A Letter From the Publisher

By Robert L. Miller

Oklahoma! My Fair Lady. Funny Girl. Follies. Almost everyone loves a Broadway musical, and TIME is no exception; over the years we have featured these and a dozen other productions and their creators and stars on our cover. This week we are at it again, with a profile of British Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, whose The Phantom of the Opera opens later this month to the largest advance- ticket sales in Broadway history. "Phantom is more than a show," says Senior Editor Christopher Porterfield, who edited the story. "Like Lloyd Webber himself, it's an international phenomenon. We set out to find the secret behind all this excitement."

TIME has posed that question about many runaway hits and hitmakers over the years. We asked it of Lyricist Oscar Hammerstein, who appeared on our cover in 1947, when he and his partner, Composer Richard Rodgers, had five shows, including their musicals Oklahoma! and Allegro, playing on Broadway. (For all his popularity, Hammerstein had a yearly income of $500,000 -- roughly half of Lloyd Webber's present monthly royalties.) We wrote then that Hammerstein's words "carry a gentle insight and a sentimental catch in the throat to millions of people who are only dimly aware of his name." Within a decade, though, such sentimentality had given way to a more hard-edged style. In a 1960 cover article on Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe (Brigadoon, My Fair Lady, Camelot), we approvingly likened the best of Lerner's lyrics to "expertly cut glass."

Lloyd Webber's pioneering smash hit Jesus Christ Superstar wedded the manic energy of rock 'n' roll to the musical theater, and appeared on our cover in 1971. Associate Editor Michael Walsh, who wrote this week's profile, met Lloyd Webber in 1984 and has seen him frequently since. "A lot of people say that he's very cold and brusque," notes Walsh, "but I've never known that side of him. He's extremely enthusiastic when talking about musical things." That passion bubbled over at one point during Walsh's interviews for this story. "Lloyd Webber sat down at the piano and started playing songs from his new show," Walsh recalls. "Pretty soon we were making up words and music to a Rodgers and Hammerstein-type song. When he's unbuttoned like that, he can be very congenial." Now that must have been entertainment.