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The show was Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, written in 1967 for London's St. Paul's School, and it remains one of their most winning compositions. Originally a 25-minute piece for the school's younger boys, it was expanded for a performance at Central Hall, Westminster, where by chance it was heard by Derek Jewell, a music critic for the London Sunday Times. His unexpected rave led to a recording. Lloyd Webber's deft gift for parody (the Elvis homage of Pharaoh's Story) and melodic invention (Joseph's moving anthem Close Every Door) captured a wide audience. "Without realizing it," recalls Rice, "we were breaking new ground by forgetting about Rodgers and Hammerstein."
A false start with a show about Richard the Lion-Hearted sent Rice back to the Bible for inspiration, and he found it in the greatest story ever told. Jesus Christ Superstar was an instant hit, first as a single pop song, then as a double album, finally as a 1971 stage show in New York. It was not the first rock musical -- Galt MacDermot's Hair preceded it, as did the Who's "rock opera" Tommy -- but its impact was extraordinary. Lloyd Webber hated Director Tom O'Horgan's lurid, heavenzapoppin' staging, which featured a transvestite Herod, Judas in silver briefs and Christ emerging from a huge chalice clad in a $20,000 glittering robe. Christian as well as Jewish groups protested the show as offensive, but it ran for 720 performances before heading off to the West End and more than 20 other countries.
At about this time, Lloyd Webber married Sarah Tudor Hugill, whom he had met at a party when they were teenagers. As this partnership was formed, the other one in his life, with Rice, began to crack under the stress of Superstar. While Lloyd Webber felt embarrassed and humiliated by what he regarded as the "travesty" of the New York production, the more phlegmatic Rice was content to let it run its course and enjoy the success. A few months later, when Rice dropped out of a treatment of P.G. Wodehouse's unflappable butler, Jeeves, Lloyd Webber enlisted Playwright Alan Ayckbourn and put the show on the boards in Bristol. It eventually closed in London after 47 performances -- a failure that continues to rankle the fierce perfectionist.
The last Rice-Lloyd Webber show was also the best and the most daring: Evita. The authors were condemned for glorifying the right-wing Eva and Juan Peron, even though they intended the show as an allegory of the deteriorating political situation in England in the mid-'70s. Like Superstar, Evita was first released as a record. The task of getting it onstage devolved upon Director Prince; watching Prince put the show together turned out to be a most instructive lesson for Lloyd Webber. "When I came into Evita, there was no script, just a lot of numbers in a shape to tell a story," remembers Prince. "We moved some numbers around and made a straight line, added tension and all the rest. To me this was a strange process of coming up with a show, working from an album backward." Prince's starkly effective staging echoed Lloyd Webber's view of the music ("cold, cold, cold"). (