Andrew Lloyd Webber Quotes

1. I have lived and worked in Britain all my life. Not even in the dark days of penal Labour taxation in the Seventies did I have any intention of leaving the country of my birth. Despite a rumor put around some years back, I have never contemplated leaving Britain for tax reasons.


2. We felt we had to know something of his back story. I don't think people in the cinema would just accept that he's there. I think we had to learn how he (got there).

3. I've got to find something and if I find something that I like, I'll do it. If I don't, I won't.





4. (about Emmy Rossum) She is a wonderfully pure soprano, with an exceptional range. But more than this she also brings real character into the voice - so rare for her age.

5. Well the least favorite question is the one that one's asked particularly about in Japan is what's the difference between theatre and cinema and I think, well, that's about eighty bucks.


6. Because her voice is, it's like the muscles and it develops all the time. That was the fantastic thing for us.

7. Well we'd just seen Gerry. I think he wanted somebody who had that authority and was handsome. The thing is, he's a big hunk isn't he? All I can say, if you look at his chat line, or the Phantom website, it's quite worrying. Because the girls really seem to love him.

8. It doesn't stand up to huge intellectual scrutiny.

9. There is a recommendation that schools spend a certain amount of time teaching music but it really depends on whether the teachers believe in it. In some primary and secondary schools there is no musical provision at all but other well-resourced schools have plenty.

10. When we finally came to start work on this, the joy was it was only Joel and I, we didn't have to answer to anybody, and we didn't have to submit a screen play or anything like that. We just wrote it and then made it.

11. I'm a composer and therefore I know when I've written a good tune. When you've written a good song is when you know that the lyric is completely coalesced with the song. Sometimes I think I've written melodies that may have got a bit buried because maybe the lyric hasn't worked with the song. Sometimes, actually, it's the other way around. When you're writing for musical theatre the story comes first. If the story's right then the songs will probably come right.

12. If you're a composer you do want to know how people are reacting to it but at the same time, of course, the performer is the most important thing.


13. Superstar was made so early in my career I had nothing to do with it at all. The first time I saw it was the opening screening.

14. More than ever before we need to keep high-flying professionals in the UK. We can't, as we have done in the past, dump on them through penal personal taxation. Of course we know that there have been some shocking excesses in the City of London. But for years we have also had drummed into us that the City of London proudly took over from manufacturing as the UK's main source of income. New Labour rejoiced in the fruits of the excesses of the bankers. Of course, with hindsight, their bonuses were obscene. But New Labour gratefully taxed them.

15. Corny answer is of course is that everyone who wants musicals are children in different ways, aren't they? So you think of them in different ways. There are things of mine I'm sorry haven't come here.


16. The regrets in the theatre have always been the shows that you know ought to have worked, but for one reason of another haven't. I suppose if I had one regret it's that I would have loved to have had a long-term partner like Rodgers had with either Hart or Hammerstein. I was really hoping that the Tim Rice relationship would have gone on, but I'm obsessed with theatre and for Tim it's something that he does enjoy doing, is very good at, but it isn't his whole life as it is with me.

17. And it sort of jogged a memory of something that I read at school and I read it, and I thought God this is it. So you never can tell. I could find something this afternoon.







18. Here's the truth. The proposed top rate of income tax is not 50 per cent. It is 50 per cent plus 1.5 per cent national insurance paid by employees plus 13.3 per cent paid by employers. That's not 50 per cent. Two years from now, Britain will have the highest tax rate on earned income of any developed country.

19. What strikes me is that there's a very fine line between success and failure. Just one ingredient can make the difference. A really good example of that is design and "Love Never Lies". The London production didn't have any consistency of style, so it would go from say, art nouveau to art deco, to straightforward, old-fashioned showbiz. The Australian production had its own language. It was at one with the piece.

20. I guess the thing is that we remained huge friends after the original Phantom movie, when we decided it wouldn't take place and we just saw each other socially over the years so we were friends.






21. I began to think, now is the time. I found quite a lot of opposition in Hollywood about the idea of doing a film musical and we ended up having to buy the rights back. I'm glad we did because it meant John and I were able to make exactly the movie we wanted.

22. I guess we've had a very close relationship because I don't pretend to know about cinema and I think I do know a bit about theatre but he does, he respected that and so we really just had a collaboration which went completely like this.





23. (on composing songs) I've sometimes found that they've taken a while, but then you get the ones where it's so obvious that you think "that must have been done before", so you go through agonies and get musicologists and people to look at them.

24. I knew nothing about film at all. I suppose the biggest surprise is all these things. In the theatre we sort of do, I might do two or three key interviews and that would be it.





25. I mean I don't really think about it. You know, do you know what I often say to myself? I think you're very lucky in life if you know what you want to do.

26. I said, look, do you think you could bring Gerry through, and they said yeah, absolutely, they thought that. Joel was very keen to cast him. If all my music team were happy, I was happy.




27. In the last few years, everything seems to have gone slightly away from music and more toward the comedy musicals, the "Hairsprays" and "The Book of Mormons". I just don't know if there's a public for something now which is much more serious and is old-fashioned, in the sense that it is melodic.

28. I think Michael Crawford realized, I think we all realized, once we'd gone the route of casting a very young girl, you can't really cast a 65 year old man opposite. Slightly different resonance I think. No, we weren't going to go there. We'd have Jack Nicholson in the lead.


29. I think back at the time, if it had been 1988, I would have thought Michael and Sarah probably would have been cast but I don't think, I think it's much better that the girl is younger and if Sarah would have been 26 or 27 then.

30. I think the thing's that perhaps sad really is that younger people haven't come in and I think it must have been absolutely fantastic to have worked in the 50's when you had all of the great Broadway composers and when "West Side Story" didn't win the Tony Award.


31. I think that the wonderful advantage we have in the film of being able to cast a girl as young as Emmy and which we couldn't do in the theatre of course because no girl of 16 or 17 could sing 8 shows a week, couldn't sing two.

32. I would have gone right ahead but the only thing, the only phenomenon that's going on now of course, which is different in my experiences, is that you are getting things planted in the Net by people about the Woman in White on the Net. That's not a nice change.


33. I'm going to take the kids away over Christmas but I don't, I've written 14 musicals now, I don't want to rush into doing something just for the sake of doing it. I want to do it when I find a story.

34. In Evita I wasn't really hugely involved with it. I gave a little bit of help but they needed a bit of technical help on the movie and so some of my music people went in at the end of the movie and helped out with it.

35. If you know what you want to do, as I always loved musicals, and then to have been lucky enough to be successful with them, I think that's all you can ask isn't it? I think I don't really think too much about it. I am a bit shy socially, yeah, I admit that.

36. It must have been an extraordinary time. I guess the worrying thing about musical theatre to me, is if you look at the London season this year, mine is actually the only one to have come in.

37. The next few years are going to be horrendous in the UK. The last thing we need is a Somali pirate-style raid on the few wealth creators who still dare to navigate Britain's gale-force waters.

38. Negative things, and they were all deliberate and I'm not going to say who they were but I know who they were and it was in the business, and that's not a good sign.


39. Two years ago I hadn't even thought of the Woman in White, and I was doing a television show and I said I hadn't found a story and the next day somebody rang me and said have you ever thought of the Woman in White.


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