The first preview of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cinderella, delayed for 10 months because of Covid, is hours away. The theatre is getting a fresh lick of paint, frocks are laid out next to elaborate floral arrangements and the merch stall has Cinders face masks. A golden rococo frame surrounds a stage dominated by a glittering silhouetted cityscape. The sound of vacuum cleaners competes with the orchestra. It’s Friday lunchtime. Tonight, the doors open to the first audience.
Well, half an audience. Upstairs at the Gillian Lynne theatre, in a suite filled with designs from Cats, Lord Lloyd-Webber sits beneath a sketch of Growltiger and channels that piratical puss’s scowling spirit in a stand against the government’s “arbitrary” 50% capacity restriction, still in place owing to the delay in easing restrictions. “The truth is we’ve been dumped,” he fumes. “They don’t value theatre.” His jaw is set: “Now we have to prove them wrong.”
A new musical by Lloyd Webber is an event in itself but Cinderella comes with an original story and book by Promising Young Woman’s Oscar-winning Emerald Fennell, “horrendously pregnant” and beaming as the due date arrives for her second baby and her first musical. “Andrew’s done this a billion times,” she says. “This is my first rodeo.”
Fennell has known him for ever: Lloyd Webber is a friend of her parents. A few years back, when she was working on Killing Eve (she was the second season showrunner), he came for lunch and explained that he was looking for a new angle on the fairytale. He grimaces at the synopses he had previously been offered. One featured a Cinderella working in a wardrobe department in Hollywood who left her footprints in wet cement at Grauman’s Chinese theatre. Fennell’s eyes widen: “But that sounds … sensational!”
The problem she had with Cinderella, Fennell says, is that “the girl has to change herself in order to be lovable”.
She decided to confront the modern pressures put on young women, while keeping “the deliciousness, fun and romance” of the fairytale and its traditional trimmings. “You can’t have Cinderella without the shoe,” she says, “but it’s a man going around essentially deciding his bride on a woman’s shoe size. It’s a little bit problematic!” Her story, set in the “absolutely despotic” city of Belleville, explores the friendship between rebellious Cinderella (Carrie Hope Fletcher) and her friend Sebastian (Ivano Turco), who suddenly inherits a title and becomes heir to the throne. It’s a romantic comedy, she says, built around a realistic relationship.
Wrapping thorny issues in bubblegum colours and colliding romcom scenarios with darker truths is what Fennell did so brilliantly in Promising Young Woman, whose score featured musical-theatre showstopper Something Wonderful from The King and I. The poster for Cinderella, with its spray-painted upside-down-heart dress, suggests something in a similar vein (though for family audiences). There is a connection, too, to Netflix’s regal sensation The Crown, in which Fennell plays Camilla Parker Bowles. In the season four episode Fairytale, Diana’s flatmates toast “no more worries” as her engagement to Charles promises a life of palaces, jewels and happy-ever-afters. But, Diana tells Camilla, she has barely spent any time with her fiance – much like your typical Cinders. While she loves the notion of love at first sight, Fennell admits: “I’m not sure how realistic it is to marry someone the day after you meet them at a party!”
The musical, with witty lyrics by David Zippel (City of Angels), is a cautionary tale about overnight celebrity, not just royalty. Imagine, suggests Fennell, that your best friend suddenly becomes the most famous pop star in the world. “How does that change the dynamic of the relationship? How does it change the way you feel about yourself?”
Lloyd Webber says Fennell’s script provides “the set pieces that any composer would always like … so I got the opportunity to write a grand waltz” and covers a range of emotional territory, spinning in “a different way to what you’d expect”. Fennell emphasises that they never wished to be arch or to undermine fairytales – they wanted to understand why we return to such narratives. She brought her young son to watch a bit the other day. “That’s so thrilling,” she says. “Making something that you hope one day your children might be able to enjoy.”
The initial postponement of Cinderella, citing “global circumstances” in March last year, was a bellwether for theatre’s Covid crisis. Venues closed a couple of weeks later. The £6m musical was developed through lockdowns and the structured working schedule kept her sane, says Fennell, although at one point she was collaborating with Lloyd Webber from outside a window because of restrictions. “One can do things on Zoom and one can use an extraordinary device called the telephone,” observes the composer. “But nothing is ever the same as being in the same room.”
A significant number of changes have been made since the cast album was recorded. Once everyone is assembled in the theatre for rehearsals, a musical becomes “a juggernaut that is very, very difficult to stop,” he says. For Fennell, used to working in film and television, the experience grew thrilling for its collaborative complexity: “It’s 200 people having to be on the same wavelength at all times.” It is not until the first performance that you realise quite what you’ve created, adds Lloyd Webber. “When we were in this building with Cats, the changes we made in previews were pretty big. We didn’t know what we had with Cats until the third preview because it’s such an unusual show.” Finessing the book is trickiest, he thinks. “It’s difficult for you,” he says, nodding to Fennell. “Dialogue and jokes are more difficult to read.” Especially when you’re gauging reactions from a half-filled room.
But that is where theatres are at for now. For more than a year, in between Twitter play-offs with Lin-Manuel Miranda and composing a song for Handforth parish council’s Jackie Weaver, Lloyd Webber has played a vital role in getting the industry back on its feet. Last July, he put on a pilot event at the Palladium, which has the biggest capacity of the seven London venues in his LW Theatres group, showcasing stringent hygiene methods such as antiviral chemical fogging. Beverley Knight performed to an audience who had staggered arrival times, followed one-way systems, ordered drinks on their phones and sat in bubbles – all now part of the theatregoing experience. “We demonstrated to the government how theatres can open safely,” he says of the Palladium event, where his impassioned speech about theatres’ future was thunderously applauded. Today, you hear the frustration rising in his voice.
Some data from the government’s programme of pilot mass events was disclosed a day after he announced he was taking legal action to force its publication. “All we want to do is get the arts back,” he despairs. “Nobody’s looking for a fight.” Mind you, he declared himself ready to risk arrest and open for full-capacity audiences without the government’s go-ahead. But that action could have led to others on the production being fined, he says, so Cinderella will remain half-full until 19 July. The composer estimates a weekly loss of £100,000 on the show until restrictions ease. And if they are pushed back further? “We can’t stay open indefinitely,” he accepts. It costs more than £1m a month to keep his theatres closed. His total fortune, according to the Sunday Times Rich List, has plummeted by £275m in the last year to £525m.
In 2017, Lloyd Webber quit as a Conservative peer, saying he was entering the busiest ever period of his career. How does Boris Johnson’s government view the arts compared with, say, sport? “Back in February there was a joke that Wimbledon would get up because Boris likes tennis,” he says. “And the fact is that there’s no way the government is going to go against Uefa. It’s become a sort of farce.” The government “don’t understand the cost of getting a show up once it’s been closed down and they don’t have a clue about how you run buildings,” he continues.
A DCMS spokesperson said: “We understand the delay to further reopening is challenging for live events but we are helping the arts and culture sector through it with our record £2bn culture recovery fund.” They added that Lloyd Webber was invited to be part of its events research programme which would have enabled audiences to be at 75-100% capacity for Cinderella. Lloyd Webber said he was “surprised” by Johnson’s offer of help made in a recent Downing Street briefing, that the invitation was an “afterthought” and that after the government’s delay and confusion, “I cannot and will not take part in yet another pilot scheme.”
Lloyd Webber says the culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, who he thinks has done his best, told him the cabinet views theatre as “nice-to-have” rather than essential. It’s not just the economic argument for theatre (said to generate £6 for every £1 of funding) that the government hasn’t comprehended, he adds. “The real thing is about what’s going on around the regions – how important theatre and music are to people locally, what they can do at the schools level.”
That’s something Fennell cares about deeply. “I remember watching children my age in the panto, wearing sparkly dresses,” she remembers. Enjoying cartoons on telly is one thing, “but you can’t really see the work that goes into a cartoon as a child.” Theatre, by contrast, has a tangible wonder. “You go to the pantomime or you’re in your school play and you think: OK, I could do this! Or at least I could try.” After all, “who wouldn’t jump at the opportunity?” she says. “It’s magical.”
At which point the chorus bursts out from Belleville below us. The pair rush downstairs for some finishing touches before audiences finally arrive at their ball.
