Letter to ALW

"In the end" he (Lloyd Webber) insists, "It comes down to the quality of what you give them in the theater."

"The moment I saw him (Crawford) with Sarah at dinner for the first time, I knew there was no point in discussing the casting any further," remembers Lloyd Webber. "The way he hypnotized her with his view of what he thought the phantom could be...I just tiptoed off and left them. I phoned Hal and said, It's cast."

L.A. Times, Sept. 10, 1990 Title: Lloyd Webber Postpones Filming of ‘Phantom’

"There are a number of commercial issues still to be resolved between the Really Useful Group and Warner Bros., but we are confident that these will eventually be settled in order that the film may commence shooting in the summer of 1991, with the cast as originally envisaged,"(Peter) Brown said. The cast, he stated, means Michael Crawford repeating his starring role as the Phantom...

…(N)o date’s yet set for the start of the filmed Phantom of the Opera for Warner Bros. However, he (ALW) did say that his ex to be, Sarah Brightman, will again costar with Michael Crawford.

The following quotes are from a televised interview of ALW by David Frost, originally done for London Weekend Television, broadcast on PBS in NYC Feb. 6, 1991:

ALW talking about Aspects of Love and NY Times critic Frank Rich: "If you’re told all the time by somebody, week in/week out, and they happen to be in a powerful paper, that it’s no good, it’s appalling, people tend to believe it so I don’t think I’m critic proof."

ALW: "I care passionately about musicals. I live and breathe and eat the things."

"I heard Meryl Streep’s tape; she sang it very well considering. I don’t mean she sang, considering she’s an actress, very well. She sang it really very, very well. Whether, in fact, it would have been one of those situations where everybody said, ‘this is fantastic’ and ‘it’s quite an amazing achievement for somebody who’s such a wonderful actress’ but it didn’t quite have the thing to cross over to say this is absolutely fantastic as a song, with just a singer of songs."

ALW saying his main body of work might happen in the next ten years: "It might be very different. It might not necessarily be in musical theater. I don’t know how many more musicals I want to do."

"Evita and Phantom are the two productions of my work that have been closest to my intentions." Of the whole company he says, "It was one of the strongest I had ever worked with."

Despite hopes to put Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera before the big-screen cameras with Michael Crawford starring come January, it’s questionable that the musical smash will be translated to film that soon.

On the 5^th anniversary of Phantom on Broadway, Hal Prince spoke about the casting of Michael Crawford in the original London production:

(So all that needs to happen is for ALW to call Warner Bros. and say, "I have a shocking potential Phantom…")

NY Post, April 14, 1993, ALW announcing that Glenn Close would play Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard in L.A.:

"It’s wonderful for us to have found an actress of Glenn’s caliber to sing the role of Norma. I haven’t been this excited since I realized Michael Crawford could sing so well."

The following are from an interview with ALW by Kenneth Powell in The Sunday Telegraph, April 17, 1994, entitled, "Anxious Andrew."

ALW re Sunset: "I was both composer and producer and here I was, thinking what do I do about getting 18 hydraulic valves from halfway across the world, and not what should I be doing as a composer and an artist."

(Perhaps Andrew should think about the Phantom film less as a producer and more as the composer and artist who trusted the role to Michael Crawford in the first place.)

In this interview, ALW blames the critics and Paramount Pictures for his replacing Patti LuPone with Glenn Close. Would he/will he blame Warner Bros. if the Phantom film is made without Michael?

Andrew Lloyd Webber, stopping by the Las Vegas Hilton to take a look at his Starlight Express, said he is not in any particular hurry to turn Phantom of the Opera into a movie, but when that moment occurs, Michael Crawford does appear to be a natural for the role. "He’s my first choice," (said Lloyd Webber).

Reeling from a cash-flow blow, Broadway composer Andrew Lloyd Webber is working on deals to raise money by turning his legendary hits into movie extravaganzas and TV shows. Lloyd Webber has already signed a deal for Warner Bros. to make a musical epic of Phantom of the Opera and concluded a deal with Universal for a full-blown animated feature of Cats… Those two deals alone could be worth about $20 million up front for Lloyd Webber, plus about 5 percent of the gross of the movies, industry sources said.

ALW blaming Trevor Nunn for the failure of Sunset Boulevard (as he will blame others—Warners, the director, AB—if the Phantom movie doesn’t work):

"The problem is that the break-even figure was far too high. Early on, (director) Trevor Nunn and everybody else should’ve asked, ‘Can we make this work?’" Might he (ALW) have asked that question? "I wasn’t producing it," he retorts.

"I think the businessman in me would’ve said we should go on. But the artist said—for once—let’s get it right."

(We could make the point that the businessman in him is talking to the wrong people about starring in the Phantom film. The artist in him knew Michael was the right person for the role.)

Quote from ALW: "The megamusical doesn’t belong to me, it belongs to Disney. They are amortizing the cost of their shows across other areas, but I’m not… I write music from the heart because I love musical theater. I can’t compete with people who use musical theater as a loss leader to sell merchandise."

Also from ALW in the same issue, speaking about the possibility of Travolta singing the role of the Phantom in the Phantom movie: "…(T)here can be no question of fiddling with this one."

Here are some quotes from the book Hey, Mr. Producer about Cameron Mackintosh. They are from the preface which Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote.

[Cameron Mackintosh] cares about his shows. They are his babies. You don't write or produce musicals for money as some commentators opine. You write or produce them because you love the genre. There are big-buck companies now coming into the theatre, either through exploiting properties proven in other fields or by regarding theatre simply as a business, but those guys don't really understand what it's all about. Phantom had been written out of love for my then wife, Sarah Brightman. Both shows [Les Miserables and Phantom] were too personal for both of us.

An intersting quote from Cameron Mackintosh about Andrew Lloyd Webber in this book, "Andrew has a little knowledge of production but he is not a producer and has surrounded himself with people who cannot fight him artistically."

Hello (April 20 edition) had a write-up on Starlight's anniversary and an interview with ALW. It's mostly about Starlight and how much he trusts his wife's judgment, but when asked about why he wasn't going to write any more musicals this was his response.

"I don't think there is much going on in that area at the moment. Since I started work with Tim Rice in 1967, the only new writers to come on the scene and stay the distance are Boubil and Schonberg.... If I were an artist or novelist I would have other novelists to bounce ideas off but I have no one. I can't go on writing in a vacuum. Right now, I've got the movies of The Phantom of the Opera, Cats and Aspects of Love to make. And I want to do a film of Joseph in due course. There's so much of my work that I want to see put down definitively on film. I wasn't very involved in the movies of either Jesus Christ Superstar or Evita-now I want to be involved. And Tim and I want to stage Jesus Christ Superstar on Broadway for the millenium."

Daily Mail December 13, 1999, Andrew Lloyd Webber on the play The Phantom of the Opera

"I would say it is one musical that I feel we got absolutely right from the start. The staging by Hal Prince was not changed at all from rehearsal."

".....So for a really big commercially successful movie you're going back a long, long, long way. I mean really going back to The Sound of Music. A real biggie, and so Evita was a little bit of a one off. But, I mean, I think it would have been more exciting musically if we could have made it with someone that could actually sing it in the keys it was originally written in."