It would be an exaggeration to say that the last few years have seen Andrew Lloyd Webber become cool again, because that would imply that he was cool in the first place. Or is cool now. Still, it is my solemn duty to point out to you that something is definitely up.
Forty years ago, Webber was absurdly popular, Britain’s number one cultural export of the ’80s. It was an Ed Sheeran-ish popularity: an insanely prolific hitmaker, yes, but he never commanded a fraction of the critical adulation of, say, Stephen Sondheim or Kander & Ebb. Heck, his most acclaimed musicals were actually the ones about how awesome Jesus was. Nonetheless, there was a period of time where he could literally have made a musical about anything – rollerskating trains FFS – and it would immediately make more money than the GDP of a mid-sized European country.
His imperial phase ended somewhere around the mid-’90s, and while a new Andrew Lloyd Webber musical is always a big deal, there’s something depressing about the fact his biggest hit of the last 30 years is his boomertastic adaptation of School of Rock, which was pleasant but workmanlike, a musical any number of composers might have tackled. His last musical was Cinderella, which didn’t stick around for long and tanked on Broadway. And we mustn’t forget the screen adaptation of Cats – not so much a low point for cinema as it was for human civilisation.
The Webbernaissance: origins
However. However. The historical works of Andrew Lloyd Webber have gotten inexorably cooler over the last decade or so, whether he likes it or not. And he might not like it! In an interview with Variety last year the Baron uttered some low-level grumbles about Jamie Lloyd, the director so key to what I’m calling the Webbernaissance. He complained that last summer’s Lloyd-masterminded megahit Evita lacked coherence; he appeared to back away from reports that Lloyd would direct his next original musical, The Illusionist.
Not every recent Webber revival has been met with rapture. A disastrously misjudged 2023 production of 1989’s Aspects of Love essentially demonstrated that the musical – which sorry to say involves a lot of grooming – should probably have never been written.
But cool productions of Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals are now a thing, having not been a thing for the first 40 or so years of his career.
It was the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre’s grungy 2016 production of Jesus Christ Superstar that got the ball rolling, and it’s proved to be an enduring take, finally making it to the West End this summer. Where the original directors of Webber’s musicals had generally offered maximalist, bombastic, try-hard productions, Timothy Sheader’s moody, impressionistic OAT take was unapologetically stylish and fundamentally came from a position of believing JCS was a cool show in a way that previous directors had not obviously believed.
But it’s Jamie Lloyd who really kicked the Webbernaissance into overdrive. When it debuted, his summer 2019 Open Air Theatre revival of Evita was received as a sort of enjoyable spiritual sequel to the theatre’s Jesus Christ Superstar. But post-pandemic Lloyd would go on to become pretty much the biggest director in the world, and that was bound up in Webber: his swaggeringly innovative 2023 revival of Sunset Boulevard was the best show of the year; last summer’s turbocharged West End transfer of an audaciously reworked Evita was Gen Z catnip and so absurdly zeitgeisty that it actually made global headlines for the scene in which star Rachel Zegler performed ‘Don’t Cry for Me Argentina’ to the street outside. The biggest, hippest director on the planet really digs Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals.
Lloyd shouldn’t be seen as the be all and end all of the reappraisal of Webber’s work. Over in New York, a fresh, immersive, queered-up off-Broadway take on Cats entitled Cats: The Jellicle Ball scored superb notices back in 2024 and is just about to open on Broadway proper. An immersive off-Broadway take on Phantom of the Opera entitled Masquerade garnered warm reviews when it opened last autumn and is still going strong. And over here Paddington the Musical director Luke Sheppard helmed an immersive-ish revival – the actors skate past your head – of Starlight Express that was more family-friendly than arthouse but nonetheless pulled a contemporary hit out of this most ’80s of shows. This summer, the Open Air Theatre (again) will be presenting the first ever UK revival of Cats: maybe it’ll be edgy, maybe it won’t, but the key thing is it’s an actual new production, made for our times.
Why is the Webbernaissance actually happening?
Is it actually particularly wild that Webber’s very big old hits are getting put on again? On the one hand, obviously not. But then again, look at Webber’s peer Cameron Mackintosh. Although not a composer himself, superproducer Mackintosh owns the rights to a significant body of musical theatre works, including several that were massive hits at the same time Webber was scoring his massive hits. But Mackintosh doesn’t really allow new productions, or certainly not interesting ones. He is forever bringing back his repertoire of old classics with only the barest of changes: Oliver!, Miss Saigon, and the endless minor tweaks to Les Misérables. It is inconceivable Mackintosh would let an iconoclast like Jamie Lloyd loose on any of his greatest hits – he does not have that appetite for risk.
So here’s where it’s important to acknowledge that Andrew Lloyd Webber does actually have something to do with the Andrew Lloyd Webber revival.
For starters, he’s made shows people want to stage: on the whole Webber offers big bright shiny tunes and wildly varied, often engagingly eccentric subject matter that fires the imaginations of directors and their creative teams. So many musical composers try to offer insight into the (yawn) human condition or whatever: at his peak Webber knocked out musicals about an Argentinian dictator (Evita), cats (Cats), trains (Starlight Express), a sewer-dwelling lunatic who shoots fireballs (Phantom of the Opera) and a guy who grooms his ex-lover’s teenage daughter (Aspects of Love, which we don’t talk about).
And it needs to be pointed out that at the end of the day, the guy allowing all these interesting Andrew Lloyd Webber revivals is… Andrew Lloyd Webber. Lord knows he’s tried the Mackintosh ‘give it a polish then try and sell the same thing again’ route in the past, notably with a fractionally updated mid-’10s iteration of Cats that included a rapping Rum Tum Tugger. But whether because he was flattered by the interest of a younger generation or he simply realised what he’d done re the Rap Tum Tugger, he is the one who agreed to let interesting directors do interesting things to his work. There would be no Webbernaissance without Webber allowing it.
For well over a decade, the original productions of Cats, Starlight Express and Phantom of the Opera ran concurrently on the West End, with the eventual closure of each feeling like the fall of part of an ancient empire. Now there’s only Phantom left in the West End, having finally shut its doors on Broadway a couple of years back.
But what if the original, bombastic, ’80s productions of these shows weren’t keeping them alive but were holding them back, preserving them in synthy amber, stopping them from evolving? Perhaps like his hero Jesus, Andrew Lloyd Webber – or at least, his works – needed to die in order to be born again. Now we’re witnessing the Second Coming – and it’s surprisingly un-cringe.
Masquerade is now open at 218 W 57th, New York.
Cats: The Jellicle Ball opens at New York’s Broadhurst Theatre on Mar 18.
Jesus Christ Superstar is at the London Palladium, Jun 20-Sep 5.
Cats is at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, Jul 25-Sep 12. Buy tickets here.
The best new London theatre shows to book for in 2026.
Plus: Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre has announced its summer 2026 season.
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