Lloyd Webber: I did scold cast... for being ‘entitled’
ANDREW Lloyd Webber has admitted reminding the young cast members in his musical Cinderella that no one has a right to be on stage.
He was accused of ‘berating them down the phone from his Mallorca holiday home’ in a call which was broadcast over loudspeakers at the Gillian Lynne Theatre ahead of a performance last month.
The incident, first reported by Daily Mail columnist Baz Bamigboye, came after a scathing review by New York Post theatre critic Johnny Oleksinski, though the composer, 73, said it was not connected to the review.
He said: ‘What I was saying to everybody is – it’s nothing to do with the New York Post – the younger cast don’t really realise all the time [that] we are a service industry, and nobody has a right to be on the stage.
‘I don’t have a right to have my musicals in the theatre,’ he told Samira Ahmed on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row. ‘What we have to do is try to give the best performances possible. All I was saying is, that is what we have to do, and the cast we’ve got at Cinderella are really wonderful and are well capable of doing that.’
Some of the cast were said to have been left in tears by the call.
Oleksinski branded the production, written by Emerald Fennell, ‘joyless’ and insisted 30 minutes would need to be cut if it is to successfully transfer to Broadway.
Lord Lloyd-Webber said there are no plans to make huge changes, only minor tweaks to dialogue.
He said it ‘will play in a different configuration’ on Broadway owing to the fact the Gillian Lynne Theatre has a rotating stage.
Cinderella, played by Carrie Hope Fletcher, opened in June.
The following month the show was forced to close hours before the world premiere after a member of the cast tested positive for Covid. ‘When we had to cancel in July we lost overnight £700,000, and… whatever the Government thinks, if this all happened again certainly we would go under,’ he told The Stage newspaper.
Lord Lloyd-Webber has revealed that he lost more than £1million a month while his theatres were closed during lockdown.
‘Younger cast don’t seem to realise’