Politics andPhantom ’s reception

In 2009, Larry O’Connor, a former employee of Lloyd Webber, offered a defence of the composer for the late Andrew Breitbart’s conservative website Big Hollywood. O’Connor claimed that Broadway hates Lloyd Webber not just for high-minded aesthetic or philosophical reasons; distaste for Lloyd Webber’s personal political beliefs also fuels the animosity:

Clearly, O’Connor is not an impartial source, but some evidence bears out his perspective. Lloyd Webber is an ardent Conservative (he is now a life Peer and Tory member of the House of Lords). Lloyd Webber’s political affiliation was already well known in the mid-1980s, around the time of Phantom’s premiere, as the composer had become a vocal advocate for Tory policy, particularly tax reform.Footnote ⁶ He also deployed his compositional gifts to serve the Conservative cause: in 1987, for instance, he provided music for Margaret Thatcher’s Party Election Broadcast to accompany a montage of Thatcher meeting with world leaders and engaging in other acts of statesmanship.Footnote ⁷ Although reviews for Phantom did not directly address Lloyd Webber’s political opinions or his status as composer-in-ordinary for the Tories, the materialism and unregulated capitalism that characterised the Thatcher and Reagan era did not find favour among many artists, musicians and theatre critics from either the United Kingdom or the United States, and this animosity seeped into the critical response towards Phantom.Footnote ⁸

By 1988, when Phantom premiered on Broadway, the affluence of the Reagan era had begun to wane. This new austerity was ignited by the so-called Black Monday stock market crash that affected the US and other world markets in October 1987.Footnote ⁹ Frank Rich’s New York Times review of the 1988 Broadway production of Phantom reflected this new economic reality, as he hoped that Lloyd Webber’s opulence and crass consumerism might soon seem out of step with the times:

Jazz pianist John Eaton, writing for the Washington Post, also drew explicit parallels between Lloyd Webber and current events, although he took a different tack, equating the composer’s popularity with the financial and political disasters facing the US:

Throughout his review, Eaton claimed that Lloyd Webber’s financial success, his role as a player in the capitalist system, was entirely incompatible with true artistry – a rebuke against Reagan’s economic policies that sought to commodify the arts and saw little value in public subsidy. Reagan’s budget proposal of 1986 included cuts of $32.9 million to the arts and humanities endowments (he had tried and failed to get a 50 per cent reduction in funding in 1981).Footnote ¹² Although Reagan did not manage to secure his desired cuts, those interested in ‘the substance of culture’ (to use Rich’s phrase) felt increasingly alienated within this intensely commercialised environment.Footnote ¹³ Bernard Holland in the New York Times described a class struggle in which impoverished musicians were pitted against the Lloyd Webber capitalist juggernaut: ‘No matter what any musician says, the amount of money “Phantom of the Opera” stands to make is a sensitive issue for creative people, so many of whom have struggled in the past or continue to struggle.’Footnote ¹⁴

Other critics blamed audiences for embracing Lloyd Webber’s commercial aesthetics. Michael Feingold, writing for the left-leaning Village Voice, implicated the artistically ignorant bourgeois consumers who made Phantom a hit: ‘Yes, yes, I know. The semi-educated middle-class world loves Andrew Lloyd Webber best of all theater composers, and the Phantom is already a financial triumph, no matter what any critic may say, with an $18 million advance sale.’Footnote ¹⁵ David Richards in the Washington Post took a similar tack, worrying that ‘smaller pleasures’ would be obliterated by Lloyd Webber’s megamusical. Like Feingold, he drew a direct correlation between questionable audience priorities and what he perceived to be a new theatrical aesthetic that emphasised profit above all: ‘The consumer mentality that prevails among the baby-boomer, the devotion to the brand name, the concern for staying on top of the trends – all this has also affected our playhouses, too.’ According to Richards, audiences no longer went to the theatre ‘because [it] is one of the civilized and civilizing endeavors that mankind has managed to come up with over the eons’. Instead, audiences flocked to ‘Events’ that were thoroughly hyped by a massive marketing apparatus.Footnote ¹⁶

Although Lloyd Webber’s political conservatism and the material success of his shows may have counted against him for some reviewers, it helped him in other places, particularly in the UK among those who supported Thatcher’s economic values. During Thatcher’s second term in office (after 1983), she turned her attention to the dismantling of the British post-war welfare state.Footnote ¹⁷ And while she did not actively cut the government’s funding of the arts, she failed to increase government subsidy. Due to inflation, the Arts Council was therefore forced to make cuts and the private sector was slow to make up the shortfall, as at the beginning of the 1980s business sponsorship represented less than 2 per cent of arts subsidy in Britain.Footnote ¹⁸ Given the economic environment, producers mounted shows that were ‘sure bets’ – ones that would enjoy a large return at the box office. Michael Billington, the theatre critic for the left-leaning The Guardian, has recently argued that the musical during the 1980s was ‘the most potentially profitable of all theatrical forms and the ultimate celebrant of individualism … [it] was Thatcherism in action’.Footnote ¹⁹ Certainly Lloyd Webber’s string of successful shows in the 1980s could be seen (and was seen by Thatcher) as triumphant exemplars of her free market philosophy.Footnote ²⁰

The tabloid press in England, which largely leaned right during this period and had a readership that included precisely the demographic reviled by Feingold, turned the composer and his new wife Sarah Brightman into household names.Footnote ²¹ Numerous articles were published about the Phantom Michael Crawford’s elaborate makeup, and the Daily Express offered promotions for tickets and holiday packages to the show. The same paper was protective of Lloyd Webber in advance of the Broadway premiere of Phantom, running an article that pilloried New York Times critic Frank Rich, ‘What Makes Rich Such a Bitch?’Footnote ²² As Phantom racked up record sales on Broadway, the tabloids described ‘How the Brits Keep Broadway in Business’, with dollar signs prefacing each subheading.Footnote ²³ The Daily Mail’s Jack Tinker also jumped on the pro-Lloyd Webber bandwagon, calling Phantom ‘a triumphant reworking of this vintage spine-tingling melodrama’.Footnote ²⁴

Likewise, the Conservative broadsheet papers were cheerleaders for Lloyd Webber and his commercial interests. Although Irving Wardle for the centre-right The Times criticised Phantom’s book and lyrics, elsewhere the paper enthusiastically reported on Lloyd Webber (one headline read ‘The young music master in his magnificent prime’).Footnote ²⁵ The Sunday Times ran a nationalistic article by George Perry in advance of Phantom’s Broadway premiere, gloatingly detailing the amount of money the musical had made in advance sales, even in the face of the expected nasty reviews from New York critics who ‘think Britain’s richest composer is slick and commercial, but not in the same league as Gershwin and Cole Porter’.Footnote ²⁶ The right-leaning Daily Telegraph proclaimed that Phantom was ‘unmitigated tosh – but of a high order’.Footnote ²⁷ The paper most closely aligned with the City, the Financial Times, was less equivocal in its opinion of Phantom: for them, the financial success of the show neatly aligned with the Thatcherite agenda of re-establishing national pride. Indeed, the Financial Times lavished admiring attention on the Phantom’s box office returns, its canny producer, Cameron Mackintosh, and the massive financial gains enjoyed by Lloyd Webber’s business concern, the Really Useful Group, which had had its first public stock offering the same year as Phantom’s debut.Footnote ²⁸ After the Broadway premiere, the Financial Times also defended the composer against the slings and arrows of Frank Rich, running an item about John Selwyn Gummer, the former chairman of the Conservative Party and friend of Lloyd Webber, who had travelled to New York to support the composer. In the piece, Gummer crowed, ‘Andrew’s done it. Britain’s done it’, before turning his attention to Rich: ‘They don’t want to give credit do they?’Footnote ²⁹ Perhaps not surprisingly, Michael Coveney, the Financial Times’s theatre critic, penned one of the most glowing notices of the musical in the British press, announcing that ‘this feast of a musical not only tells a great mythic story, it also restores a sense of experimental joy to the musical theatre and reveals Lloyd Webber to be as adept a romantic operatic composer as he has lately been (in his Requiem) a purveyor of full-blooded Orff-ian ecclesiastical permutations’.Footnote ³⁰

Capitalist aesthetics andPhantom ’s operatics

A ‘romantic operatic composer’ – as this statement suggests, the relationship between ‘high-class’ art and commercial entertainment also affected the reception of Phantom, an issue that has been well explored by Sternfeld, Snelson and others in recent studies.Footnote ³¹ But beyond the journalistic sniping, might we more specifically locate Phantom’s musical language within the frame of 1980s politics? Can we understand the work’s style in terms of what might be seen as specifically Thatcherite (or, for Americans, Reaganite) aesthetics?

During the 1970s in the UK, a clear distinction had emerged between the language deployed by Labour and the Conservatives. Some members of the Labour Party, in turning to the left, often deployed the thorny language of Marxist theory.Footnote ³² Although this contingent became increasingly disenfranchised over the course of the 1980s, the discourse of Marxism did not completely vanish until the emergence of Tony Blair and ‘New Labour’ in the 1990s.Footnote ³³ By contrast, Thatcher favoured a straightforward and plainspoken rhetorical style, and often lampooned the Marxist excesses of her opponents on the far left, purposely tarring Labour with the brush of radicalism.Footnote ³⁴ Indeed, the 1987 Conservative Party election broadcast for which Lloyd Webber composed music configured these rhetorical and political differences in sound. Images associated with the ‘disastrous’ results of Labour’s economic policies were accompanied by ominous, atonal music (surely designed to signify as both avant-garde and unsettling), while Lloyd Webber’s contribution – rhythmically energetic, repetitious and reassuringly tonal (goal-orientated) – accompanied Thatcher’s exploits.

In the US, Reagan was the ‘great communicator’ – a former Hollywood actor whose populist style garnered the support of many Northern blue-collar workers who had previously voted Democrat.Footnote ³⁵ As with Thatcher, Reagan’s ideology had a strong moral component. Both believed that the radicalism and promiscuity of the 1960s had done tremendous damage and advocated a return to traditional ways of life. Reagan expounded upon ‘family values’ while Thatcher desired to return to the hard-working ethos of a storied Victorian past, and to ‘the values when our country became great’.Footnote ³⁶ For both, the evocation of past times had moral as well as economic implications. In Thatcher’s ‘Sermon on the Mound’, her address to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, she outlined her belief that free market values were entirely consistent with the Judeo-Christian tradition: ‘it is not the creation of wealth that is wrong but the love of money for its own sake’.Footnote ³⁷

One could argue that these ‘traditional values’ are embedded in Phantom’s musical language, for this is a work that foregrounds a dialogue with the past. It features an operatic, lushly orchestrated, almost through-sung score, and music heavily outweighs spoken dialogue during its two-and-a-half hour running time. Lloyd Webber included ensemble numbers such as ‘Prima Donna’, a waltz that would sound at home in Die Fledermaus, and other moments that evoke Britten’s Peter Grimes, as a prosecutorial off-stage chorus hunts down the Phantom (‘Track Down This Murderer’). Although Lloyd Webber had used recurring motives in his musicals before, in Phantom this technique reached a new level of complexity.Footnote ³⁸ And the Phantom’s own opera, Don Juan Triumphant, also deploys a more difficult (although by no means atonal) idiom, one that musicologists have variously heard as being reminiscent of Dargomïzhsky or Stravinsky.Footnote ³⁹ Although one cannot claim that Lloyd Webber self-consciously chose to engage with past musical styles in a fit of Thatcherite-inspired nostalgia, one can plausibly hear Phantom as a commercial repackaging of the past, a synthesis of the twin Thatcherite values of traditionalism and capitalism.Footnote ⁴⁰

Yet the reception of the operatic elements of Lloyd Webber’s score did not divide neatly along political lines, with Conservative papers voicing support for Lloyd Webber’s use of a ‘traditional’ idiom and left-leaning publications being critical. Part of this is because of the fraught space that opera occupied within Phantom and within 1980s culture more generally, for in the populist landscape created by Reagan and Thatcher, cultural products associated with the intellegentsia were viewed with deep suspicion, and opera was believed by many, including Thatcher, to be an elitist form of entertainment.Footnote ⁴¹ According to her friend, the novelist Frederick Forsyth, ‘She didn’t hog any box at the Coliseum or the Royal Opera House … For the trendies, she was anathema. She was very middle-brow … She refused not to be one of the ordinary people.’Footnote ⁴² Indeed, Thatcher’s own aesthetic preferences and her devaluing of the opinion of ‘trendies’ or ‘elites’ deeply affected official policy. In the 1987–1988 annual report of the Arts Council, Lord Rees-Mogg echoed Thatcherite dogma: ‘We are coming to value the consumer’s judgement as highly as that of the official or expert.’Footnote ⁴³ In short, the value of cultural products was now more intensely predicated upon popularity and profitability. As one might expect, ‘elite’ art suffered. Reduced government funding in the UK meant that by 1987 the Royal Opera House (as well the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre) teetered on the edge of financial insolvency. As we have already seen, in the US, the stock market crash of 1987 had caused a wave of economic uncertainty and for a nation where corporate sponsorship had already largely replaced state subsidy of cultural institutions, many feared the worst, a sentiment particularly seen in Rich’s and Eaton’s reviews of Phantom.Footnote ⁴⁴

The Right’s frequent antipathy towards the ‘elites’ and their cultural products in the UK and the US was symptomatic of a particular strain of conservative ideology that emerged in the 1970s. According to the influential American conservative political theorist Irving Kristol, during the post-war era in the US (and Britain too, one might add) a ‘New Class’ had developed: college-educated people who worked in the media or in secondary school and university teaching. Many on the Right believed that this demographic was responsible for the ills of the 1960s and were power-hungry, anti-business and even unpatriotic. As Kristol put it, its members were ‘idealistic in the 1960s sense of the term, i.e., they are not much interested in money but are keenly interested in power. Power to shape our civilization, a power which in a capitalistic system is supposed to reside in the free market.’Footnote ⁴⁵

The Right’s characteristic pitting of capitalism (the democratic free flow of money) against the preoccupations of the ‘New Class’ (idealism, elitism) framed the debates over Phantom’s music in various ways. Some critics were inclined to view the musical’s engagement with opera as an argument for the genre’s continued importance.Footnote ⁴⁶ For instance, Barrymore Laurence Scherer, writing for the Metropolitan Opera Guild’s Opera News, lauded Lloyd Webber’s musical, as he believed it manifested the elite cultural values his magazine sought to preserve: ‘He has absorbed the eclectic nineteenth-century opera idiom and built upon it a personal one that is at once fresh and appropriate to the period setting, supporting the drama on a stream of melodic inspiration that Broadway and the opera would have thirsted for.’Footnote ⁴⁷ The New York Times’s music critic Bernard Holland, meanwhile, convened a panel of opera singers and classical composers – Ned Rorem, William Bolcom, Frederica von Stade and Beverly Sills – to discuss Phantom’s score. The two singers and Bolcom were receptive to Lloyd Webber’s charms. According to Sills, the operatic idiom of Phantom ‘may be more sophisticated’ than Oklahoma and South Pacific: ‘You really have to pay attention; there’s more here than special effects.’Footnote ⁴⁸ Bolcom, a composer with populist tendencies himself, believed the music perfectly matched the stage action and he appreciated Lloyd Webber’s prowess:Footnote ⁴⁹

Von Stade also praised the work’s popular appeal: she ‘adored’ the show, calling it ‘opera in its most accessible state’.Footnote ⁵¹

For those who enjoyed Phantom’s music, then, Lloyd Webber’s adoption of an operatic idiom was a comforting sign that ‘high’ culture could survive without government subsidy in Reagan/Thatcher’s unforgiving commercial marketplace, and that broad audiences might still derive pleasure from the music of a latter-day Puccini. Given von Stade’s claim that Phantom was ‘opera in its most accessible state’, we might even understand Phantom as a harbinger of the democritisation of opera and classical music that emerged in the early 1990s with the Three Tenors concerts and in Britain with the advent of Classic FM.Footnote ⁵²

For other critics, though, it was precisely Lloyd Webber’s commercialism (associated with the unbridled capitalism of the Reagan/Thatcher era) and the score’s accessibility and popular appeal that were so problematic.Footnote ⁵³ Ironically, these critics – even avowedly liberal ones such as Rich – seemed to believe that opera should remain an elite, non-commercial form of entertainment. This strain of argument is clearly evident in their reception of Phantom’s own opera parodies. Predictably, Rich in the New York Times found them dreadful (‘Mr Lloyd Webber’s tiresome collegiate jokes at the expense of such less than riotous targets as Meyerbeer’).Footnote ⁵⁴ In the Opera Quarterly, M. Owen Lee was similarly unimpressed by the ‘commercial jamboree’ he found in Phantom, and dismissed the ‘puerile’ operatic elements of the score:

Whatever Lloyd Webber’s intentions, these critics heard only a mockery of an ‘elite’ art form they esteemed.

Although many critics in the 1980s lambasted the profitability and accessibility of Lloyd Webber’s shows, from its inception musical theatre has been popular commercial entertainment with a fraught relationship to its operatic models. As the commercial viability of American-authored musicals waned during the Reagan/Thatcher era and as arts organisations increasingly found themselves scrambling for funding, megamusical blockbusters in the West End and on Broadway received increased scrutiny and press coverage, much of it focused on their profitability. Lloyd Webber’s Phantom, with its romantic, operatic musical aesthetic and stunning visual spectacle, confronted the commercial vs art dichotomy directly. Critics found different strategies for dealing with the uncomfortable place the show occupied in the musical theatre landscape, depending on their political, economic and artistic perspectives. For some, art and commerce were radically incompatible and Lloyd Webber’s lavish show reflected the worst elements of a new Gilded Age. For others, Lloyd Webber’s financial success was a source of national pride. For some, Lloyd Webber’s operatic aspirations elevated the genre of musical theatre, and showed a way forward for art in an economically hostile Reagan/Thatcher landscape. For others, his mixture of art and commerce offended all they held dear.

After the Phantom

In recent years, the critical debate about Lloyd Webber has shifted, for he is no longer the ‘young music master in his magnificent prime’ who reigned over the West End and Broadway in the 1980s. While he is still a successful businessman and now reality television mogul in Britain, where he casts his productions of American musical theatre standards such as The Sound of Music and The Wizard of Oz by audience vote, he has not had a new hit show for many years, despite numerous attempts.Footnote ⁵⁶ In the past four years, Lloyd Webber has mounted two new musicals in the West End, Love Never Dies (2010), a sequel to Phantom, and Stephen Ward (2013). These works remain haunted by the spectre of Phantom, in financial, artistic and critical terms.

Lloyd Webber’s new musicals have opened in a much-altered theatrical landscape from that of the 1980s.Footnote ⁵⁷ Considering the corporatisation and Disneyfication of Broadway and the West End, it seems clear that the Lloyd Webber (and Reagan/Thatcher) capitalist model of arts funding and theatre production has largely prevailed.Footnote ⁵⁸ Yet ironically, Lloyd Webber and his producing partner for Phantom, Cameron Mackintosh, are underdogs in the brave new world that they helped to create.Footnote ⁵⁹ Their breed of operatic megamusical has waned in popularity, and Disney blockbusters (The Lion King), profanity-filled American musical comedies (Book of Mormon) and jukebox musicals (Mamma Mia) now occupy a central place on Broadway and the West End. Charles Spencer for the conservative Daily Telegraph decried the debasement of current musical tastes, observing in his rave review for Love Never Dies that the show ‘seems like a relic of another age’.Footnote ⁶⁰

Lloyd Webber could not bottle lightning twice, in other words, as audience tastes and expectations had moved on. As Ben Brantley observed in his review of Love Never Dies for the New York Times: ‘“The Phantom of the Opera” was one of the first (and best) versions of that grandiose showbiz genre, the musical as amusement park ride.’ But compared to newer shows with much larger budgets, Love Never Dies in the West End failed to deliver spectacle: ‘The thrill rides, like much of the scenery here, are digital projections.’Footnote ⁶¹ Lloyd Webber recently acknowledged how these new economic realities shaped production values in an interview with the Evening Standard: ‘Now we live in a different age of blockbusters … The costs of doing musicals have risen absolutely hugely. I don’t think I’ve got enough money to do many more.’Footnote ⁶²

As Brantley’s comparison between Phantom and Love Never Dies suggested, Lloyd Webber’s sequel also had to compete against a show that has been accepted within the musical theatre canon. Rabid ‘phans’ and some critics viewed any meddling with a classic – even by the composer himself – with disdain. Before the show opened, internet wags had renamed the musical Paint Never Dries, a nasty epithet that was re-used by many reviewers who negatively compared the sequel to the original.Footnote ⁶³ Billington summarised the problem in his review for The Guardian: ‘I should say that I have no truck with those ghoulish groupies who’ve seen The Phantom of the Opera 852 times and regard any sequel as equivalent to painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa. No masterpiece has been besmirched.’Footnote ⁶⁴

Either Lloyd Webber does not fully understand the changed musical theatre landscape or, more likely, in his new works he actively resists the altered times.Footnote ⁶⁵ In Love Never Dies his music is not tailored to suit the tastes of audiences enamoured with Mamma Mia or Beauty and the Beast, or even his own Phantom of the Opera (although he does use thematic material from the original show throughout the sequel). For opera is not parodied in Love Never Dies as it was in Phantom – it is simply revered.Footnote ⁶⁶ The Phantom is now a successful impresario in Coney Island, NY, a place where his physical deformities are not a problem, and he wants Christine – now a famous diva – to come to America to sing for him in a deal similar to the one P.T. Barnum struck with Jenny Lind. In a plot twist that invites biographical speculation, the Phantom has been reduced to writing commercial nonsense for the vaudeville theatre, but yearns to return to operatic greatness. In the words of the Phantom: ‘Ten long years, / Wasting my time on smoke and noise’. The music itself (with the exception of one progressive rock number) largely rejects popular idioms. As Quentin Letts in the Daily Mail tabloid put it, ‘Lloyd Webber’s increasingly operatic music tries to lift us to a higher plane.’Footnote ⁶⁷ Although Lloyd Webber, ever the magpie, cleverly imitates vaudeville, these songs, while money-makers within the narrative of the show, are clearly meant to be understood as artistically inferior to opera (and the person who sings them is revealed to have been a prostitute – a revelation that can be read on both literal and metaphorical levels).

Lloyd Webber’s audience failed to embrace Love Never Dies. The show has closed in the West End, and the press has questioned whether the composer still has his finger on the pulse of popular taste. As Spencer in the Daily Telegraph lamented: ‘The show may ultimately prove too strange, too dark, too tormented to become a massive popular hit.’Footnote ⁶⁸ The evening I saw Love Never Dies in the West End, a sold-out crowd gave the show a standing ovation, but given the mixed critical response, its box office failure and subsequent closure, it is unclear if and when the show will reach Broadway, although Lloyd Webber is actively exploring that option.Footnote ⁶⁹

If we view Love Never Dies as trying to answer charges of earlier disrespect by treating opera seriously, then we might understand Lloyd Webber’s newest musical, Stephen Ward, as addressing criticisms of Lloyd Webber as a Tory hack and purveyor of crassly commercial entertainment. Indeed, the composer pointedly called Stephen Ward ‘the antithesis of The Phantom of the Opera’.Footnote ⁷⁰Stephen Ward makes no obvious attempt to be a commercial property, with its explicit sexual subject matter and acerbic skewering of moral hypocrisy.Footnote ⁷¹ It retells the story of the 1963 Profumo scandal: Stephen Ward, a well-connected osteopath, had introduced war secretary John Profumo to the 19-year-old model, Christine Keeler. Unfortunately, Keeler slept with Profumo and a Soviet naval attaché, a revelation that sparked anxieties about national security and eventually brought down Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government. Ward was accused and convicted of pimping, but committed suicide before he could begin his jail sentence. Lloyd Webber and his collaborators, Christopher Hampton and Don Black, took a particular political viewpoint in Stephen Ward – for them the osteopath was a scapegoat of the corrupt Establishment.Footnote ⁷² Lloyd Webber has also been involved in attempts to overturn Ward’s conviction.Footnote ⁷³

Reviewers noted the more abrasive tone of Stephen Ward, inevitably comparing it to the by now aged Phantom. Jill Lawless’s observation is typical: ‘Some of Lloyd Webber’s biggest hits, such as “The Phantom of the Opera” are full of lush romance. “Stephen Ward” is far spikier, almost a polemical musical.’Footnote ⁷⁴ The music, too, is less lush, less overtly operatic than Phantom or Love Never Dies. For the first time since the 1981 draft of Cats, Lloyd Webber tackled the orchestrations alone.Footnote ⁷⁵ They are, for the most part, quite sparse, often eschewing the swelling strings that are his trademark. The eclectic score includes 1960s pop pastiche (including reggae), a Kurt Weill-inspired waltz, and emotive ballads in a typical Lloyd Webber vein.Footnote ⁷⁶ With its small budget of £2.5 million, an orgy scene (accompanied by a deliciously perverted gloss on My Fair Lady’s ‘Ascot Gavotte’), full frontal nudity, harsh profanity, minimalist staging and distinctly British subject matter, it was unlikely that Stephen Ward would appeal to tourists, one of the major demographics currently filling theatres on Broadway and the West End.Footnote ⁷⁷ The tabloid press, with their populist bent, pinpointed Lloyd Webber’s problem. The Daily Mirror decreed, ‘this is no Phantom Of The Opera-style smash hit’Footnote ⁷⁸ and the Daily Express commented, ‘not even Andrew Lloyd Webber’s staunchest critic could accuse him of taking the easy route to the bank’.Footnote ⁷⁹

Lloyd Webber recently observed of his musicals: ‘Most of the subjects have been entirely uncommercial. And most of the shows have been entirely uncommercial … I haven’t had a hit in 20 years. I’ve written six musicals in that time. I’m resigned now to the fact that anything I do probably nobody is going to like.’Footnote ⁸⁰ As Stephen Ward closed after only four months on the West End, Lloyd Webber may be right. Michael Billington echoed the opinions of many reviewers of Stephen Ward when he stated, ‘Lloyd Webber’s great gift is for exploring … thwarted desire … we feel that this story of the breaking of a social butterfly on a wheel needs a melodic astringency that is not exactly Lloyd Webber’s forte.’Footnote ⁸¹ By contrast, in The Phantom of Opera, this characterisation of the composer’s idiom was perfectly aligned with his subject matter and popular taste: even the potentially ‘uncommercial’ subject of a deformed composer and his unrequited love for an opera singer made money hand over fist.

As we have seen, it was precisely Lloyd Webber’s financial success that caused critics in the 1980s to locate Phantom within debates about government funding and the increased commercialisation of the arts. That such rhetoric no longer pervades responses to Lloyd Webber indicates he no longer provokes the same set of anxieties (because he is no longer so commercially viable), and, more broadly, that the aggressive brand of capitalism that emerged in the 1980s with Thatcher and Reagan has largely triumphed. Twenty-eight years on, Phantom has entered the canon as ‘one of the first (and best) versions of that grandiose showbiz genre, the musical as amusement park ride’.Footnote ⁸² Although the critical response to Lloyd Webber has shifted and changed, the centrality of Phantom within the discourse has not. Both Lloyd Webber and his critics cannot let Phantom go. As these recent skirmishes indicate, the composer and his reviewers continue to renegotiate and reframe their very complicated relationship with his most famous work and with each other.