“Andrew Lloyd Webber’s music is everywhere,” sniffed Malcolm Williamson, Master of the Queen’s Musick, in 1992, “but then so is AIDS.” On the whole, AIDS gets a better press. As a spelling, “Musick” pretty well sums up the feelings not just of critics but also of Broadway insiders, all those Kern/Gershwin/Rodgers/Bernstein/Loesser/Styne/Sondheim fans who’ve watched aghast as he’s inherited by default. “Why,” Lloyd Webber once asked Alan Jay Lerner, “do people take an instant dislike to me?” “It saves time,” said Lerner.

Well, that’s the way Alan told it. Back in the days when he was writing My Fair Lady and Gigi, that sort of tart wit would have been in the script. But by 1986, when Lloyd Webber briefly turned to Lerner for help with Phantom of the Opera, musicals had become earnest and overwrought and portentous, and the only snappy gags were told backstage—usually at the composer’s expense. Lloyd Webber is vulnerable now—a classic example of imperial overstretch. Watching tired businessmen fidget through Aspects of Love in 1989, one of his collaborators said to me: “With Aspects, he’s out to show he’s audience-proof.” With Sunset Boulevard, he has to demonstrate he’s lawyer-proof. There was a discreet pay-off and a carefully worded back-of-the-book credit to the original lyricist, Amy Powers (dumped before the London opening); a million bucks to Patti LuPone (dumped for Broadway); and a suit still pending from Faye Dunaway (dumped for Los Angeles). If, as in the Billy Wilder film,