, the hostility between George III and the Prince of Wales was so great that the theatre owners thought it wise to give each his own entrance and box, on opposite sides of the auditorium. Lloyd Webber has perpetuated this weird bit of history by having the audience seats on one side emblazoned with the sovereign’s crown, and on the other side with the Prince of Wales’s feathers.
What’s more, ticket holders will enter from the king’s staircase or the prince’s staircase, depending on which crest their seat carries. What about family groups who might stretch across the middle of the stalls? “Then we say, ‘Sorry, but you have to part to enter,’ ” Lloyd Webber says. “I think it could be fun.”
The new auditorium has one other asset, perhaps even more important than which seats have which royal crest. This old theatre has been given a 21st-century adaptability. The front of the circle can be demounted, the stage can rise, and a unit put over the stalls seats to connect the two. “A show can now be played in the round, or you could use a thrust stage,” Lloyd Webber says.
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First, however, the venerable stage will become a sound studio. With Frozen rehearsals not starting until May, Lloyd Webber has accepted bookings from orchestras needing somewhere huge to record in. “The stage has good acoustics and masses of space, so even an 80-piece orchestra can socially distance,” he says.
That will be the first music heard at the Lane for a long time. “Yes,” Lloyd Webber says. “It will be quite a day.”
Clive Davis on the man who reinvented musical theatre
The debate about the quality of his music will run and run — much like his hit shows, in fact — but even his harshest detractors will concede that Andrew Lloyd Webber changed the centre of gravity of musical theatre. Time was, we automatically looked to Broadway for new ideas and new idioms. But the success of musicals such as Evita, Cats and The Phantom of the Opera signalled a decisive shift in the balance of power.
In the film world the vainglorious cry “the British are coming” prompted no end of sniggering in the years after the Oscars triumph of Chariots of Fire. In the realm of the musical the Britons really did take charge. That quintessential New Yorker, Stephen Sondheim — once a protégé of Richard Rodgers’s songwriting partner, Oscar Hammerstein — still commands a weightier critical following. Witty, urbane and self-consciously cerebral, Sondheim’s shows possess cachet on the Upper West Side. Yet as far as the box office is concerned, there is no contest: Lloyd Webber remains the dominant figure of our times.
So deeply is he associated with the establishment (he is one of the very few members of the culturati to have come out as a Tory supporter), it is easy to forget how much of a revolutionary Lloyd Webber once was. When Jesus Christ Superstar, his early hit with the lyricist Tim Rice, was performed in socially distanced guise at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre last summer it was an opportunity to become reacquainted with a show that channelled the rebellious rhythms of Sixties rock for the delectation of audiences who never got closer to Woodstock than watching it on the evening news bulletins.
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The work was unveiled as a concept album in 1970 before it rampaged on to the New York stage the next year. Whether or not Rice and Lloyd Webber invented the “rock opera” — the Who’s Pete Townshend was in at the birth too with Tommy — the duo taught musical theatre to sing in a new language. At Regent’s Park, where the cast performed on a spartan set, the music and lyrics still sounded bold and dynamic.
Lloyd Webber was nobody’s idea of a rebellious rocker, of course. The musical buff Mark Steyn’s wonderfully detailed and gossipy history of musical theatre, Broadway Babies Say Goodnight, has a story of the composer organising a rock version of one of his songs and trying to get the musicians in the mood by calling out, “OK, chaps, remember: I want maximum aggression.” Ozzy Osbourne he ain’t. But in Superstar he nailed the sound of rock anthems more convincingly than anyone else of his theatrical generation.
Evita, which opened in the West End in 1978, was another show that tackled an unorthodox subject. Now that it has become a coach-party favourite (that dedicated follower of fashion Madonna had a stab at the lead role in the 1996 film version), the idea of building a musical around the consort of a South American strongman might seem unremarkable. But step back for a moment and consider how bold the idea actually was. In the wrong hands Evita could have delivered another Springtime for Hitler. Instead it gave us Don’t Cry For Me Argentina.
True, it’s harder to make a case for the epic melodrama The Phantom of the Opera. Or Cats, although the much-mocked cinematic version at least kept Twitter addicts busy concocting CGI memes when it was released at the end of 2019. It’s worth remembering too that, like so many other composers, Lloyd Webber has kept going even when shows have flopped. And he has ploughed millions into the crumbling infrastructure of the West End. His enthusiasm has always been infectious. In a pandemic that kind of energy is priceless.
