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Though his music may often sound as if it were written by a man locked in the basement of the Paris opera-hearing late-nineteenth-century music, muffled, from a couple of floors down-he turns out to be very much a boy of the Monty Python generation, his ears full of rock and British comedy. Lloyd Webber, as his memoir, “ Unmasked” (HarperCollins), reveals, was caught in a wrinkle within that time. Certainly, no artist as hugely successful as he has been can have struck a chord without owning a piece of his time. Given his reputation as the guy who dragged the Broadway musical from its vitality and idiomatic urgency back to its melodramatic roots in European operetta-while also degrading rock music to a mere rhythm track-is it possible that, as his memoir indicates, his work might be more varied and interesting than we had known? Could we, terrible thought, have been unfair to Andrew Lloyd Webber? The answer turns out, on inspection, to be a complicated and qualified Yes. There is nothing pompous or pallid about his prose, which makes it all the odder that so much of the music that he wrote seems to have no other qualities.
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Illustration by Bendik KaltenbornĪmerican lovers of musical theatre who blame Andrew Lloyd Webber for pretty much everything that went wrong on its stages, starting in the early seventies, will be chagrined to discover that he has written an autobiography that has all the virtues his music always seemed to lack: wit, surprise, contemporaneity, audacity, and an appealingly shrewd sense of the occasion. In an age when the musical was no longer a hit machine, Lloyd Webber returned the form to its origins in operetta.
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