Ryan's Reviews

Lord Wiki says here: "Caprice No. 24 in A Minor is the final caprice of Niccolò Paganini's 24 Caprices, and a famous work for solo violin. The caprice, in the key of A Minor, consists of a theme, 11 variations, and a finale. His 24 Caprices were probably composed between 1802 and 1817, while he was in the service of the Baciocchi court. It is widely considered one of the most difficult pieces ever written for the solo violin. It requires many highly advanced techniques such as parallel octaves and rapid shifting covering many intervals, extremely fast scales and arpeggios including minor scales, left hand pizzicato, high positions, and quick string crossings. Additionally, there are many double stops, including thirds and tenths." If anyone is familiar with "The Phantom of the Opera", you can imagine the Phantom playing this for Christine. Of course, considering Andrew Lloyd Webber, this may be important. Wiki goes on to list what I presume is all of the known v

The tunes Andrew has recycled from himself over the years. Here are all the ones that I know about, in chronological order. "The Likes of Us" (first performed in 2005) with lyrics by Tim Rice: Parts of 'I'm a Very Busy Man' reappear in 'I Hope You like It Here' from "The Woman in White" (2004). 'Love Is Here' becomes 'Travel Hopefully' in both "Jeeves" (1975) and the revised version "By Jeeves" (1996). 'The Likes of Us' becomes 'Variation 18' from "Variations" (1978) which is performed as the dance half of "Song and Dance" (1982). 'We'll Get Him' verses become the music for the Ishmaelites in 'Poor, Poor Joseph' from "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" (1968). 'A Man on His Own' comes from Andrew's 1963 song 'Make Believe Love' recorded by Wes Sands. This song is included on Disc 5 of the ALW set "Now & For

There was a very exciting release in the Jim Steinman community recently: the 1988 demos of Jim's score for a stage musical of "The Graduate" from the book by Charles Webb, upon which the movie from 1967 was based. Here is a quote from the New York Times, by the way, to give you a bit of an idea: https://www.nytimes.com/1988/03/18/theater/on-stage.html So, what happened? This story in Variety from November 3, 1997 may shed some light: "...In the late ‘80s, the Nederlanders brought him in to work on a planned musical of "The Graduate" for which Robert Merrill ("Funny Girl") had already written a score. "Bob was under the impression that I was hired as 'youth consultant,' and I was 39 years old at the time. He was horrified and rightfully so, and it just fell apart..." One thing for certain is that there was a stage version written and directed by Terry Johnson. This was first mounted on April 5, 2000 at the Gielgud Theatre in Lond

"But then he made two albums without Steinman—Welcome to the Neighborhood in 1996 and the current Couldn't Have Said It Better, which failed to achieve Bat heights. Obviously he needed Steinman musically. Steinman's career was also having its ups and downs—he wrote Bonnie Tyler's hit single 'Total Eclipse of the Heart' and the lyrics for Andrew Lloyd Webber's Whistle Down the Wind, but his own show Dance of the Vampires flopped spectacularly on Broadway. So the other day he rang Meat Loaf and told him he was busy writing Bat 3—he claims to have written eight songs already..." That comes from a piece by Lynn Barber in The Observer Sunday 7 December 2003. Let's say things had progressed from there. Let's say that, somehow, Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman committed to making an album called "Bat out of Hell III: The Final at Bat" and went into the studio. A lot of things needed to work out here. Meat needed to be happy. Jim needed to be happy