My piece ranking the musicals of Stephen Sondheim was very popular and it incited some great dialogue on how opinions differ depending on our experiences, emotions, and the criteria that draws us to musicals in the first place. Several of you wrote to me asking that I unleash my same ranking process on the musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber. I will gratefully oblige, though I must warn you that my opinions on Sir Andrew are more extreme than those I have for Sondheim. Webber tends to only be as good as his lyricist at the moment, an ever-changing array of collaborators who have come and gone. Stephen Ward aside (which I don't know enough about yet to weigh-in), here are my opinions of his work, from worst to the best.

Mark Robinson

Music That Makes Me Dance

There was a time, mostly in the early stages of my love affair with musical theatre, that Andrew Lloyd Webber was the perceived god of Broadway and the West End. It is true that, especially in the 1980s, that his musicals ran for a very long time. Being the good little musical theatre student I was, I used my allowance to buy Phantom of the Opera, Cats, Evita, Joseph, and Jesus Christ Superstar on cassette (yes...it was that long ago). What I found (adding Aspects of Love, Starlight Express, and Sunset Boulevard to my schema) was that most of these musicals only featured one or two songs that stuck with me (in a major way) and the rest was just background noise. I don't write this to bash Sir Andrew, but rather to explore my own experiences with his music. How could I be so transfixed by one or two songs and so unmoved by the rest? I will go, show-by-show, through the recordings I listened to regularly, and discuss my favorites and least-favorites.

Dec 11 High Flying, Adored: Ranking the Musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber

Mar 4 My Love-Hate Relationship with ALW

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