If Broadway composers were stocks, blue-chip Robert Lopez would have split several times over. Andrew Lloyd Webber, on the other hand, is on a downward trajectory. Having won Tony Awards for “Avenue Q” and “The Book of Mormon,” Lopez may well win an Oscar on Sunday night for the song “Let It Go” from the Disney animated blockbuster “Frozen.” The soundtrack of the film’s score, which he co-wrote with his wife, Kristen Anderson-Lopez, has been riding the top of the charts with more than one million copies sold and the movie itself is nearing a billion dollars in worldwide grosses. The film has been so successful that Disney has put it on the fast track to be adapted into a Broadway musical.
At only 39, Lopez is already one of the most successful Broadway composers in history and an Oscar win will grant him admission into one of the most exclusive clubs in the world — the EGOT — reserved for those entertainers who’ve managed to win competitively an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony. (If he wins, he’ll be 12th on a list of luminaries that includes director Mike Nichols, producer Scott Rudin, comic Mel Brooks, actors Audrey Hepburn and Rita Moreno, and composers Richard Rodgers and Marvin Hamlisch.) Lopez and his wife are currently working on a new Disney musical, “Up Here,” with director Alex Timbers, which has been described as a romantic comedy along the lines of “Annie Hall meets Cirque du Soleil.”
Such are the fickle fortunes of the theater that Lopez is as hot as his predecessor Andrew Lloyd Webber has been, well, frozen. The titan who once could do no wrong — “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,” “Jesus Christ Superstar,” “Evita,” “Cats,” and, of course, “Phantom of the Opera” — can’t seem to do anything right lately. No need to cry for him, of course. “Phantom” alone has grossed $5.6 billion at last count and is in its 26th year on Broadway. But that has been the last U.S. hit for Lord Lloyd Webber. While “Sunset Boulevard” was a success in the early ’90s in London’s West End, the $13 million musical failed to recoup on Broadway even after winning the Tony Award for Best Musical and running for more than two years. His line of recent failures — including “Love Never Dies,” the sequel to “Phantom of the Opera” — has now been joined by “Stephen Ward,” his West End musical about the notorious call-girl scandal of the early ’60s that helped to bring down the British government of Harold Macmillan. It closed recently after a four-month run, the shortest of any of his musicals in his 40 years in the commercial arena. Still, Lloyd Webber is to be praised for choosing to take on difficult subject matter, whether it be the wife of a fascist dictator (“Evita”), religious sectarianism in Ireland as viewed through the lens of soccer (“The Beautiful Game”), or the injustice done to a political pawn (“Stephen Ward”). Lloyd Webber recently wrote in a letter to the London Telegraph that to think only of commercial considerations is to invite “catastrophe.”
He added, “If money was the only goal, would I have embarked on a musical that was inspired by an anthology of poems by a dead poet, was directed by a commercially untried director… was to open with most of its investment missing and… featured human beings dressed as cats?” That musical, “Cats,” ran for 21 years and made buckets of money for its investors. Talk about your wildcat strike!
