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EXCLUSIVE: Andrew Lloyd Webber has unveiled his new West End and Broadway musical: a magical romance called The Illusionist, directed by Sunset Boulevard’s Jamie Lloyd.
During a private audience at his penthouse office adjacent to the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, one of six theatres controlled through his LW Theatres group, the legendary composer of Phantom of the Opera and Evita gave Deadline an exclusive preview of three of the several numbers he has so far scored.
The impresario says Oscar-winning screenwriter Chris Terrio (Argo) “has done the book very much with me, but he’s the scriptwriter.” British songwriter Bruno Major is also attached.
Lloyd Webber performed an early draft of his score to Lloyd earlier this year as they began preparing to open Sunset Boulevard, starring Nicole Scherzinger and Tom Francis, on Broadway. The show premiered at the St. James Theater on October 20 to ecstatic notices from the majority of critics.
However, it’s only recently that both Lloyd Webber and Michael Harrison, his producing partner in Lloyd Webber Harrison Musicals, approached Lloyd to direct the new show, which, says the composer, will feature an “operatic” score.
With director Lloyd, writers Terrio and Major on board, the next important step is to find someone to create the illusions for The Illusionist. There’s an illusion, Lloyd Webber divulges, “where we can literally disappear somebody in front of the audience,” and there are a couple of other coup de théâtre magical moments that will need to be developed. ”They’re not a huge part of the show, but they’re a very important part of the show,” he explains, but they need to be designed at the “get-go.”
Harrison adds: “Whoever the magic person is, and we don’t know who it is yet, they’ll be heavily involved because it’s very important, obviously, if you’re doing a show called The Illusionist, that there be good illusions.”
Harrison calculates that the revelations broken by Deadline today are “more of an early announcement” rather than “us launching the show, that will come later.”
Lloyd Webber adds: “I think it’s absolutely fair to say we haven’t a clue where it’s going to open because an awful lot of it’s got to do with what theaters are available on which side of the pond. I mean, it could be New York, it could be here [in London]. I’d like it to be here, but it could be New York. It’s also important to emphasize that it’s very, very early days.”
Harrison expresses a desire for The Illusionist to open in London and observes that while it will be “spectacular,” it doesn’t need to be in a “huge” house.
If the title sounds familiar, it’s because the production’s partially inspired by the 2006 movie of the same name written and directed by Neil Berger; which in turn was based on a novella called Eisenheim the Illusionist taken from The Barnum Museum, a book of fantasy-themed short stories by Steven Millhauser, a Pulitzer Prize-winning short story fiction writer.
The movie, set in Vienna in 1900, starred Edward Norton as Eduard, who uses the stage name Eisenheim, whose increasingly elaborate illusions create an uproar in the imperial city with questions raised about the boundaries between illusion and reality.
The film introduced a love story between Eisenheim and Sophie, a young woman he falls in love with, played by Jessica Biel, who happens to be betrothed to a Crown Prince, a role taken by Rufus Sewell in the film.
In the movie, a police inspector played by Paul Giamatti accuses Eisenheim’s act of “shaking the foundations of the universe.” That part is much reduced in the new show.
Lloyd Webber stresses that the musical is not going to be a straight rehash of the film. “We are not hugely based on the movie,” he declares. “I think what we’ve done is taken the idea of it and developed it into another area completely.”
For instance, he and Terrio have expanded the Sophie character. “We’ve made her, very much in the second act, the catalyst of everything that happens, which is quite different from the movie,” he states.
The show, he remarks, will conjure up a fascinating period of history, where the city was “this melting pot” where “on the one hand you had Strauss’ waltz’s” while on the other hand, he points to the cultural, societal and psychological breakthroughs involving, for instance, the likes of Sigmund Freud and his psychoanalytical theories and Arnold Schönberg’s revolutionary music techniques.
“So what we’ve written, which is not really part of the movie, is something where it’s a cauldron of these various ideas,” Lloyd Webber tells us.
What also fascinates him historically is that within fourteen years “an empire was going to be dismantled” by a world war. “So, it’s a wonderfully rich area for me,” he says, which will enable “my romantic side to fly” and his “kind of more mathematical side” because the plot is set in a city where everything was changing, innovation, ideas, everything.
“And so you’ve got people coming to Vienna and all of them for different reasons. Some of them because they want to hear a waltz,” the musical lord surmises. “Quite a lot of them are coming because they want to find a solution to their problems, others because they’re excited about the act that there is new work going on there.”
All of that, however, counts for naught if the score doesn’t lift you, the audience and the show.
Lloyd Weber and Harrison both ask David Andrew Wilson, the Really Useful Group’s director of music, to play me recordings of three piano demos with voice accompaniment. The first, a powerful ballad, Invincible, to be sung by Eisenheim after he’s been put down by his father for performing magic in the village square.
That’s followed by I Only Came To Say Goodbye, a sweeping love song with a haunting melody which, Lloyd Webber jokes, ”just in case everybody thought that I’d gone back irrevocably to rock and roll, I have tried to do something a little bit more in my older mold.”
But it’s the second act number Always Everything To Me, a passionate love song that lingers most. “That’s a classic,” says Harrison, breaking the silence.
True. I can forever boast, I joke, that I heard it seated next to the composer on an October afternoon. It took me back to an early evening meeting with Lloyd Webber nearly four decades ago when he sat at his grand piano and played me Music of the Night from Phantom of the Opera. I felt the same emotional jolt with Always Everything To Me.
Now the big test for the creatives is how to integrate these songs into a production that will dazzle and amaze.
It’s clear that Lloyd Webber, 76, wants youthful energy to surge through The Illusionist which is why it was vital to secure Lloyd, 43, who is, certainly with his electrifying Sunset Boulevard, introducing new ways to dream in musical theater.
“And as an oldie now, to have somebody’s who’s younger, just challenges me,” says Lloyd Webber. He notes how the pair developed a close friendship and working relationship on Sunset Boulevard where they challenged each other. They managed to chop two numbers from Sunset Boulevard without falling out.
And Lloyd Webber seems energized by Terrio and Major.
Terrio wrote the screenplay for Zack Snyder’s Justice League and co-wrote screenplays for Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice – and the latest script for the long-gestating movie version of the Sunset Boulevard musical, while Major’s output includes albums A Song for Every Moon and To Let A Good Thing Die.
They were introduced to the ennobled tunesmith by independent music executive Alistair Lloyd Webber, 32, the eldest of his three children from his third and current marriage to Madeleine Gurdon, deputy chair of the Really Useful Group, equestrian and champion racehorse breeder.
Although all concerned would like to see The Illusionist ready to enchant audiences sometime in 2026, Harrison insists that there’s “genuinely no timeframe” for the production.
“It’s always got to be when everything’s right,” adds Lloyd Webber as he recites the “wonderful piece of advice” that Evita and Phantom of the Opera director Hal Prince gave him decades ago: “You can’t listen to a musical if you can’t look at it.”
We do not speak of his last show Bad Cinderella which wasn’t at all ready for the spotlight, although it did keep theater folk employed during the pandemic.
Lloyd Webber acknowledges that with The Illusionist “I’ve got this tough producer” in Harrison “who says, Andrew, it’s not good enough.” Having Harrison as producer is “fantastic” says Lloyd Webber “because I can just be a creator again.”
Earlier this year, Lloyd Webber and Harrison collaborated on a successful reimagining of Starlight Express, forty years after it first opened at the Apollo Victoria Theatre directed by Trevor Nunn, designed by John Napier and choreographed by Arlene Phillips.
The new version directed by Luke Sheppard is on at the 1,000-seat Troubadour Wembley Park Theatre where it has sold close to $30M worth of tickets. The show also ushered in a new star in Jeevan Braich who plays Rusty, the discarded steam engine. Last month Braich, a teenage newcomer, won The Stage Debut Award for Best Performer in a Musical honor jointly with Sunset Boulevard’s Grace Hodgett.[Disclosure: this writer was on the judging panel].
And, of course, there’s Phantom of the Opera, produced by Cameron Mackintosh, which has run at His Majesty’s Theatre, formerly Her Majesty’s until the late Queen Elizabeth’s death, for 35 years, and by all accounts, it’s been having a banner year.
Lloyd Webber will continue writing with Terrio and Major, while Harrison prepares to mount the London Palladium’s raucous annual pantomime. This year it’s Robin Hood with Jane McDonald and Julian Clary topping the bill, and a company that includes Paul Zerdin, Nigel Havers, Marisha Wallace, Rob Madge, Tosh Wanogho-Maud, and Charlie Stemp.
Lloyd’s also busy rehearsing Sigourney Weaver, making her London debut as Prospero in The Tempest, which previews at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane from December 7. Weaver is joined by Jude Akuwudike, Jason Barnett, Selina Cadwell, Matthew Horne, Mara Huf, Forbes Masson, Mason Alexander Park, James Phoon, Oliver Ryan and Tom Steed.
Casting for The Illusionist will begin as soon as Lloyd Webber, Harrison, and Lloyd have assembled their creative team. I gather there’s already a “wish list.”
