GP: Andrew Lloyd Webber 50th Birthday Celebration






		On the Night of a Thousand Stars By Michael Coveney

The presentation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's fiftieth birthday concert, which took place on April 7, 1998, in the Royal Albert Hall in London, is the document of an amazing career in musical theater.

And of a famous night in the Royal Albert Hall, London, as stars gathered from all over the world on a fine spring evening to honor an outstanding talent and, quite literally, to sing his praises.



	Performers on stage at the Royal Albert Hall.

The crowds gathered all day around the great concert hall, which stands on the main drag opposite Kensington Gardens, official home of the late Princess Diana. Special guests included former Prime Minister John Major and his wife, Norma; Sir Tim Rice, Lloyd Webber's first, and most important, lyricist; the broadcaster Sir David Frost and his family; and an impressive cadre of stars from film, theater, and television.

Inside, the stars turned out in force to perform in the composer's honor: Antonio Banderas, Glenn Close, Donny Osmond, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, Bonnie Tyler, the pop group Boyzone, Elaine Paige, Michael Ball, Sarah Brightman, and the composer's brother Julian Lloyd Webber, to name a few. As these sorts of galas go, it was an exceptional evening, brilliantly staged by Steven Pimlott on a pair of scenic, interconnecting catwalks designed by Mark Thompson as black and white musical staves.



	Donny Osmond wows the crowd with a selection from "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat."

The band was arranged in full view under the energetically wielded, non-stop baton of musical director Michael Reed. The spectacle ranged from the heart rendingly simple -- Donny Osmond, as relaxed as Andy Williams, singing "Any Dream Will Do" with a chorus of seated children clutching colored balloons -- to the imposingly theatrical -- Antonio Banderas and Elaine Paige strutting sexily among a massed phalanx of mourning extras in a filmic recreation of "Evita."

At the party for the cast and their guests after the show, in a private room in the Hall, Antonio Banderas revealed that this evening marked his stage debut, and that he first wanted to go into show business after seeing "Jesus Christ Superstar" in Madrid in 1974.


	Another British stage debut is that of Glenn Close, who recreated her Broadway triumph as Norma Desmond in "Sunset Boulevard" in a glittering gold and black gown and toque, like some exotic, armor-plated armadillo.

Another splash of color among the black and white was provided by Andrew's brother Julian, the distinguished cello soloist, who in performance wore a red football jersey proclaiming his lifelong devotion to the Third Division soccer strugglers known as the team Leyton Orient.

Julian leapt on to the stage like a whirling dervish and ripped through the "Variations on a Theme of Paganini," which Andrew wrote as a result of a fraternal bet laid against the soccer team, Leyton Orient, being demoted at the end of one losing season. As it happened, Orient survived, and Andrew was obliged to write what turned out to be one of his most vivid and inspired pieces.



	Julian Lloyd Webber proudly wears his soccer jersey.


		When Andrew finally took the stage at the Albert Hall, he thanked Tim Rice, without whom, he said, he might never have gone this far, or, indeed, this way. "Musicals, whether small, medium, or big, are alive and well as long as someone wants to write one and someone wants to produce one.... When I started to do this, nobody believed in it at all. People said it was an old form and you had to be the Beatles or Elvis Presley." The evening was dedicated as a charity to the National Youth Music Theater, of which Lloyd Webber is chief sponsor. Andrew Lloyd Webber's career has been a fascinating attempt to marry new musical idioms with new sound technology, new ways to dream with old standards of artistry. None of his shows is set in the contemporary world, but for their audiences they strike contemporary chords. John Major declared the concert "an astonishing evening," and dubbed Lloyd Webber "the Puccini of the second half of the 20th century, who has composed more music that is loved by more people than by anyone else." In the still air of the Albert Hall, as the cheers and the encores faded away, Lloyd Webber sat quietly at the piano and played while a young girl sang. He pressed the keys as if his life depended on them. And he seemed to withdraw inside a private reverie as the years rolled back to a noisy London apartment where a very small boy with bright eyes and a fiery temper insisted on playing his own tunes instead of doing his assigned piano practice.

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