On the face of it, P. G. Wodehouse and Andrew Lloyd Webber, currently sharing billing on By Jeeves at the Helen Hayes, would appear to have little in common. Wodehouse is widely credited for helping invent the American musical, Lloyd Webber for having destroyed it. The first claim happens to be true, as attested by Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Ira Gershwin, Alan Jay Lerner, and other admirers of Wodehouse’s Broadway work eight decades ago. The latter claim is a bit of wishful thinking: The Great White Way wound up like Mark Green’s mayoral run—it had years of experience and all the qualifications, but, through its own sour, joyless complacency, defeated itself and let the other fellow inherit by default.

It’s easier to see that now that Cats and Starlight Express have departed. Lloyd Webber hasn’t had a hit since Phantom fifteen years ago—though, the media’s herd mentality being what it is, everyone was still writing about him being “invincible” and “unstoppable” until the mid-Nineties. Aspects of Love and Sunset Boulevard both lost money, and his two most recent works, Whistle Down the Wind (1996) and The Beautiful Game (2000), never even came to Broadway. The West End musical seems to have returned to its pre-Lloyd Webber condition: something for strictly local consumption. The Beautiful Game, a show about IRAviolence in Northern Ireland (really), closed a few weeks ago in London, having failed to recoup. According to Lloyd Webber, the audience no longer exists for demanding, intelligent theater