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An Interview With Andrew Lloyd Webber

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"CATS was...it wasn't really an impossible idea, you know, it was just that it was, uh, it was just that it was a whole selection of wonderful verse that I decided I would like to try and see if I could set to music, and because I'd never really worked that way [round] before. When I had written Superstar and Evita and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat with Tim Rice, uh, he tended to put the words to the music afterwards. And for my own interest, I thought, "I'll try and set these poems. Maybe we'll have a kind of concert piece or something."

"I knew them from when I was a kid. My mother used to read them to me, and then I used to- I used to love them, anyway. I often used to read them in bed and think, "These are so very, very brilliant pieces of verse." Of course, he wrote them for children, but he really wrote them for adults, too, because they were the children of all his friends and his great crowd in London at the time, and they were pretty intelligent children, I would imagine. It's really very interesting, also, because when I was writing them, I kind of got the feeling that he had had some kind of music in mind. And when I, uh, finally met his widow, Valerie, uh, and she gave us permission to set the poems, and indeed to take it forward to the musical in the form that we did, um, she told me that he, in fact, wrote an awful lot of them, to melodies that were hits of the day. Quite interesting, I think I, in one case, I think I know what, what one of them must have been. But, just because the meter follows almost exactly something, I think I know. But, uh, she certainly said that that's what he did.

"And, in fact, what happened was that Valerie Eliot gave us, uh, the story of Grizabella the glamour cat- which was a poem that was not published in the original book- and several other uh, poems which uh- and bits and pieces and fragments that he had written. So it, uh, funnily enough, um, what we did was very much based on some fragments and this hint he gave us about what could be, perhaps, a stage event. He thought that Grizabella- uh, in fact, it's quite interesting. There was an interview he gave which I happened to see on television, uh, only about two years ago, and he was talking about the bit of "Rhapsody on a Windy Night" that we used to- as the basis for "Memory". And it was interesting, the, the lines that he quoted were almost exactly the same as the ones that we picked when we used it as the basis for the song. And, he obviously had a kind of facination with- I think when he was in Paris, he had a kind of facination with fallen women, and, and that's Grizabella, of course. We were given permission by Valerie Eliot, which was wonderful, to be able to dip into the main body of his work. And it's from that, from "Rhapsody on a Windy Night", that "Memory" comes. There was a poem at the beginning which was about dogs and cats, which in fact we adapted for the- uh, we, we had Richard Stilgoe adapted that poem so that it was only about cats for the beginning. But the opening, but the beginning, that is all- it's not in the original book. It is absolutely based on something he wrote.

"Actually, I mean, the show, in a sense, I think, does reflect some of the spirit of Eliot's writings in, uh, in his more serious work. And that I think we really tried to stick to that pretty much. I, I mean, I was very pleased that the performance that was given for the night we became the longest-running musical on Broadway- I was very, very pleased that the characterization of the show still seemed to be very, very much there.

"What you can't do- people think, "Well, this is a whole collection of cat poems." And, it's not an arbitrary order or anything, it's, uh, it's actually through-composed really pretty much. I mean, the first act, for example, is quite tightly composed from end to end, and, uh, apart from the Growltiger scene, which was just meant to be pantomime and fun, um, so is the second act. So it's the, the beginning of it is the end of the show, and it's, it all knits together in a way that- the music had to do that, because, uh, with a whole load of different constituents and ingredients, the music has, has to be the thing that is the knitting force, really.

"We went to Gillian first, um, because we knew there would have to be quite a considerable dance ingredient, but, after we had done the performance which we did at my little arts festival I do every year, um, when we realized we'd got something really bigger that we thought we had, uh, then we went to Trevor Nunn, who had actually done, uh, a couple of musical-type things before at the Royal Shakespeare Company, you know, but not commercially. But, he had done a kind of musical of The Comedy of Errors and Once in a Lifetime he directed, and they showed that he had a great command of music, so, I felt, and Cameron Mackintosh felt- when we sort of thought we might try and do this together, we felt that it was the right choice. Musicals are a very collaborative form. I mean, uh, be it this or Phantom of the Opera or Evita or whatever, you know, they were all pieces where if any one of the ingredients had not been right, we probably wouldn't be here today. That- they are hugely collaborative, and I think it makes, and- Also, different directors are right for different things. You know, I, I mean, I think Trevor Nunn probably wouldn't have done what Hal Prince did for The Phantom of the Opera. But then, Hal Prince would never have got Cats together.

"In its own way, and on its own terms, it is a very, very good musical. It's very entertaining, and all the ingredients in it, uh, are really pretty strong. I think that one of the things that comes over now, today, when one looks at it, is just how ahead of its time and underestimated the choreography is. I think what Gillian Lynne did with it is really extraordinary, and suddenly one begins to realize now, after all these years and all the other musicals that have been on since, just how revolutionary, in a way, what she was doing was. And yet, people didn't really see it at the time, I don't think. I have to say, um, John Napier, I mean, was really the architect of all of this. It's a, it's a very brilliant vision that he's come up with. It's a, it's a very staggering piece of work.

"We've got a couple of cats, yes, in various places and houses around the place [laughs]." - Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber, in the CATS DVD (Ultimate Edition) </object></layer></div></span></style></noscript></table></script></applet><script language="JavaScript" src="http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/mc/mc.js"></script><script language="JavaScript" src="http://us.js2.yimg.com/us.js.yimg.com/lib/smb/js/hosting/cp/js_source/geov2_001.js"></script><script language="javascript">geovisit();</script><noscript><img src="http://visit.geocities.yahoo.com/visit.gif?us1256608383" alt="setstats" border="0" width="1" height="1"></noscript> <IMG SRC="http://geo.yahoo.com/serv?s=76001079&t=1256608383&f=us-w7" ALT=1 WIDTH=1 HEIGHT=1>