NBC Nightly News with Tom Llamas - Nightly News Films: Andrew Lloyd Webber one-on-one

Episode Date: April 14, 2023

With Phantom of the Opera about to close on Broadway after a historic 35-year run, Lester Holt chats with legendary composer Andrew Lloyd Webber about the musical and his iconic career.

One of the hottest tickets on Broadway happens to be the longest-running show on Broadway. That's because after 35 years, time has run out to say goodbye to the Phantom of the Opera, leaving mixed emotions for the man who composed it. I sat down with Andrew Lloyd Webber to talk about Phantom's farewell to Broadway and more. We're here to talk about the closing, but let me go back to 1988, the opening night on Broadway. What do you remember? Well, I remember it was a very, very special night because there was huge anticipation

of it coming to New York. And also, I was married to Sarah Brightman, who was playing Christine. And of course, I was quite nervous for her to put it mildly. So it was a sort of double double nerves if you know what I mean. One obviously that and an excitement about it opening on Broadway but very much you know hoping that it all worked for her and it's very special actually that she's back's back in New York for the final show. Were you able to recognize at the time what a hit Phantom would become? I don't think when it opened in London that I knew it was going to be what it became.

In fact, how could one? But by the time it came here, it had become such a phenomenon back in London. And so many people from America had come over specifically to see it that I had a suspicion that it would have to go horribly wrong here for it not to work. But nobody, I mean, when you sit down to write a musical, you don't say, I'm going to try and write a massive blockbuster. You, what you do is you write what you want to write. I mean, one thing that Hal Prince always used to say, Hal Prince who directed it, is never be afraid of failing. You know, you should always try something different and never be frightened about failing. And I'd never written before Phantom of

the Opera anything that was a high romance. In fact, I hadn't written a romantic musical at all because Joseph of Amazing Technicolor, Greencoat, Jesus Christ Superstar, and the wife of a right wing Argentine dictator, let alone a load of cats, didn't give me much of an opportunity to show a romantic side. And that's how Phantom happened, because I was really keen to write a high romance just to see if I could. It's amazing back then you didn't have hashtags, you didn't have people tweeting likes or dislikes. So how did you measure other than receipts?

Well, you see, this is the funny thing. We discovered very, very shortly after Phantom opened that there were these girls young girls coming to it and there was a whole phantom we discovered magazine a sort of underground magazine where every one of these girls at one point and by the time it had got to broadway it had already got to australia it was going and you know you they were reviewing every single performance in this sort of shared fan forum. So it was like a kind of social media before the day. But what is interesting to me now is that Phantom is doing really, really the best, I suppose, it's ever done in London since the very opening. And what's happened there is that like 18 months ago,

and you're talking about social media, kids started to discover Phantom again. And so Phantom was number one over Halloween on TikTok. So why couldn't it have that kind of success on Broadway? Well, the point is it has. And I mean, I am lucky enough that I own theatres in London because it's my way of putting back something into the profession that's been so good to me. And I'm very proud of the fact that we run our theatres not for profit because every penny goes back into the buildings. But I can tell you that if I was a theatre owner with the business that Phantom is doing here now, I would be saying, I'm crazy. I'm crazy. But the other thing, though, to just take on board, though,

is a show like Phantom is extremely expensive to run. And this is one of the difficulties, I think, that Broadway is going to have to face, is that, I mean, would you like to guess how much Phantom actually costs a week to run? I've seen some numbers, seven figure numbers. Costs about, if you averaged it out right now, it probably costs about $950 to a million dollars a week to run. A week? A week, yeah. Is that why you're pulling the plug?

Well, I'm not pulling the plug. It's something to do with me. And I wouldn't if it was me. But there's no question about it that before the pandemic and then coming out of the pandemic and everything, that the costs of running a musical like Phantom are really, really incredibly high. I mean, this is one of the problems on Broadway now is that, I mean,

even to put a play on, you're going to be talking about a $5 million investment. Plays don't make that kind of money. Or I can't tell you whether it would be doing the sort of huge figures that it's doing now. But I suspect that what's happened is two things, that the announcement of the closure has made people realize, well know we got a chance doesn't see it but i think what's happened is that a young audience and if you just look at the people who were outside the theater you know this morning they're all the same young girls age that we used to have when the show first opened and i think that it's been discovered through social media and

a whole new audience has come to it and two things have happened and that that means that I I think what would have happened is that if it if it wasn't closing I think it wouldn't be doing quite what it's doing at the moment because of course it wouldn't be but I think he would be able to run on if it was up to you wouldn't it wouldn't be closing. But it is closing. Are you going to be emotional on Sunday? Well, I'm going to just be concerned about what the Phantom is going to think about this. Because, you know, the Phantom doesn't like his legend not to be told. So, you know, who knows what might happen on Sunday I mean

it might who could tell the Phantom that might be very displeased does that suggest that maybe it will come back to bro I don't know is I mean I'm only the composer who does what the Phantom tells me to do I mean if I'm instructed to write something I wrote it L a disaster beyond my imagination occurred to me. So I have no idea what the Phantom's going to do. He's unpredictable and the one thing I do know is he's very, very fond of New York. The open, the overture, that heavy thunderous organ. Do you enjoy watching audiences when they realize... Well, the beginning of The Phantom, I mean, the chandelier rising from a disused opera house and the opera house transforming itself back in front of your eyes

was something I really wanted to do. And I remember saying to Hal Prince that my idea is that we have this broken chandelier and it reassembles itself and flies over the audience. And I remember Howe saying yeah absolutely let's you know let's go on and do it you know and um it's no is it that I think is unrepeatable and I think what is what is unrepeatable completely is that experience in anything other than the theater I mean the moment that chandelier rises it's pure theater it's immersive pure theater folks who's immersive, pure theater.

Folks who have not seen The Phantom, describe it. What's it about? What The Phantom? Well, it is in the end a high romance. I can't tell you why The Phantom works. I can only say what other people have said to me. But it strikes a chord. And I think that one of the things about it is that you empathize with the Phantom and you do with Christine. And I think it would be silly to say that I think most people in the audience would have loved it if it had worked for both of them. But it, of course, didn't. Because Your inclination is to be afraid of the Phantom, but you feel some empathy with it. Yeah, I think you do. I think our Phantom is a tragic figure, not a figure where you're sort of terrified of it or whatever.

I wasn't trying to do that. I wasn't trying to do a horror story. The book itself is very confused. It can't make its mind up whether it's a historical telling of facts or masquerading as what it does, but whether it's just telling a factual story, whether it's a horror story, whether it's Bengali and Trilby, whether it's, you know, a high romance. I chose to go with the high romance. This is an unfair question, but I'll ask it anyway. Is it your best work?

I can't ever say what I personally, I think it's as good as anything I've done. I think put it in a different way. I think it's very, very rare in a musical, very, very rare for all of the ingredients to come together in the same way that Phantom did, the production, the lighting, the choreography. It doesn't happen very often. I think probably of the recent musicals, I think Hamilton, obviously, that's happened.

But it tends to happen sort of once in a generation. So what I would say is that Phantom is probably the one musical of mine where absolutely everything came together. We never changed anything at all in preview, at all. And, I mean, that will never happen to me again. And it certainly never happened to me before. And yes, I've had other productions that have worked very well. And How Princess Evita was terrific. Cats, of course, worked really, really well. And of course, there have been many, many productions of Jesus Christ Superstar now with different directors

and different things. And some of those work really well and some of them not so well. But for a big musical, say, take Lion King, which is huge, it's just every ingredient happening at once. I'm only a part of that. I'm just the musical cog in the wheel. I had the idea of how to do Phantom, but I'm not a director. I'm not a designer. I'm not a lyricist. Are there any performances alike, or is it a unique experience each time? Well, it is a unique experience because, by definition, anything you see in the theater is not going to be exactly repeated every night.

And you're going to get performances and particularly the phantom over the years i mean i've lost count of how many phantoms and christines there have been i think 16 i think there were only 16 on broadway if i'm correct way that may well be right 16 phantoms yeah but um each one of those will have given a different different performance i'll go right back to Michael Crawford. He had an incredible command of the stage. That was the thing. The Phantom has to have authority. You mentioned in the interview and I want to take you back to, do you worry about

the state of Broadway? Is this a symbol of something we should worry about in terms of the health of live theatre here? I used to discuss all the time with Hal Prince about what we thought was going on with Broadway theater. And I think one of the things that he regretted enormously, as he said so before he sadly died, was that Broadway isn't really now the place where you're finding new work.

Everything is tending to come from other places. And you've got to remember, Powell produced West Side Story. West Side Story was a show that didn't do anything much at the Tony Awards, didn't win Best Musical or Best Score. But that kind of new work is becoming very, very difficult to produce. And so what I'm noticing is that more and more and more, either shows are really very small and therefore can in some way, you know, they don't have the kind of huge cost of something like a Phantom. Or they are really shop windows um and my my concern you know is is that you're getting a lot of people who say publishers you've got people people who own now song catalogs and copyrights and they say okay well we just need to

get this particular catalog put together with the story or whatever you know and then we then we get it on broadway and um and then we can take it everywhere else but what what what that means really i think and i think this is the big danger is is that what broadway could become is rather like you know you have to have a shop on fifth avenue if you're you know gucci or whatever you know but you don't intend to make actually any money out of that shop. It's just there as a flagship for everything else. And that isn't healthy. That's not healthy.

And also the theatre-going experience, I think, compared with, say, the theatre-going experience in London now, we're finding that, particularly, say, with the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, which I've completely restored, people are coming now for the overall experience. So you get children who come there and feel they're really quite happy coming to Frozen and they love being there. But at the same time, we are doing events like the launch of the Crown and things, because people want to come to the actual building and they want to have a

good time they want to know that there are restrooms and they want to be able to you know not have to go across the road to the bar the opposite because there's such a queue to use a restroom and to clear a view a woman you know and it's this it's all of this there's a there's a you you think gosh a million dollars a week you have to take to run a show like phantom it's very difficult and and i mean i but i think most of all it's i wish that you know we i mean am i trying to think now of an original musical or an original play or which actually originated here. That's, I mean... That's a challenge.

But you've got to understand, I'm saying this because I love Broadway. I'm a, you know, as a Brit who just loved musicals, well, Broadway is it for me. And I just really, really hope that everybody starts to sort of think a little bit about the running costs, you know, the fact that you buy your ticket now, and you're

possibly playing, I mean, there was one particular ticket agency which everybody has been using where, I mean, the actual average price in the Schubert Theatre was 38% over the pre-pandemic over the cost of the actual ticket. And this isn't good. So I was going to ask you what's next, but I know you're bound by

confidentiality, but you have been selected to write the anthem for Prince Charles' coronation. Yes, I mean, there is quite a lot. King Charles. Well, King Charles, yes, and Queen Camilla. No, there are quite a few new pieces of music that have been commissioned, but I've written the moment as it stands. It's the moment after both of them have been crowned, and I think one of the things that the king was very, very keen to try and make as the occasion joyful. So I've chosen Psalm 98, which has the line in it several times, make a joyful noise. And so the anthem is called Make a Joyful Noise. I would think of all the projects you've taken on, it's a very high pressure writing a work for a coronation. Well yes it is I mean I'm I'm excited by it I'm a little nervous about the live performance because we have the Royal Air Force fanfare trumpeters we have the

Westminster Abbey choir we have obviously the Westminster Abbey organ and an orchestra and but if they were all in one place I would be quite quite happy We have, obviously, the Westminster Abbey organ and an orchestra. But if they were all in one place, I would be quite happy. We're not too nervous. There's no bandstand in Westminster. So you've got your fanfare trumpeters here, and you've got the organ over here, and then you've got the choir in the middle, and the poor guy who's conducting it got to keep a whole lot together.

So, I mean, that's what I'm worried about. But we have recorded it, so I know what it should sound like. I'm not sure I hear a lot of confidence there, but. No, I, I, it, it will be, it will be fine. But I, I have worked in the Abbey before, so I know it's quirks, but it, it is a huge, great, you know, gothic, wonderful building. But it wasn't designed, you know, for something quite like this.