Andrew Lloyd Webber: ‘You'll have to arrest us to stop us reopening theatres’

Andrew Lloyd Webber has pledged to reopen his theatres without social distancing later this month "come hell or high water" - and is prepared to be arrested for it.

In an exclusive interview with the Telegraph, the composer said his theatres were suffering “acute financial stress” that could only be alleviated by fully reopening, which he is willing to do even if the Government delays ending Covid-19 restrictions.

He said he may have to sell his six West End venues; had remortgaged his London home; and claimed he had seen scientific proof that coronavirus was not spread in theatres.

Cinderella, Lord Lloyd-Webber’s first new musical in six years, is reliant on selling tickets for all seats to recoup its £6million investment when previews begin on June 25, ahead of its world premiere three weeks later.

Lord Lloyd-Webber’s defiant stance puts him on a potential collision course with Boris Johnson, who is under pressure from scientists and senior ministers to resist removing all lockdown restrictions on June 21.

Downing Street is awaiting more Covid data later this week before making a decision.

Read our interview with Lord Lloyd-Webber below.

If the Government ignore their own science, we have the mother of all legal cases against them

Andrew Lloyd Webber, the world’s most successful composer of musicals, is putting the finishing touches to his first new West End show in five years. He should be preparing to celebrate − the first preview is just over two weeks away, with opening night set to follow on July 14 − instead, he’s spoiling for a fight.

The world premiere of his £6 million Cinderella depends on social distancing being lifted, in accordance with the Government’s “roadmap”, on June 21, a promised milestone that looks increasingly in doubt. Yet, Lloyd Webber tells me, his voice bristling with defiance, “We are going to open, come hell or high water”. What if the Government demands a postponement? “We will say: come to the theatre and arrest us.”

The buzz around Cinderella, Lloyd Webber’s 17th major musical since Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat in 1968, is intense, not least because its book is by Emerald Fennell, the Oscar-winning writer, director and producer of Promising Young Woman. Lloyd Webber has known 35-year-old Fennell, who also appeared as Camilla Parker Bowles in The Crown, since she was a child – he’s an old friend of her mother and father, the jeweller Theo Fennell.

He seized on her scenario, dashed off in 48 hours back in 2018, when she was still best known for playing Nurse Patsy in Call the Midwife. Her sparky treatment upends the familiar telling of the fairy tale, instead presenting, as Lloyd Webber puts it, “a world where people go to extreme lengths to make themselves beautiful, and our Cinderella looks at it and goes: this is weird”.

Lyrics by David Zippel stir stinging satire into the romance. “It’s about being obsessed with changing yourself and being like the Kardashians,” says Lloyd Webber. For Zippel, who also collaborated on The Woman in White in 2004, the creative process was “joyful… Andrew knew where he wanted it to go musically. There were times Emerald would write a scene and I would musicalise it – it was a team effort.”

According to Nikolai Foster, artistic director of Leicester’s Curve theatre, Lloyd Webber’s score marks “a return to A-game form… You’ve got rock anthems that remind you of the excitement of Jesus Christ Superstar, there are waltzes with nods to Rodgers and Hammerstein, and a mind-blowing Bohemian Rhapsody-inspired segment in the second half. It’s just what you want in a musical.”

We shall see. Or shall we? What should be the happy conclusion to a creative journey that began in earnest in 2018, before being diverted by the pandemic (Cinderella was originally due to open last August) is once again in question. No show of this scale, with a bank-busting ensemble of 34, is commercially viable while attendances remain capped at 50 per cent of capacity.

Despite the success of the vaccine rollout, the mood music has suddenly changed, and official caution is once again in the ascendant. Lloyd Webber questions the justification for this. “I’ve seen the science from the tests, don’t ask me how,” he says. “They all prove that theatres are completely safe, the virus is not carried there. If the Government ignore their own science, we have the mother of all legal cases against them. If Cinderella couldn’t open, we’d go, ‘Look, either we go to law about it or you’ll have to compensate us’.”

The stakes could hardly be higher. It costs Lloyd Webber £1 million a month just to keep his six theatres dark. He has remortgaged his London home – a townhouse in Belgravia, which he shares with his third wife, Madeleine, mother to three of his five children – and has reportedly borrowed more than £50 million, although he refuses to confirm that figure today. According to The Sunday Times Rich List his personal net worth has tumbled by £275 million in a year, to £525 million.

More challenges lie ahead. He has two other shows waiting in the wings: a new production of The Phantom of the Opera, the West End’s second longest-running show after Les Misérables, is set to take over the refurbished Her Majesty’s Theatre from July 27; while a revival of Joseph is also due at the Palladium that month. Then, as owner of the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, London’s oldest playhouse, he’s also poised to unveil a £60 million renovation in time for the UK stage premiere of Disney’s Frozen in August. All of which leaves Lloyd Webber in a position he describes as “acute financial stress. I don’t think [the Government] understand it. We’ve never taken any profit out of the theatres. I’ve always tried to put back in, which is why we’re in a muddle now because we never had a big reserve.”

When we meet, early in the morning, at his (again, newly refurbished) Gillian Lynne Theatre, Lloyd Webber’s usual, endearing air of eccentric distraction has given way to twitchiness. Having shown tireless leadership throughout the crisis, he seems a bit on edge. News has come in of a government adviser counselling delay to the roadmap and his office has just been contacted by Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden. “They’ve said can we have a call at 5pm? No! I’m doing the day job now. I will talk to him later.” The implication? Theatre is a serious business, not to be treated lightly.

For months, he has been a proactive but pliable collaborator with officialdom, on the inside track before news spilled out. Last year, he says, he “knew on February 2 from a source in Government that it was very likely there would be a lockdown. I got a coded message sent to me – ‘Happy birthday!’ – from someone at a meeting.” So Lloyd Webber gathered his staff and said: “‘OK, folks, we are going to have to close down, we have to get a doomsday scenario in place.’ And people said, ‘You’re off your trolley!’” Six weeks later, the Prime Minister advised the nation to “avoid pubs, clubs, theatres and other such social venues”, effectively bringing down the curtain on live entertainment.

Now, Lloyd Webber’s patience is being stretched to breaking point. “Unfortunately,” he says, “the Government regards theatre as a nice thing to have rather than a necessity.” Aside from Dowden, he has had no dealings with the top brass. “I don’t know Boris at all,” he remarks, with some acidity. “He has shown no interest in getting in touch.”

Doubt over the wisdom of opening the West End’s first major new musical in over a year is etched on his face. “I jumped the gun and all the bigger shows have followed suit. I just hope I’m right. I took what I thought was an informed decision on what I knew the Government wanted.” If the goalposts keep moving, his worst-case scenario – being forced to sell off his playhouses – will become a reality. “There is a real risk of that,” he says. “I will fight to the last ditch to prevent that happening but no one can deny that there are foreign buyers sniffing around who would quite love to have these [theatres] as trophy assets. They call them bottom-feeders, don’t they?”

The licence for the Gillian Lynne “is for a music venue til three in the morning. If I lost it there’d be nothing I could do to stop someone doing that.” He trails off, shudders. “In the end, it’s unthinkable.”

If Lloyd Webber’s London theatre empire crumbles, his life’s work, the shows, can hardly be dismantled, even if they are sometimes glibly and wrongly disparaged. He says he pays little heed to his detractors; negative reviews don’t deter him from continuing, nor do flattering appraisals persuade him that he’s a national treasure. “I never think about what my profile is. I like to get on and do what I want to do.” He notes, all the same, with some satisfaction that shows such as Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita “were not greatly considered at the time, at least by quite a number of people, and I think they’re now classics”.

His biggest flop of the past decade – Stephen Ward, about the socialite osteopath at the heart of the Profumo scandal – lasted just a few months in the winter of 2013-14. He concedes that it wasn’t up to scratch but pleads illness: “I was on morphine!” (After prostate cancer, he had a number of back operations.) He redeemed himself with School of Rock in 2015, an uproarious hit on both sides of the Atlantic.

That show, based on Richard Linklater’s 2003 film, was about Dewey Finn, a slacker who inveigles his way into a private school and turns prim classical music lessons into wild rock sessions. At the time, Lloyd Webber – the elder son of composer and organist William Lloyd Webber and violinist and pianist Jean (and, of course, elder brother of cellist Julian) – told me how he identified with Finn’s anti-establishment spirit, saying, “There was a day I was down to play piano at the school concert and I got up and said, ‘I’m changing the agenda, I want to play songs I’ve written’ – it was when the real me came out”. Whether it’s Finn, or the Phantom, or for that matter Cinderella, Judas, Norma Desmond, or even Evita, he’s drawn to outsiders.

Quite why, though, he hesitates to articulate. “I do relate to that misfit [Finn] and I love stories that involve somebody who doesn’t conform to convention but I never quite analyse it. It’s probably for others to say.” That’s a classic bit of Lloyd Webberian deflection, done with a brisk politesse as though there were much more important things to do than clamber onto the analyst’s couch.

He’s less circumspect about his true feelings on the debacle of the Cats film: “I wrote to the head of Universal and said, ‘You’ve got a car crash on your hands unless you get a grip on this thing’, a year before they made [it]. I didn’t even get a reply.”

By this point he is exiting the Gillian Lynne, and ushering me into his own personal chauffeur-driven London taxi, to pop round the corner to see the opulent goings-on at “The Lane”, as he calls the Theatre Royal, brightening as he walks, workmen parting at his approach, like the Red Sea before Moses; he’s so speedy it’s hard to keep up.

His biographer, Michael Coveney, finds that restlessness fascinating. “What is appealing is this permanent sense of insecurity and I don’t think it has ever changed. He’s the biggest thing in musical theatre since Ivor Novello, in fact there’s no one comparable but he’s never quite happy.”

Perhaps it’s worth taking him at face value too, though: a face that lights up when he talks about returning Drury Lane to its palatial former glory, or the way the front section of the Gillian Lynne auditorium will magically spin on a revolve, so that some of Cinderella can be performed in the round.

“I don’t know when or where or how I began to love musicals but I can’t remember a time when I didn’t,” he says, 73 going on seven. “I think of music all the time. I must have 30 to 40 melodies in my head that haven’t found a home yet.”

The prosaic, wondrous truth may be that Andrew Lloyd Webber is a once-in-a-generation gift to British theatre. It’s incumbent upon the Government to handle that gift with utmost care.

Cinderella is at the Gillian Lynne Theatre, London WC2 (andrewlloydwebberscinderella.com) from June 25