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Lloyd Webber Back on Broadway |
| Section: THE ARTS / THEATER |
| Author: Herb Greer |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 4/1/1990 |
| Size: 2,077 Words, 11,755 Characters |
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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, so...
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...omes from fashion and a sense of occasion than it does from the product consumed. It is a triumph of packing over content - not unusual today, even among customers who, you might think, know better. Whether one wishes to contribute to this triumph is a matter of taste. On that score the bookings in London speak for themselves. What happens in New York remains to be seen.
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
comprehensive academic resource that encompasses a broad range of
articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
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