Like I said, standard irrational hatred.
Name one show that Webber did prior to The Woman in White that shows an actual lack of effort or quality control. He's had flops, granted, but even _Sondheim_ has had no shortage of flops, so that's not a very useful standard.
Okay, _maybe_ Starlight Express qualifies as Webber on autopilot, although songs like "Only He" and "There's Me" show that at least a little effort went into it. But Aspects of Love was a bad libretto with wonderful music, which describes most cult flops. Whistle Down the Wind was a weird but potentially interesting idea that stumbled in the execution. And The Beautiful Game was an ambitious and moving story with an uneven but sometimes lovely score that shuttered mostly because it wasn't what people expected from a Webber show. If he were just some crass commercial merchant who didn't care about quality, why would he have done that show in the first place? It certainly doesn't _look_ like anything that was potentially going to pay off.
That just leaves the Jeeves project. It's a disaster, I'll grant you, but you can tell, given the source material, why it looked like a good idea at the time (although I'll grant that his attempts to turn it into a hit after the fact seem motivated by little more than stubbornness. Hey, Sondheim spent ten years trying to turn the Bounce/Road Show franchise into a hit, so again, it happens to the best of them.)
And if you were actually suggesting that Webber's _hits_ are the result of a man who 'doesn't care about quality'...well, if we applied that to the production elements, it would be patently false even by theater-snob definitions of truth, so I'm assuming you're of the stripe who argue that Webber just makes spectacular theme-park shows with no compositional merit.
I don't know if you've ever had a conversation with a Webber fan that went beyond the name-calling phase, but pretty much all of us like the shows for their music. This isn't some evil conspiracy of liars paid off by Webber's production company trying to fool the world into thinking people actually like his music...we're telling the truth.
And if you're going to pull out the next standard argument your kind usually jump to and bring up the enormous amount of garbage that succeeds on the pop charts and start comparing Webber to Britney Spears, let me acquaint you with a little phenomenon known as 'the Test of Time'.
Yes, a lot of straight-up crap becomes a success as pop music, but the thing is, it usually doesn't last, and if it does, it's given the "Macarthur Park" treatment and reduced to camp status. That hasn't happened to "Memory", "Music of the Night" or any of Webber's other hits. Newsflash, sweetcheeks...it's been more than a generation since Phantom came out, and more than two since Superstar. If time was going to overrule the music and prove the snobs right about his inadequacy, _it would have happened by now_.
You want to personally hate Webber's shows in that black little theater-snob heart of yours, go ahead. I can't stop you, and frankly it's your loss. But pretending than those 'opinions' have any basis in the world outside your head or any relevance to any human beings that are not you is just making you look like you have your head up your ass. I don't care how many other people in your little theater-snob enclave you can find to agree with you, posterity has proved you wrong, and you don't get to change the rules for composers you don't like. In other words, kiss it.
And yes, I am aware of the irony of providing a blistering defense of Webber on a thread devoted to his worst show, but declining in quality late in your career is another thing that has happened to plenty of universally-acclaimed composers. Anyone remember Irving Berlin's 'Mr. President'?
I thought so.
Updated On: 9/24/14 at 02:40 AM
