Lord, Baron and Rocker: Impresario Has a New Beat
At a rehearsal for his new Broadway musical, “School of Rock,” Andrew Lloyd Webber came striding down the aisle of the Winter Garden Theater in New York and onto its stage.
Surrounded by the young actors, who earlier were debating the meaning of the pop song “Pumped Up Kicks,” Mr. Lloyd Webber, the composer and musical-theater impresario, began scat- singing the frantic rhythm of Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata Number 7 — “da- da- da — da — da” — then asked them to guess its time signature.
“Is that in five?” asked Brandon Niederauer, a f loppy- haired, 12-year- old guitarist.
In a pedagogical voice, Mr. Lloyd Webber answered: “Seven.” He explained that the Prokofiev sonata was “the best work of 7/8 time ever — it’s pure rock.”
Mr. Lloyd Webber, 67, might seem an unlikely person to produce a musical, an adaptation of the 2003 Jack Black movie, about pent- up prep- schoolers who learn to stick it to the man from an unorthodox substitute teacher. The composer of “Cats,” “Evita” and “The Phantom of the Opera,” he is also, in his native Britain, a lord and a baron, with an estimated net worth of nearly $1 billion.
But Mr. Lloyd Webber, who helped legitimize rock musicals with “Jesus Christ Superstar” and “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,” is distinctively qualified to tell a tale of how guitar riffs and drumbeats can be a language of liberation.
As Mr. Lloyd Webber said of the $16 million show: “I haven’t written a score that’s going to change the Western world or the musical as we presently know it. But I just hope it’s fun.”
His father, William, was the director of the London College of Music, but he also sneaked young Andrew into a movie theater to see Elvis Presley’s “Jailhouse Rock.” “He really did believe there were only two kinds of music,” Mr. Lloyd Webber said. “Good and bad.”
Another formative influence was the British TV series “Oh Boy!,” where he watched emerging talents perform at London’s ramshackle Hackney Empire music hall. “What that did for me, at that impressionable age, was make theater and rock ’n’ roll indistinguishable,” Mr. Lloyd Webber said.
Years later, Mr. Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice recorded the original 1970 concept album for “Jesus Christ Superstar” — hailed, in its time, as revolutionary and denounced as sacrilegious.
The composition of “School of Rock” (in which Alex Brightman plays the Dewey Finn character) happened quickly, between June and December of 2014. Auditions for its school-aged characters were held at the start of this year.
Glenn Slater, the “School of Rock” lyricist, said he thought Mr. Lloyd Webber had some trouble at first deciding between writing in the mode of 1960s classic rock or 1970s heavy metal.
Mr. Slater said that he suggested to Mr. Lloyd Webber, “We should think of it like Meat Loaf or Jim Steinman: huge, operatic, over-thetop rock.”
At that point, Mr. Slater said, “He perked up and said, ‘Oh, I’ve worked with Jim Steinman.’” ( Together they wrote the musical “Whistle Down the Wind.”)
“He just said, ‘I know where to go with this,’” Mr. Slater recalled. “‘I know what I’m doing.’ ”