Andrew Lloyd Webber on the creative process behind his acclaimed musicals

Amna Nawaz:

Well, one of the biggest hits on Broadway right now is a new version of "Cats," the legendary musical based on T.S. Eliot's poetry about a tribe of felines called Jellicles.

It's an imaginary name, now reimagined in "Cats: The Jellicle Ball," and critical acclaim has followed. The musical received nine Tony Award nominations and won three.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown took in the show talked to composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, who created it and so much more, for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Jeffrey Brown:

The high energy spectacle is certainly still there. And the songs get their moments. The words and characters are still based on a cycle of poems originally written for children by renowned poet T.S. Eliot.

But in some important ways, this is a new "Cats." And the man who wrote the music and started it all back in the late 1970s, Andrew Lloyd Webber, sees something very exciting.

Andrew Lloyd Webber, Composer:

I can see a "Cats" that is not just reimagined, which it is. It's not just a revival, but for some reason, I think it gets closer to the heart of Eliot's writing than any version of it that I have seen before, any other.

Jeffrey Brown:

"Cats: The Jellicle Ball" gets there in an unexpected way. No more cats in a London junkyard. Instead, directors Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch have set the action in New York's queer ballroom scene, where contestants in and out of drag and never far from a history of oppression and ostracization sing and dance, competing and flaunting their styles and personalities, celebrating their culture.

Andrew Lloyd Webber:

It sort of feels organically right.

Jeffrey Brown:

Because it reaches into these kind of differences in humanity.

Andrew Lloyd Webber:

I think it does. I think it touches on something which is -- it's very hard to define, but it's very rare when it happens, and I do think that this production has done that.

Jeffrey Brown:

Now 78, Lloyd Webber knows something of making theater magic. In the late 1960s and early 70s, working with lyricist Tim Rice, he composed the music for "Jesus Christ Superstar" and "Evita."

But as he told me outside the theater where "The Jellicle Ball" is playing, when he first dreamed up the idea of a kind of musical review featuring singing cats, he was met with derision.

Andrew Lloyd Webber:

Suddenly, your back is to the wall and everybody says, this is the most disastrous idea. Nobody should ever be doing this.

Jeffrey Brown:

Is that what people were saying to you at the beginning?

Andrew Lloyd Webber:

Yes. I mean, it opened with some of the investment missing, and I had to get a second mortgage on my house to pay for the production costs.

Jeffrey Brown:

Suffice it to say he was able to pay off his mortgage. "Cats" was a cultural phenomenon, beloved, parodied, running on Broadway for nearly 18 years, a record later surpassed by another Lloyd Webber megahit, "Phantom of the Opera," which opened on Broadway in 1988 and ran a remarkable 35 years.

Across the street from the theater at Broadway's Sardi's Restaurant, we talked about the art and craft of musical theater, including advice from famed director Hal Prince.

Do you work thinking about the entire show from the beginning, or are you thinking about individual songs?

Andrew Lloyd Webber:

You have to think of the entire show. I have learned the hard way that a great story is what you need. If the story has for some reason not been quite right, then no amount of music, no matter how good, will really, really make it a great evening or even save a show.

Sometimes, a very good story can carry a not-so-good score, but I have never found it the other way around.

Jeffrey Brown:

Does the same thing apply to individual songs? I mean, do you know you have got a great song or is it only great within the context of hearing it within the production?

Andrew Lloyd Webber:

Well, I would go so fast to say some of the greatest songs ever written for musical theater, we wouldn't know if they had been in shows that hadn't worked. It comes back to the fact that so many factors in musicals, if -- I always remember that one of the things that Hal Prince said to me when I was very young.

He wrote to me when I'd had a big flop musical in London to sing, I'd keep some of those tunes for something else, but he said: "You can't listen to a musical if you can't look at it." And, by that, he meant that the production designer's got to be right. Every aspect has got to be right for a show to really click.

Jeffrey Brown:

Knighted and later bestowed with a life peerage -- he's Lord Lloyd Webber -- he wrote an anthem, "Make a Joyful Noise," for the 2023 coronation of King Charles and has composed more than 20 musicals in all.

He's seen plenty of misses among the hits, taken his share of critical punches and kept working.

What about when there have been failures? How have you dealt with it? What about when there has been critical negative?

Andrew Lloyd Webber:

Well, you move on. You move on. And you also know that if the thing's actually any good, it'll resurface again in some way. Or if it's not, or if the story's not quite right, then it probably won't.

Jeffrey Brown:

In fact, he's lately seeing something of a renaissance of earlier works presented by a new generation of directors, including a new version of "Sunset Boulevard," originally on Broadway in the '90s, and now "Cats: The Jellicle Ball."

Andrew Lloyd Webber:

A lot of things have come together at the same time.

Jeffrey Brown:

But does that surprise you that this is happening?

Andrew Lloyd Webber:

I always feel that the shows, if they're any good, would stand the test of time. I think for me, now, all these years later, seeing it as "The Jellicle Ball," it's incredibly moving now, because they are real people as cats.

And the fact that, for example, 19 of them had never been on Broadway before, all these things, somehow there's a kind of raw quality, which is cats are street things, aren't they?

Jeffrey Brown:

So are you surprised all these years later at how many times you -- it all has come together for you?

Andrew Lloyd Webber:

Well, I'm very lucky. I mean, I have...

Jeffrey Brown:

Is that how it feels, lucky?

Andrew Lloyd Webber:

I do feel that, because I feel that you're very lucky in life if you know what you want to do. You're incredibly lucky if you succeed in doing what you want to do and you can make a living out of it. But if you can have the kind of career that I have had doing the one thing that I really enjoy, I mean, in a way, I can't do anything other than say I'm the luckiest man alive.

Jeffrey Brown:

Hardly slowing down, he has several new projects in the works. In addition, a highly acclaimed new production of "Evita" comes to Broadway next year.

As for "Cats" and its more than nine lives, "The Jellicle Ball" has been extended at least into next January.

For the "PBS News Hour," I'm Jeffrey Brown on Broadway.