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Few people overhearing him would suspect it, but those barely audible hums are the stuff dream musicals are made of. Out of them, Lloyd Webber, 39, has spun a worldwide empire unmatched in the history of musical theater. With one exception, the ill-starred Jeeves of 1975, Lloyd Webber has scored an unbroken string of triumphs over the past 15 years. His most financially successful show, Cats, has had 19 productions in cities ranging from Budapest to Tokyo to Sydney to Stockholm; eleven of them are still running. Cats has racked up total box-office receipts of more than $425 million.
When Lloyd Webber's latest show, The Phantom of the Opera, opens on Broadway the week after next, he will have three hits playing simultaneously in both London and New York City. It is only the second time a composer has ever pulled off such a double hat trick. The first was in 1983, and, of course, it was Lloyd Webber who did it. In New York, Evita ran for almost four years; Cats is still selling out five years after its opening.
And now comes Phantom. Rarely has a show been so eagerly anticipated, and never has one enjoyed such a box-office buildup. Opening Jan. 26, it has already taken in an unprecedented $16 million in advance sales, $4 million more than the previous record holder, Les Miserables. On the day the Majestic Theater box office opened in November, buyers -- many of whom had queued up in the cold overnight -- snapped up $920,271 worth of tickets, easily breaking the one-day record of $477,275 set by Les Miz. As in London, where Phantom is the theatrical event of the season, seeing the show is an exercise in long- range planning. Want a pair of $50 orchestra seats for an evening performance? The first available dates are around Thanksgiving. With Phantom productions already scheduled for Vienna and Tokyo, and others on the way, this is one specter that should be haunting theaters for years to come.
To keep tabs on his burgeoning realm, Lloyd Webber is a man in almost perpetual motion. During the year between the London and New York openings of Phantom, he has circled the globe in his leased Hawker Siddeley 125 jet, making arrangements for new productions and spot-checking the quality level of old ones. "I have been all over the world until I hardly know what time of day it is," he says. It doesn't matter: the sun never sets on this new British empire.
Between trips, Lloyd Webber has overseen the continuing restoration of London's Palace Theater, a Victorian landmark that he bought for $2 million in 1983; expanded the dairy farm on Sydmonton Court, his estate in Hampshire, and planted 50,000 trees in an effort to reverse soil erosion; and with his wife, Soprano (and Phantom Star) Sarah Brightman, 27, acquired a nine-room duplex apartment on the 60th floor of Manhattan's Trump Tower, as well as a seaside villa in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat in the south of France. He has indulged his hobbies of collecting pre-Raphaelite art and 18th century English furniture, added to his cave of fine wines, and bought Sarah a bracelet with a jeweled snake head that used to belong to the Duchess of Windsor.