Dear Andrew Lloyd Webber

Dear Andrew Lloyd Webber,

Am I to address you as Sir, Lord, or just Andy?  I’m never sure how to greet people who have had so many symbolic accolades, such as yourself.  If I were to meet you, should I curtsy?  Or is that just too over the top?

I’d like to congratulate you on your contribution to modern musical theatre.  I find your musicals to be generally poignant and relevant to the general community.  I find the music of your productions to be so catchy, I can never get some of the tunes out of my head.  I admit, I’ve cussed your name sometimes when I’m trying to concentrate and all I can hear is the theme from Starlight Express.  Who’d have thought a musical about a toy train set coming to life could be the one of the longest running shows on the West End?  It’s great to see that you’ve always tackled really important issues. 

As a small child, when I first started listening to your musicals, I used to perform your songs at the top of my voice constantly, so much so that I was actually banned from singing any of your tunes in my house, my school and the local supermarket.

As an adolescent, I gained a newfound love of your work by making up alternative lyrics to the songs.  One example was those of ‘Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina’. 

Don’t cry for me, I’ve got tinea,

My feet are old and smelly

I ran so far to

Sit beside you.

I’ll take my shoes off,

Please keep your distance.

As teenage nerdish musically minded children, we found our lyric augmentation absolutely hilarious.

Looking back on lyrics like those now, I see why I haven’t pursued a career in writing Broadway Musicals, but rewriting your lyrics certainly provided some great times during school.

I imagine what it must have been like for yourself at school, listening to songs such as Puccini’s ‘Quello Ché taceta’ from ‘La fanciulla Del West’ and thinking about alternative lyrics for them.  Unlike us, as suburban Australian schoolkids who found enough artistic inspiration with toilet humour and songs about feet, you thought it apt to adapt songs into musicals based on other people’s books.  I went to the Phantom of The Opera in Melbourne in 1993 and still have nightmares about the falling Chandelier, but I am so impressed that you managed to adapt such a lovely tune and make it so haunting.

I was thinking perhaps of some other Classical pieces which you might consider turning into a musical.

I thought about Mozart’s ‘A Little Night Music’, perhaps you could coin some lyrics and write a musical about the Taliban.  I know, that sounds absolutely ridiculous, but surely people may have thought that about turning the theme from Mendellsohn’s Violin Concerto into a song sung by a Mary Magdalene in Jesus Christ Superstar.  So, you never know, it may just work!

Remember Stevie Wonder’s ‘Sir Duke’?  Perhaps that would be a fantastic theme to a musical written about Stockbrokers in the 2008 Financial Crisis.  Hear me out, Andy, I can just imagine you saying ‘No, dear God, that shall never work’, but thirty years ago, if one were listening to Ravel’s ‘Bolero’, one would never suspect a song from a wistful cat would do so well, but look, it has!  I think you need to think outside the square a little.

When Ray Repp tried to sue you regarding the tune from his 1978 ‘hit’, ‘Till You’ for the title song of ‘The Phantom of the Opera’, I was glad that your mighty legal team quashed his silly little voice.  Ray Repp is famous for being a voice for the Catholic faith and his sooking and whingeing has done no favours for Catholocism in my mind.  I mean, who really was going to listen to that folky crap anyway, when we can be immersed in a story about a beautiful singer lurking around under a theatre with a hideous man in a mask?  No one, I think you’ll find the answer.

I find all the allegations of plagiarism a little harsh.  I remember many times waking up and thinking of the most brilliant tune in my sleep, writing down the notes, only to realise around 2pm that, in fact, someone had already written that tune and I had psychosomatically imagined that work as my own in my sleep.  Some of the tunes I had come up with in my sleep, which I later realised to be attributed to others include:

The Locomotion

Black or White

1812 Overture

Come As You Are

Carmina Burana

Bad Romance

The William Tell Theme

The last one I think was also attributed to it being the theme for the Pizza Hut ad as well, how could they have butchered such a lovely tune?  Why, I ask you Sir Lord Andy Lloyd Webber, why?

What I wanted to ask was with your work, do you set out to borrow tunes from other performances, or has that occurred subconsciously, or even coincidentally?  I thought you may have actually been a pioneer in sampling; if it’s good enough for Jay-Z, it’s good enough for Our Sir Lloyd Webber, you know what I’m sayin’ ALW?  Oops, sorry, I began speaking like Jay-Z for a moment, sorry.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to seeing ‘Love Never Dies’.  Can you send me some tickets to the Sydney season?  It’s on now, I think.

Many thanks,

Andy Leonard