Saying something unkind about an Andrew Lloyd Webber show is like trying to cut a path through a room full of feathers with a baseball bat. Even where reviews are sour, as they were for Phantom of the Opera and the extremely silly and vacuous Starlight Express, advance sales and ticket lines continued to stretch away into the middle distance in London and New York. This guaranteed popular following makes news of the latest Lloyd Webber show.
The fact is that faintly praising or openly sneering at Andrew Lloyd Webber's music has become a sort of a fashionable middlebrow activity. I myself have remarked on his ability to send and audience out of a theater whistling somebody else's tunes, and the tone of much British newspaper comment on his latest score has been, well, tolerant. It is hard to escape the impression of an underlying a priori hostility to this very wealthy and seemingly critically invulnerable entertainer.
Of course, what the critics say about his music is quite correct. It is eclectic (that is to say, almost derivative, but never quite to the point of borrowing), it is vapid, thin, flavorless, facile, and in Aspects of Love, sometimes so empty as to amount to a kind of musical doodling. But this does not quite explain or justify the relish with which Lloyd Webber is chewed up and spat out by some critics.
Violating Expectations
One has to ask what all those haughty critics want from Andrew Lloyd Webber. What are the criteria they apply inputting down these processed tunes bought by the public in such great international quantities? From the tone and language of the bad notices, Lloyd Webber seems to violate certain very particular expectations, which are principally that he should be as original, exciting, and fresh as, say, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, or Richard Rodgers, or any other showbiz composers who were famous on the same scale (but Gershwin in particular, because he tried his had at opera).
The comparison seems wrong. It is crystal clear by now that Lloyd Webber is not that sort of composer, nor is he working in the same cultural ambience as they did.
His original audience, as it were the target for his work, was and still is the ordinary British customer for musical comedy entertainment. The middling " I know what I like" preference for the undemanding and the bland is a worldwide phenomenon, and Lloyd Webber has built a fortune and a show-business empire on its foundations.
With his later shows he is much closer to the cinematic genre of films like Jacques Demy's Les Parapluies de Cherbourg and Les Demoiselles de Rochefort. Both of Michel Legrand's scores, though they are more original, more interesting, and melodically far better than the music for Aspects of Love, do use their material in much the same way that Lloyd Webber does here, with a principal song functioning as leitmotiv throughout the evening. Legrand's version of this is easier to take, not just that his tunes are better but - the real test of a composer - his incidental and transitional passages are richer and stronger.
Lloyd Webber manages nevertheless to build innocuous, pleasantly banal material into a useable platform
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