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But not even Evita's success could patch over the growing rift between composer and lyricist, and so they parted professional company. "I'm not as interested in working for the sake of working," said Rice. "Andrew wants to be in the center of the musical-theater world all the time." Since the breakup, Rice has had a modest London hit with his Plantagenet saga Blondel and a major triumph in Chess, a cynical look at a championship chess match between a Soviet and an American that boasts a brilliant score by Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson, two members of the rock group ABBA. It is scheduled for a Broadway opening in April. In 1986 he reunited briefly with his former partner on a 30-minute private entertainment called Cricket for Queen Elizabeth's 60th birthday.
Lloyd Webber was on his own in his next project, an audacious attempt to set T. S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats to music. He turned to the innovative director Trevor Nunn and the brilliant designer John Napier to transform his plotless feline frolic into the spectacular Cats. Nunn found that the increasingly confident composer's sense of musical structure was "fantastically theatrical" and that what Lloyd Webber required of his collaborators was "ways in which his musical conception could be given a narrative or some character validation."
Cats marked another notable departure for Lloyd Webber. During rehearsals he fell in love with Brightman, who was gamboling as one of the show's kittens after a stint as lead singer of the sexy rock group Hot Gossip. In 1983 his twelve-year marriage ended in divorce, and he wed Brightman the following year. Custody of the two children, Imogen, now 10, and Nicholas, 8, went to their mother.
Lloyd Webber's next show, Starlight, which opened in London in 1984, was also directed by Nunn and designed by Napier, but this time the cooperative effort was less happy. What was conceived as a small collection of genre songs (pop, rock, mock-soul) for children, like Joseph, emerged instead as an overblown extravaganza that the composer, despite his initial enthusiasm for the production, later disowned. "It was a mistake to have put it anywhere near where it could be considered a Broadway musical," Lloyd Webber says, though he still defends it as a vehicle that brings to the theater people who do not ordinarily attend. Aside from the high-tech overkill of the staging, Lloyd Webber's heart was not really in the writing; he had come too far from ( Joseph to be able to recapture the spontaneous joy of the earlier piece. Although he expected several singles from Starlight to top the charts, none did. "That area of pop is probably no longer in my grasp," he admits today.
Phantom, then, is the gauntlet that Lloyd Webber has thrown down to challenge his critics to take him seriously. As lush and ornate as the Paris Opera in which it is set, Phantom is the composer's most elaborate, beguiling score. It is also the most frankly operatic, not only in its parodies of period works by such composers as Salieri and Meyerbeer but in the way it has been written. Like an opera, Phantom is almost entirely sung, and its characters are outfitted with sharply etched musical motifs. Except for the title song, there is no rock music in the score; instead it is a sweeping, romantic evocation of Belle Epoque Paris for coloratura soprano, lyric tenor and full-dress symphony orchestra.