A school choir request launched a Broadway empire
Andrew Lloyd Webber was seventeen when Tim Rice, twenty, became his lyricist. Their biblical pop cantata for a London school choir—paid a hundred-guinea Novello advance—grew into Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. From that classroom commission came decades of West End and Broadway runs the New York Times once called the most commercially successful composing career in history.
Born 22 March 1948 in London to composer-organist William Lloyd Webber and violinist-pianist Jean Hermione Johnstone, he played piano and violin from age three, took up French horn, and was composing by six. A Queen’s Scholar at Westminster School (1960–65), he left Oxford history after one term for the Royal College of Music. Aunt Viola, an actress, walked him through stage doors; toy-theatre shows with brother Julian, later a renowned cellist, rehearsed a lifelong impresario habit.
After the unproduced Barnardo musical The Likes of Us (demo 1966; first staged 2005), Joseph expanded from short cantata to 1972 stage show and a two-hour West End production in 1973 on Jesus Christ Superstar’s momentum. Superstar (1970 concept; Broadway 1971) had grossed more than $237 million worldwide by 1980 and held the West End longevity record until Cats overtook it in 1989. Evita (concept album 1976; West End 1978; Broadway 1979) won seven Tonys including Best Musical. Cats (1981), set to T. S. Eliot, ran twenty-one years and 8,949 London performances; Phantom later broke Cats’ Broadway record. Starlight Express (1984) logged 7,409 London shows and still runs in a custom Bochum theatre since 1988.
Standalone work includes Variations with Julian (1978), which reached UK album number two and theme-tuned The South Bank Show for thirty-two years, and a Requiem for his father that premiered in New York on 24 February 1985 and won a 1986 Grammy. Honours span a 1992 knighthood, a peerage, seven Tonys, seven Oliviers, three Grammys plus a Legend Award, an Oscar, and—after the 2018 Superstar live Emmy—EGOT status as the thirteenth person to claim Oscar, Emmy, Grammy, and Tony. His LW Entertainment firm remains a major London theatre operator.
Source: Andrew Lloyd Webber
