Andrew Lloyd Webber reveals collaborators on Profumo musical | Culture | The Guardian
Andrew Lloyd Webber
Andrew Lloyd Webber reveals collaborators on Profumo musical
Composer to team up with Sunset Boulevard's Don Black and Christopher Hampton on new musical about 60s sex scandal
Andrew Lloyd Webber: Profumo affair was 'terrible miscarriage of justice'. Photograph: Ian West/PA
Thursday 20 December 2012 10.28 EST
First published on Thursday 20 December 2012 10.28 EST
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Andrew Lloyd Webber has revealed that he will collaborate with Don Black and Christopher Hampton on his new musical about the Profumo affair , which has been rumoured for months but now looks likely to happen.
Yesterday, Canadian newspaper the Globe and Mail broke the news that Black and Hampton would contribute the book and lyrics between them. Their involvement means the new musical will reunite the team behind Lloyd Webber's 1993 musical Sunset Boulevard , which originally ran for four years in the West End, despite briefly closing after mixed reviews. When the musical premiered on Broadway, Black and Hampton won the Tony award for best book.
Until now, that project has been Hampton's only collaboration with the composer, though he has worked on two other musicals: Dracula, also with Black, and the ill-fated Rebecca, the Broadway production of which collapsed this year after its major investors were found to be inventions .
Black and Lloyd Webber have a longer history of working together, having collaborated on the 1979 song-cycle Tell Me On a Sunday and, four years later, Aspects of Love .
In February, Lloyd Webber told BBC Radio 2 presenter Chris Evans that his next project would follow osteopath Stephen Ward's part in the collapse of Harold Macmillan's government . Ward was the man who introduced the then secretary of state for war John Profumo to Christine Keeler. He was subsequently charged with living off the "earnings of prostitution", and took an overdose on the penultimate day of the trial, dying in hospital four days later after charges had been dropped.
Further hints about the project emerged in September, when Lloyd Webber told the Times he was interested in exploring what he called this "terrible miscarriage of justice" .
Describing the musical, he said that it was still early days: "It's a matter of getting the shape, making it dramatically secure."