Plays and Players©, June 1978. ‘The Challenge of Evita.’ John Coldstream meets Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber.

According to Andrew Lloyd Webber there is one crucial difference between him and Tim Rice. Since a modest but, as it proved, momentous evening at a London school on 1 March 1968, Rice has never had an artistic failure. Lloyd Webber has. It was an unmitigated catastrophe called Jeeves, which opened at Her Majesty’s on 22 April 1975, and closed swiftly amid shouts of ‘dire disaster.’ Rice read the writing on the wall some two years earlier—‘It wasn’t very good, particularly the lyrics. The tunes were good, probably better than those in almost any other British musical, but the words were dire, they were mine, and the plot wasn’t working out. So I abandoned it. But I had the advantage of seeing it in plot terms: I could see the whole. Whereas the composer may know he has nine good tunes, and he may be right. However, that doesn’t mean they work in context.’

Lloyd Webber persevered. Prolific as ever, he had written all the melodies before Rice defected. P. G. Wodehouse made approving noises when the composer rattled them off on a piano at the author’s Long Island home. But the introduction of Alan Aykbourn to write the book provided no salvation. Rice had been right. The show was universally clobbered. Lloyd Webber’s confidence was severely bruised. His mother, who had previously kept out of the way, was the first to telephone with words of solace. But even she could only say: ‘Oh, it wasn’t that bad.’ The others who telephoned were the people Lloyd Webber would eventually invite to his 30^th birthday party.

It was a salutary lesson. Success on a scale matched in this generation only by that of Lennon and McCartney was shown to be hollow, wracked with uncertainty. But by the time of that debacle in the Haymarket, Lloyd Webber had mended the rift with his partner and, ensconced in a French hotel, had already sowed the seeds of a project which they were to treat with a respect born of a bitter experience. When Jeeves flopped, Evita became that much more important.

When this unprecedentedly over-publicised musical opens at the Prince Edward on 21 June, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice will have a great deal more at stake than they have ever had before. For a start, there is the question of 400,000 pound production cost, easily subscribed by Robert Stigwood’s ‘angels.’ But this time the composers are also co-producers, with all the vulnerability that reckless status entails. Then there is that febrile commodity, reputation. ‘I know perfectly well the theatre business didn’t take us seriously on the strength of Jesus Christ Superstar,’ says Rice. ‘The critics thought it was interesting, but nothing more. Fair enough. I would have felt the same.’ In order for Evita not to be a disaster, it must run for at least one year. ‘Everybody expects it to be a monster,’ say the writers. ‘We are concerned.’

On one point they can be reassured. People will go into the Prince Edward knowing at least one, probably two and perhaps several of the songs. ‘Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina,’ the first piece of music which a still doubtful Lloyd Webber wrote for the double album was, he says, simply designed as ‘one romantic theme tune’ summing up the technique Eva Peron used to elicit sympathy. Neither he nor Rice had any idea that Julie Covington’s magnificent treatment would be successful in its own right, let alone reach number one in the hit parade. After all, says Rice, ‘if you want a hit single you don’t normally write a six-minute orchestral thing with no beat about a country, in a very particular situation, which no one has ever been to.’ To their knowledge there are at least 90 versions of the song by everything from brass bands to Greek accordion ensembles. Like Mary Magdalene’s ‘I Don’t Know How to Love Him,’ which Yvonne Elliman performed to riveting effect on the original recording of Jesus Christ Superstar and which has had at least 200 official ‘covers,’ throughout the world, the song has done nothing to deter a potential audience from Old Compton Street: on the contrary.

Although surprised by the success of ‘Argentina’—‘Another Suitcase in Another Hall’ seemed a more likely proposition—Lloyd Webber was especially gratified because ‘that is where in the opera we tried to show Eva Peron selling herself to the full. Much criticism has already been levelled at the authors for over-glamorising, even hero-worshiping Eva Peron. As Rice says, ‘Anybody who suggests she wasn’t glamorous is an idiot. But we are not setting her up as a great lady.’ Lloyd Webber goes further still. His subject is ‘very unsympathetic, easily the most unpleasant character about whom I have written—except perhaps Peron himself.’ But he is not without admiration for the First Lady of Argentina: ‘I am sure Puccini would have adored her.’

For Lloyd Webber the score of Evita was an enormous challenge. Where Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat was initially just a 15-minute ‘musical piece’ and Superstar a bold experiment in trying to encapsulate part of the best known story in the Christian world within a radically new form and without a word of dialogue, the life of Eva Peron seemed to demand far greater explanation. When the tapes of Evita were played to an invited audience at the New London Theatre late in 1976, a slick audio-visual show, with lyrics superimposed on slides of the Perons’ lives and times, it was greeted with acclaim as a rewarding way of telling a relatively obscure tale. But for the stage show, Lloyd Webber has had to balance his belief that the best musicals ultimately give an exhilaration ‘like being in second gear in a fast car’ with his desire to see the music and words getting uninterrupted attention ‘without jolts from one style to another.’

His dread of ‘that awkward moment when you see the conductor raising his baton and the orchestra lurching into life during the dialogue’ convinced him that Evita, like the original Joseph and like Superstar, should be written with continuous music. If the music structure is right, he says, it renders unnecessary a good deal of explanation—a key change, for instance, can suggest that Eva gets her way and goes to the ‘Big Apple’—in this case Buenos Aires—despite the opposition of her lover, Agustin Magaldi. This is the form which Lloyd Webber and Rice have made their own. This is the justification for a gradual titular development from ‘piece’ (Joseph) to ‘rock opera’ (Superstar) and now to the more grandiose, but no less appropriate ‘opera.’ Perhaps only Peter Townshend, of The Who, has managed to equal their achievement with his Tommy. But because of the almost insuperable odds against staging this work on a large scale—the more so since Ken Russel’s savagely extravagant film—it will probably remain confined to sporadic concert performances only. Certainly The Who shrugged off this immensely personal millstone long ago. But, pre-dating Superstar by two years, it remains the first true ‘rock opera.’

As a champion, albeit reluctantly, of the most vital nouvelle vague to have surged from post-war composition, Lloyd Webber refuses to be hidebound by bogus categories and pigeon-holes. Such barriers are specious and irrelevant outside the catalogues of record shops. So, when asked recently how he thought his ‘Variations’ on Paganini’s A-Minor Caprice No. 24 should be labelled, he replied: ‘I think you will have to put it under Country and Western—Vocal.’ He feels contemporary ‘serious’ music has become a blind alley, with very few liking or understanding it. ‘Everything is happening in rock,’ he says, ‘but I am sure it’s got a lot to add to the serious music world.’

His oeuvre is sprinkled with fond pastiches of every 20^th-century genre from heavy rock to be-bop, from Nashville (‘One More Angel in Heaven,’ from Joseph) to the Caribbean and from barbershops to the rarefied climes of jazz-rock. Tributes to ‘the world’s greatest guitarist,’ Hank Marvin, abound, to the extent of the idol’s appearance twice on Evita with a burst of his dulcet ‘Wonderful Land’-like tones. Considering Lloyd Webber’s background, this eclecticism is the more remarkable.

Born 30 years ago, the son of William Lloyd Webber, Director of the London College of Music, Andrew Lloyd Webber was from the cradle ‘surrounded by music.’ He wrote his first published piano suite when he was nine. At Westminster School he wrote, composed, produced and compered an end-of-term entertainment called Play the Fool. Afterwards in the senior commons room, the word among the masters was that young Lloyd Webber would go far. But his predilection for the musical theatre meant that his parents ‘wrote me off as a serious musical force.’ After one term reading history at Magdalen, Oxford, he decided to leave because, musically, he was wasting his time. He thought he should go to the Royal College of Music, but his father, bearing in mind the sort of music his son wanted to write, said it would be better not to be formally trained at all and he should do it ‘as a kind of inspired amateur.’

He studied composition and played the French horn, but has no delusions about his ability as a musician: ‘I’m the world’s worst pianist bar none.’ Unlike Rice, who ‘hadn’t seen more than three in my life,’ Lloyd Webber became fascinated by the American musical. He admired the pre-war efforts of Gershwin, Rodgers and Hart to eschew ‘chorus girls and revue,’ and decided that Rodgers’ later collaboration with Hammerstein on Oklahoma! Was a revelation, ‘kicking off with a woman churning butter and singing about a beautiful morning.’ Lloyd Webber went to work. He wrote nine complete musicals, none of which surfaced in public. He met Rice, then in the record business, through a publisher to whom Rice was ‘trying to flog an encyclopedia of pop.’ With a book by Leslie Thomas, they wrote the music for a show based on the life of Dr. Barnardo, called The Likes of Us, which was planned to go into the Mermaid in October 1967. A ‘bit of an Oliver! rip-off,’ it, too, vanished without trace. It was, they agreed, ‘a depressing time.’

All that was to change when the late Alan Doggett, then head of the music department at Colet Court school in London, asked Rice and Lloyd Webber to write a piece for his schoolboy choir to sing at their end-of-term concert. Doggett had taught Lloyd Webber’s brother, Julian, now an astonishingly young professor at the Guildhall School of Music and a much-lauded cellist. ‘We had visions of the West End,’ says Rice, ‘and here we were, writing for a school. But at least we had a guarantee that our work would be shown. So we took a few risks and wrote something totally original.’ Joseph was unveiled on that March night in 1968. Doggett, who remained a close friend, conductor on Superstar and major contributor on all their joint works,, did not live to celebrate its tenth anniversary. Since that inauspicious world premiere, the 15-minute piece has been extended five times, is annually afforded 500 productions by British schools and has just become the most successful musical in South Africa. The ‘world’s first pop cantata’ had an enthusiastic welcome from the more observant critics. Hitherto, said one, ‘the imagination necessary to set in motion anything like a pop oratorio has never quite been there. The way is now open for a real pop opera.’

Thanks to David Land, agent for the Dagenheam Girl Pipers and ‘owner of most of Dagenham,’ Rice and Lloyd Webber were to be pioneers. Impressed by Joseph and by the prospect of a musical based on the last seven days of Christ seen largely through the eyes of Judas Iscariot, he put them on a salary of 25 pounds a week for three years. The result was the title song of Jesus Christ Superstar, a single record released to massive antipathy in Britain and America, but a hit in Brazil and in Holland, where its acceptance at an Amsterdam gay bar frequented by media people ensured extensive airplay on the right radio station. MCA took out an option on the complete work, it was recorded at a total cost of 14,000 pounds and released a year later.

As history relates, Superstar was no overnight sensation. Its music, with Lloyd Webber’s accent on angry-sounding orchestral interludes and his obsession with the minor key, was hardly of instant appeal. In Britain it took two years for the double album to take off and even now the British pressing of those original LPs has only sold 36,941 copies. Throughout the world the figure is nearer a colossal six million, with a further two million of the film soundtrack and ‘endless’ original cast albums from stage productions. The music’s true impact has only been felt in performances at theatres like the Palace, where, for example, ‘King Herod’s Song’ delivered with outrageous verve to the thrashing rhythm of a ‘live’ rock group takes on a wholly different dimension from that of the somewhat insipid recording. Indeed, the West End production of Superstar, with very few modifications from Jim Sharman’s original conception in August 1972, still plays to packed houses and later this year will outstrip Oliver! as the longest-running British musical of all time.

Lloyd Webber considers his aim on Superstar was ‘to see whether it was possible to write an extended piece in this form, something that was dramatic, worked well on record and did some new things musically.’ Later he would say that he and Rice had become victims of its success and regarded as ‘precocious phenomena, rather than working pros.’ Before Evita, and their most concerted efforts to ‘change all that,’ Lloyd Webber did some work on his own. He wrote a fluent and atmospheric score for Albert Finney’s Bogart-esque film Gumshoe and some less elegant but nonetheless unobtrusive music for The Odessa File. Jeeves threw him into the slough of despond, but already the commitment to Evita was intense. When the recorded opera was greeted with praise like Peter Clayton’s ‘it’s rock and it’s new, which doesn’t make it neolithic—just mature’ and the stage show was assured, Lloyd Webber tried what Monty Python might describe as something completely different.

For years his brother Julian had asked him to write a piece for the cello. The fateful day was 17 May 1977, when Leyton Orient played Hull City. Andrew had wagered with Julian that the home team would be relegated. He lost, when Orient drew. The final result was ‘Variations,’ on which Andrew avenged himself by involving Julian and to a lesser extent the rock group Colisseum in some violently difficult musical gymnastics. The 23 variations were previewed at Lloyd Webber’s annual summer festival in his country house, Sydmonton Park. Once recorded, they raced up the album charts to number two, much to the composer’s surprise. Tim Rice, remarking on his partner’s over-burgeoning output suggests some of the variations are ‘not unconnected with a few tunes from the past.’ More surprising still is the fact that when he crossed the Atlantic to promote Variations Lloyd Webber found he was utterly unhelped by Evita. Although the double album of the opera has sold about 200,000 copies in both Britain and Germany, with ‘gold discs piling up elsewhere,’ it has been a complete failure in the United States.

By April this year, fewer than 5,000 copies had been sold, despite a lavish presentation identical to that at the New London Theatre. The composers suggest that the American publicity campaign was ‘apalling,’ but more important, they feel, is the specialised approach of the American radio stations. ‘Evita is not jazz, not classical, not middle-of-the-road,’ they say, ‘so we don’t get air time. If a hard rock station receives it, they play the first few bars, hear the strings, and say ‘Forget it’.’ Which tends to suggest that Lloyd Webber’s very eclecticism has its price: high-flying he and Rice may continue to be, on the strength of Superstar alone. But adoration—that, as Che implies in the new opera, is an altogether more transient affair.