In 1971 Andrew Lloyd Webber and his first wife, Sarah Hugill, were married. He was 23, she was just 18. The day after the wedding they set off for Bath to begin their honeymoon, though as they drove along the A4 he noticed she was crying. “The reality of what I had done truly hit me,” he recalls in his memoir. “I had taken a girl barely 18 straight out of school and propelled her away from her family into a new life that just happened to include being the wife of the composer of the first British musical to premiere on Broadway.”
Oh Andrew, you massive pillock. Just when you get the chance to show warmth and sensitivity, qualities for which you are not exactly famed, you have to make it all about you. In fairness, his lofty self-appraisal isn’t wide of the mark. Lloyd Webber’s successes are now well known: his musicals, which include Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, Starlight Express and Cats, have been staged the world over, and he is the only person to have equalled the record set by Rodgers and Hammerstein with four Broadway shows running concurrently. In his early 20s his star rose at warp speed, allowing him to purchase Sydmonton, a Tudor mansion on a large Hampshire estate, by the age of 25. But Lloyd Webber isn’t known for hiding his light under a bushel. As well as reinforcing his position as the leading light of musical theatre, Unmasked cements his status as king of the humblebrag.
He warms up early as he recollects building theatres out of play bricks as a young child, one of which had a revolving stage inspired by TV’s Sunday Night at the London Palladium, prompting the reflection: “I have to pinch myself every morning knowing that today I own the theatre that turned me on to theatre.” Few will be surprised to learn that he was a precocious child whose enthusiasm for music was matched by his love of architecture. He won a scholarship to Westminster school largely through his knowledge of castles on the Welsh borders (the bursar came from Clun). At 17 he went to Magdalen College, Oxford, to read history but blew his first year by spending too much time on music. No matter, since his career was already on its way. By this time he had met his first writing partner Tim Rice, with whom he wrote a “pop cantata” in 1968 that would form the basis of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
The original cantata was 22 minutes long; would that Lloyd Webber had spent the same amount of time telling us about it here. Instead the build-up to the Joseph LP runs to just under 40 pages, while the genesis and eventual staging of Jesus Christ Superstar gets nearly 70. Ice ages come and go as he moves on to his first megahit, Evita. While its inception and journey to the stage are diverting enough – the story about “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” topping the disco charts because DJs were using it to clear dance floors is a cracker – his breakdown of each song as it appeared on the album, specifically how it was conceived and its role in the narrative, is enough to make even the most ardent fan swear off musicals forever.
More curious is that the darker, more dramatic moments of his life are glossed over in just a few paragraphs. We learn that, in 1963, the commander of Westminster school’s cadet force ordered him, then 15, to Aldershot for a field trip. Lloyd Webber was “a paranoiac about the army ... I was terrified out of my skull” and reacted by taking an overdose of aspirin. “I can’t tell you if it was a cry for help or whether I meant it,” he reflects. And that is that.
Other personal matters, including his split from his first wife on account of his affair with Sarah Brightman, fly past at similarly breakneck speed. Instead, the making (and sometimes losing) of money is a running theme, and page after page is given over to business transactions, from wrangles over royalties to house buying to his purchase of London’s Palace theatre. Elsewhere, there are frantic venue searches, casting conundrums and endless breakups and makeups between Lloyd Webber and Rice, Trevor Nunn and Cameron Mackintosh.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Unmasked is that, at more than 500 pages, it only tells half its author’s story, ending with the first performance of The Phantom of the Opera in 1986. “I meant to cram my memoirs into one book but my verbosity got in the way,” he acknowledges unrepentantly in the final chapter. He’s not wrong. There are some juicy anecdotes here but the pacing is all over the place. Lloyd Webber may know a thing or two about theatrical narrative, but he’s yet to learn that, when telling his own story, less is definitely more.
• Unmasked by Andrew Lloyd Webber (Harper Collins, £20). To order a copy for £17, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
