For a man who’s made his fortune from writing musicals, Tim Rice is surprisingly sanguine about them. Now more than ever they keep the West End in rude health. But as far as the lyricist of
Evita,
The Lion King and
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat is concerned, the song-and-dance spectacular should be handled with care. “I went right off musical theatre for a while,” he says. “I thought, ‘I can’t see what people like in it’.” It’s an attitude that has not gone unnoticed by his most famous former collaborator. “Tim doesn’t really like musicals,” Andrew Lloyd Webber said in an interview last year, “he’s more cynical.”
Can this be true? It’s a bit like finding out that Roald Dahl hated kids. Or that Mr Kipling doesn’t take afternoon tea. Does the man who gave us Any Dream Will Do and Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina really not like musicals?
“Well, a lot of musicals are pretty awful,” says Rice, who turns 62 on Friday. “A good musical, yes, but I’m not obsessed. I don’t go to every musical that comes out, and a lot of them are pretty ghastly. But then a lot of everything is pretty ghastly, really. You might be surprised by some of the musicals I’ve never seen, and sometimes I think, ‘Oh this is just not for me,’ but a great musical, of course, I love those. I saw Spamalot and that’s great — although that’s more a comedy with music, like The Producers.”
In his autobiography, Oh, What a Circus, which covers his life up to the London opening of Evita in 1978, Rice concludes that the style of his three megahits with Lloyd Webber — “little or no spoken dialogue to confuse the non-English-speaking tourist” — accidentally helped to dumb down the musical. It’s a nasty thought for Rice, who relishes language enough to have been a regular guest on both Just a Minute and Countdown.
Since Evita, he argues, producers have been musicals’ prime movers where once it was the writers. And producers are geared to exploiting ideas that are already out there — hence the paucity of original ideas and the proliferation of spin-offs from books and films.
“Like Dirty Dancing,” he says with a sigh. “You think, ‘Why bother?’ Other than to make money. Now Dirty Dancing may be brilliant for all I know, but there’s not much excitement in it for me. The Lord of the Rings? There’s nothing I’d like to see less than a Lord of the Rings musical. It’s just: ‘What’s big? Let’s make a musical out of it’. And that’s a nightmarish attitude.”
Part of the problem with the British musical, he suggests, is that the last young writing team to break through was, well, Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber. “And that was in the Stone Age. There have been a lot of great shows, like Les Mis — but those guys are French! There are things like Mamma Mia! which are wonderful, but it’s a compilation show, written by Swedish chaps. We’ve got Billy Elliot — brilliant — written by Elton John. We’ve got Blood Brothers — brilliant — written by Willy Russell. These guys are all our age! Where is a single young team or young writer writing fresh new musicals that are successful? I can’t think of one.”
Sitting in the living room of his house in Barnes, south-west London, Rice is as urbane as you expect, a tall, heavy-shouldered man with a storyteller’s knack for making a monologue feel like a conversation. The room is a triumph of tasteful luxury. Thousands of LPs line one wall, impressive shelves of books line the opposite wall and original art is dotted around. Only the familiar Jack Vettriano print in the hall suggests the mundane — until you realise that it’s not actually a print at all.
If Rice feels comfortable with knocking the competition, it’s because he’s already earned his spurs twice over — first with Lloyd Webber, then in the 1990s with a series of Disney films that then morphed into stage shows. The Lion King is a worldwide phenomenon; Beauty and the Beast is the fifth-longest running show in Broadway history, he tells me. This second flurry of activity is behind him, though — “and now it’s nice to do something different in one’s twilight years”.
That different thing is actually half-familiar — in shape if not in scale. He’s about to relaunch Blondel, the first show that he wrote without Lloyd Webber. It’s fair to say that this is not a show the world has been crying out to see again. Blondel garnered mixed reviews when it opened in November 1983 — its biggest rave probably being The Daily Telegraph’s verdict that “in its way it gently entertains”, a quote unlikely to moisten a signwriter’s paintbrush. Still, Rice’s turns of phrase, Stephen Oliver’s score and Paul Nicholas’s lead performance all received praise. Blondel played in the West End for almost a year but lost money.
And that appeared to be that for this cheerfully daft account of the legendary 12th-century minstrel who allegedly discovered the missing Richard the Lionheart while he was in prison after a crusade gone wrong. Oliver returned to serious composition and died in 1992. Rice went on to write the musical Chess with Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson from Abba and Heathcliff for Cliff Richard.
But when the director Patrick Wilde contacted him two years ago with a view to reviving Blondel, he saw it as a chance to rework a storyline that he admits he never quite got right: “And in musicals the only thing that matters is story.” When investors proved slow to front up for a small show with no stars, Rice decided to fund the production at the 300-seat Pleasance Islington himself.
So is it difficult for Sir Tim Rice to stage something on a small scale? Is that seen as a suggestion that it’s not quite up to snuff? “I think it is. And that was the problem back in 1983. Stephen and I wanted it to be small and then we got caught up by the bigness of musicals. I was on a hot streak. People thought we could do an Andrew, because Andrew had this huge hit with Cats at around the same time. But I think as you get older and wiser, even though I’ve done a few biggies since then, I’ve done Aida [with Elton John] and Chess, it’s nice to do something small. That’s how I started, after all.”
Rice first met Lloyd Webber in April 1965, after writing him a letter suggesting himself as a “with-it” lyricist. He was 20; Lloyd Webber 17. He knew he was on to something good as soon as he heard the composer play. “Andrew was doing something against the tide. Everyone else, me included, wanted to be Mick Jagger. He wanted to be Richard Rodgers.”
Their first musical together, The Likes of Us, was “a rather worthy” account of the life of Dr Barnardo. It was never seen until last year’s workshop revival at Lloyd Webber’s annual Sydmonton Festival. But they broke though with their second show, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat (1968). Rice refers to it fondly and often. It’s not that it’s his favourite of his own work — that’s Evita — more that it began with such low expectations, as a school play for Colet Court preparatory school in Barnes. It was tuneful, irreverent and short, growing only gradually into the full-blown stand-alone musical it became. There was an innocence about the process that success would later deny them.
Next came Jesus Christ Superstar (1970) — or Christ! as Rice first flippantly threatened to name it — and then Evita (1978), about the life of the Argentine First Lady Eva Perón. Then they drifted apart. Lloyd Webber didn’t need a lyricist for his next show, Cats — “which I thought was a pretty wacky idea”. Rice suggested that they do an idea of his called Chess; Lloyd Webber wasn’t convinced by it. Later he asked Rice to join a team of lyricists on Phantom of the Opera. He demurred.
“There were some rows,” admits Rice, “but it was all great fun. Until you get to the point where you have a lot of success and then you think, ‘Errr, now what?’ Some people have the ability to just say I’ll do 20 more. Others tend to wonder where it’s all going.”
Even now, 30 years since they wrote a show together, the Rice/Lloyd Webber team is part of the popular imagination. However dandy their achievements separately, you don’t have to be a fan to harbour a sentimental hope that they will work together again. “Yes, I think that’s true,” nods Rice. “It’s like thinking, ‘Lennon and McCartney, if they only got back together . . .’ Well, we might do something together. I always said there was a danger that if it wasn’t any good it would make people say, ‘Oh, we always knew they weren’t any good, the others are all crap too’.
“At the time I was upset that we hadn’t stuck together. But then I would never have had the fun of working with so many good composers: Benny and Björn, and Elton, and Alan Mencken [who wrote Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin], those people in their way are at Andrew’s level. And of course dear Stephen Oliver. It would be great if this show got his name back out there again.”
Whatever his desire to get back to the nurturing intimacy of the early days of Joseph, Rice would also love the new, shorter, sharper and smaller Blondel to join it in the repertoire. The economics of musicals — even chamber pieces — being what they are, the Pleasance run needs to sell out entirely to break even. And whatever Blondel is, it’s no producer-led cash-in on the current craze for irreverent stories about minstrels out to rescue medieval sovereigns. Even if the show’s publicity does argue that there’s “startling relevance” in its themes of faith, race, religion and holy wars in the Middle East.
But Rice can’t have been in the room when his show’s alleged relevance started to startle. “I don’t think a comic spoof about something that happened in the 12th century is written to be relevant,” he says, impatient with the very notion. “It’s written to entertain. That’s what I’ve always done. I’ve never really had a message for the world. And if I had, I wouldn’t have the bad manners to try and give it to the world.”
Blondel opens at the Pleasance Islington, N7 (020-7609 1800; www.pleasance.co.uk), on November 23.
