Best ALW Shows?

I personally love Evita and Sunset Boulevard.

For me, his best scores are Sunset Boulevard, Evita and Phantom, with Sunset being his greatest achievement.

Thank you all so much! I'll definitely try to check some of these out!

Jesus Christ Superstar is by far his best, in my opinion. I also like Evita and School of Rock. Pretty much everything else is awful.

JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR is the only show I really enjoy. For me, ALW tends to be long-winded and repetitive. Even though it's definitely repetitive, I feel like SUPERSTAR moves at a faster clip than most of his other shows, and no one song feels overly long and tedious.

Joseph is like of one those guilty pleasures for me, because it's such a fun, silly, and quirky take on a what usually seen as gritty, dramatic tale, and it's use of multiple types of music is 1000% the best thing about it, my favorites being Country for "One More Angel", the Benjamin Calypso, and using 50's rock and roll for Elvis Pharaoh!

I really have never known if I'm in the minority, but School of Rock is an absolute JAM and I love it. I had such a blast when I saw it a year ago, and those kids are RIDICULOUS talented. SoR is a funny one, because it's doesn't follow the normal pattern of how ALW tends to write, so I many times forget it's actually his. It's the most traditional in terms of having a "book" as it has the most "book" of any musical he's ever written, which the biggest reason I forget it's his. It's also straight up rock music in the vein of "Superstar" which is also his, which I certainly hope you know is his already, but JCS is more dramatic in nature, while SoR is more fun and upbeat.

I did not come from a theatergoing family. When I was a teen Andrew Lloyd Webber's Jesus Christ Siperstar was on my own personal find and I became obsessed with it. I saw Joseph in Washington DC you back when it was still a shorter show with a male narrator.

I saw the very first performance of the vita on Broadway. Turns out the joke was on me because it was a matinee and Miss LuPone did not perform but I saw the alternate- Terri Klausner.

Then I discovered Sondheim and Sweeney Todd which left ALW is my new favorite Broadway composer. However at the Geffen Playhouse I saw his musical Jeeves or By Jeeves which was very charming and very atypical for his works. I would say definitely move to one of my favorite shows he's ever written.

I find that when an ALW show is designed and mounted in a good production, it's glorious theatre, but when his work is misdirected or misinterpreted, it's absolute hell to sit through.

My favorites of his would be Phantom (at the very top, no question), Evita, Sunset Boulevard, and School of Rock.

Still waiting for that production of Jesus Christ Superstar to sell me on the show, because every version I've seen has made me want to rip my eyes out.

Aspects of Love/Sunset Boulevard/Phantom of the Opera/Jesus Christ Superstar/Evita/Woman in White...I don't think there is any ALW show/musical score that I really, really disliked. I wasn't a great fan of the show CATS itself but he did compose some exciting music to the poems of T.Eliott, including his best commercial hit MEMORY.



But certainly, one of the saddest and most poignant shows was the retitled A BEAUTIFUL GAME ( now Boys in the Photograph). On the contrary, his Joseph /Coat is pure fun!

His collaborations with Tim Rice remain his best work - probably due to Rice's quirky lyrics and Webber's affinity for good rock opera. Evita and Jesus Christ Superstar are wonderful in the hands of the right directors and downright brilliant on record. After that, he stuck to his humorless, grand opera pastiche of lush poperetta and generally, with about 2 songs per score excepted, turned into predicatable, non-offensive mush. As is his wont, his better songs are reprised so much that you never know if they're really memeroble or just drilled into your brain.

That said, I absolute and without any irony adore the Broadway recording of Song and Dance - which suffers from what I write about above, but I don't care. "Unexpected Song" and "Tell Me On a Sunday" are gorgeous. I loved it so much I actually mounted and starred in a production for my high school senior project (it was a fundraiser for EC/BFA).

Updated On: 7/31/17 at 07:52 PM

Phantom, CATS, and Joseph are my favorites.

Evita and Phantom of the Opera are probably his best works. I'm not a huge ALW fan, but I still enjoy these two shows. Jesus Christ Superstar is good too, but I still find that it always leaves me cold.