New Poll: What's Your Favorite Andrew Lloyd Webber Musical?

In honor of this morning's PHANTOM announcement...

^ I'd pick Starlight Express over Aspects of Love or Song and Dance. Damn "Starlight Sequence" gets me every time.

i love SONG AND DANCE...at least the SONG 1st act anyway...it gave BERNEDETTE PETERS 2 great songs to sing: the UNEXPECTED SONG and TELL ME ON A SUNDAY...i also love the two songs from SUNSET BLVD:...WITH ONE LOOK, and AS IF WE NEVER SAID GOODBYE...but for over-all show EVITA...I saw it the very first week of production in San Francisco, before it went to LA and then NYC, and also the 10th week of the SF production, and was able to see it grow into the major hit that it became once it hit Broadway...it will always be ranked high in my book.

Unexpected Song was in the London production. Where did you get the idea it wasn't???!!!

By the way, I'd have picked either Bombay Dreams or The Woman in White...but I guess I'm going to go with Sunset. But I LOVE Evita equally. And Song & Dance was groundbreaking when it opened, I'm also a fan of The Beautiful Game, so I love most of his work.

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Updated On: 7/2/11 at 01:03 PM

'Unexpected Song' was in the London Song & Dance...eventually. When the show opened a new song (since the 'Tell Me On A Sunday' LP) 'The Last Man In My Life' featured at that point in the song cycle. The melody that became 'Unexpected Song' featured in Dance/'Variations', and with the lyric 'When You Want To Fall In Love' at the end of both Acts. That's the way the OLC recording with Marti Webb runs. I'm not sure when 'Last Man...' was taken out and 'Unexpected Song' put in, but it was there when Sarah Brightman performed it for a short run and TV performance. There are some great melodies elsewhere in Variations that beg to have lyrics set to them, but I kind of like that they've been left as they are.

For me Evita is the ALW favourite, followed by Sunset Boulevard, and JCS. I surprised myself recently by listening to 'Cats' for the first time in about 15 years; it's a production that became more broad and obvious over the years, but with its initial companies in London and NY it seemed great (I saw the OLC a few months into the run); so far from the 'McDonalds musical' that its unexpected success and megabucks receipts led it to being labelled.

Aspects of Love, Far and away.

The song lists for the London vs. the Broadway productions here leave out "Unexpected Song" in the London list.

I gather it was not in at the London opening and it's not listed on the London CD.

Thanks for giving us the skinny, Jimbob2.
Song lists, Song & Dance

^Yay!

Unexpected Song was, I think, written FOR Sarah Brightman so it never, in it's recognised form, featured in the West End production of Song & Dance. The tune is one of ALW's Paganini
Variations (which form the score for the dance section of the show) and it was indeed used for "When You Want To Fall In Love" which came towards the end of the second half of the London version as a way of tying the two halfs together, and also providing Marti Webb and her successors (Gemma Craven, Lulu, Carol Nielsson and Liz Robertson) with something to do in the Dance section. Unlike the Broadway version, which benefitted from the reimagining of Richard Maltby Jr, the protagonist of the first half didn't have a name, and the second half had no organic connection with the second (I think I'm correct in thinking that the B'way "dance" section tells the story of what happened to cowboy Joe after he split from the Emma of "song"!)

The filmed, and subsequently recorded, version of Song & Dance that features Brightman and also Wayne Sleep was taped in front of an invited audience at London's Palace Theatre the week after the West End production had closed, and this was the first time that Unexpected Song was performed in public. As one of the best songs in the score it was of course retained for Bernadette Peters in the B'way version.

When the "song" section was revived in London a couple of years ago, under it's original title of "Tell Me On A Sunday" with Denise Van Outen, Unexpected Song was still part of the score. However, when DVO left and Marti Webb returned to her original role, U/Song was cut and "The Last Man In My Life" was back in.

Not to mention that the melody, that of "Variation 5", was taken from "Jeeves", with only a few minor changes.

EVITA is his only show I can listen to straight through.

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I vote Woman in White...oh wait.

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I saw ASPECTS OF LOVE in London and on Broadway with the brilliant original cast! I loved the musical score and thought the play had a very interesting subject ( I have read the novella by David Garnett, from the bohemian Bloomsbury Group in London which included Virginia Woolf, on which the show was faithfully based). Many years later, it was re-staged here in Manila, with minimal props and just a two-piano accompaniment, and the musical score still sounded glorious and the characters continued to intrigue!

Updated On: 7/7/11 at 06:23 PM