Popular sounds

Andrew Lloyd Webber jokes that he has mixed feelings about becoming the recipient of a Kennedy Center Honor this weekend.

"I'm delighted, absolutely delighted," he says. "I'm overjoyed. It means a lot to have an American honor. Obviously, the British ones I've sort of had." (The world's most popular theater composer was made Baron Lloyd-Webber in 1997.)

But he adds, "You're always worried when you receive something like this that your career's over."

One hopes Lord Lloyd-Webber is joking.

He's speaking by phone from Las Vegas, where his biggest success, "The Phantom of the Opera," was edited into "Phantom: The Las Vegas Spectacular" in a $40-million, custom-built theater in the Venetian earlier this year.

His London revival of "The Sound of Music" opened just over two weeks ago to both critical and public acclaim.

Even someone as successful as Mr. Lloyd Webber, it seems, can't help but look to the past.

"I know I will never have anything in my career that's as big as 'Phantom.' When something like that happens, it's a phenomenon," he says. "Frankly, 'The Sound of Music' in London is the biggest thing since 'Phantom.' "

Luckily, the composer has neither rested on his laurels nor given up trying to do something new.

"I don't think, I just enjoy writing," he says. "Everyone's got to be realistic." Even if he had another huge hit, he notes, "I wouldn't see it run as long as 'Phantom.' "

"Phantom," which premiered in 1988, is the highest-grossing entertainment event of all time and the longest-running show on Broadway. The second-longest-running show is also an Andrew Lloyd Webber creation: 1981's "Cats," based on a poem cycle by T.S. Eliot.

He's composed two film scores, a song cycle, a set of variations and a Requiem Mass dedicated to his father, the composer William Lloyd Webber. But it's his 13 musicals -- including such collaborations with lyricist Tim Rice as "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat," "Jesus Christ Superstar" and "Evita" -- for which he's best known.

"Ever since I was a child, I've always been in love with musical theater," he recalls. "My generation, on the whole, certainly in Britain, wasn't very interested in musicals. But I was." He credits his start to being lucky enough to meet some of the greats, including "Sound of Music" composer Richard Rodgers.

But perhaps it was his embrace of all genres of music that made Mr. Lloyd Webber such an original. "I was also interested in what was going on in contemporary music at the time, things like the Beatles," he says. "It never seemed to me that there was any problem bringing more contemporary music into the musical theater. It seemed a very good thing."

Changing the musical grammar of musical theater was never something "purposeful," Mr. Lloyd Webber says. "In the end, for something to work in theater, it has to be story driven," he explains. "That's the most important thing. You have to have the right idiom for the story you're going to set."

Of course, great success often breeds resentment -- and perhaps it has played its part in keeping Mr. Lloyd Webber from being taken as seriously by critics as he might have been.

When asked if his next project will be an opera or a musical, he responds, "What's the difference? Is 'Phantom of the Opera' an opera? I never really want to get into that."

"I think I have" written operas, he says. "It just so happens they've been in the commercial theater. Words don't mean anything. At the end of the day, an awful lot of people have considered the things that I've done to be operatic. They are, really. Most of my pieces have been through-composed."

Mr. Lloyd Webber might consider his biggest success to be behind him, but when asked about the highlights of a long career, he points to something he just finished. After talks broke down with American actress Scarlett Johansson, he found the lead for his "Sound of Music" revival through a BBC reality program -- a surprise hit -- called "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?" The winner, Connie Fisher, has been getting rave reviews as Maria on the London stage.

Mr. Lloyd Webber says he's looking forward to writing again after producing "The Sound of Music" and overseeing a London revival of "Evita" this year. (He talks very quickly, perhaps reflecting a particularly prolific career.) His next project is an adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov's mystical novel "The Master and Margarita."

"Most people think I'm completely off my head," he laughs about the project.

"The worse the idea in theory, the better it is," he proposes. After all, he asks, "Who would have thought a musical about an Argentine dictator's wife would be so successful?"

His sometime lyricist Mr. Rice, he adds, recently agreed that, conversely, "the moment you do something on paper that sounds commercial, it's utterly doomed to failure."

Clearly, "commercial" is not the first word one would think to associate with a musical based on an avant-garde supernatural Russian novel from the early Soviet era. "You have a naked girl flying over Moscow," Mr. Lloyd Webber notes. "It's just very, very wildly surreal and different."

Sort of like a musical based on a difficult poet's work about felines or a rock opera about Judas and Jesus. Leave it to Andrew Lloyd Webber to popularize the seemingly unpopularizable.