The tattooed hotshot director who made Andrew Lloyd Webber cool

Who would have thought that the coolest composer of 2025, on both sides of the Atlantic, would turn out to be Andrew Lloyd Webber? On Sunday night, Tony Awards voters handed the audacious new production of Sunset Boulevard three gongs: best revival of a musical, best lighting, and, ending the night’s most fiercely competitive race, lead actress Nicole Scherzinger won over six-time Tony-winner Audra McDonald.

The show was in modish company, with other victors in the ceremony hosted by British actress and Wicked star Cynthia Erivo ranging from queer revisionist historical romp Oh, Mary! to futuristic robot musical Maybe Happy Ending and another West End-originating production, sci-fi adventure Stranger Things: The First Shadow.

Credit: Facebook / Andrew Lloyd Weber

Perhaps even more unlikely than Broadway’s renewed embrace of Lloyd Webber is his choice of collaborator. Instead of the expected venerable, cravat-wearing, Oxbridge-educated director of the old guard, he has found magical creative chemistry with the 44-year-old theatrical revolutionary Jamie Lloyd, who, with his numerous tattoos, earrings and streetwear style, resembles a ruffian from a Guy Ritchie film.

But looks are most certainly deceiving in the case of the thoughtful, detail-oriented Lloyd, who has breathed new life into classic work – including several Lloyd Webber shows. It’s the composer’s most fruitful partnership in decades.

Sunset’s triumph caps an astonishing renaissance for the man who dominated musical theatre in the 1980s, but gradually became tagged with the “naff” label. He was too big, too commercial, too lordly. The haters revelled in flops such as 2010’s Phantom of the Opera sequel Love Never Dies (infamously rebranded as Paint Never Dries) and 2013’s misguided political fable Stephen Ward, which closed after less than four months.

Several musicals did maintain worldwide success – Phantom primarily – but they were regarded as heritage properties. No one would have described the 77-year-old as current or fashionable. But just when it looked like Lloyd Webber might exit stage left, he has instead begun his surprising third act.

As he ends his 30-year Tony Awards drought (he last won for the original Sunset production back in 1995), even his most zealous critics must admit that he is the man of the moment. I would call it a comeback, but, in the words of Sunset’s heroine Norma Desmond, Lloyd Webber might prefer we consider it “a return”.

Either way, it’s a particularly remarkable turnaround stateside, where this foreign intruder became a handy punching bag for commentators who rued the direction of Broadway. Lloyd Webber’s work led the British invasion in the 1980s: his mega-musicals became as renowned for their jaw-dropping spectacle, whether the hurtling chandelier in Phantom, or the roller-skaters’ runway of Starlight Express, as their content.

He was held personally responsible for an encroaching commercialisation – an unfair charge, since Broadway has always been a business, and there were plenty of other contributors, not least the all-American Disney corporation.

When Lloyd Webber’s most recent show, the pandemic lockdown-hobbled Cinderella, finally reached Broadway in 2023, critics savaged it with undisguised glee. (It didn’t help that the title was changed to Bad Cinderella.) The New York Times called it “sexed-up and dumbed-down”, and the New York Post, in a one-star review, “a wacko storybook dumpster fire”. It seemed to be the nail in Lloyd Webber’s coffin.

Enter hotshot auteur Lloyd, who has a talent for bold regeneration and glittering, sometimes unconventional star casting. The director and the composer are a brilliantly striking odd couple: one a tattooed, shaven-headed, working-class master of expressionistic minimalism and champion of diverse theatre, the other the public school-attending Lord Lloyd-Webber who got into hot water for voting in the House of Lords to cut tax credits in 2015, and whose default creative mode is lush romanticism.

However, speaking after the Tony Awards, Lloyd explained their unusual bromance. He warmly recounted: “My dad was a truck driver and he used to listen to Evita and Jesus Christ Superstar in the cab of his truck, so it’s literally the score of my childhood.” Lloyd Webber continued the love fest by saying: “It’s so fantastic to have one’s work reinterpreted – and so wonderfully as Jamie has done.”

In fact, the pair have more in common than you might think. Neither is afraid of what some in the theatre establishment regard as a dirty word: “commercial”. Both are passionate about making the arts more accessible, with Lloyd Webber telling the Telegraph in 2024 that he was thrilled Starlight Express brought in “people who had not been to the theatre before”.

Lloyd, likewise, has attracted new audiences via attention-grabbing casting tactics. He’s lured in Hollywood A-listers like Jessica Chastain for A Doll’s House, Spider-Man’s Tom Holland for Romeo and Juliet, and Tom Hiddleston and Hayley Atwell for Much Ado About Nothing. This autumn, Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, stars of 1989 film Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, reunite on Broadway in Lloyd’s production of Waiting for Godot.

In 2023, he radically reinvented Sunset Boulevard, which Lloyd Webber, Don Black and Christopher Hampton had adapted from Billy Wilder’s movie, as a lean, film noir-esque monochromatic thriller. Suddenly a dusty musical became the hottest, and most powerfully resonant, show in town: a psychological horror for the 21st century.

The casting of 45-year-old former Pussycat Doll Nicole Scherzinger as faded starlet Norma Desmond was a masterstroke, refocusing the story as a critique of toxic celebrity culture and an absurdly ageist industry. Lloyd’s use of cameras and screens reflected the subject matter while also chiming with a generation wedded to phone cameras and TikTok. No wonder Sunset racked up seven Olivier Awards, in 2024, and has now added three Tonys.

But that’s far from the only Lloyd Webber victory. Roller-skating train musical Starlight Express came thundering back down the track and is a London sensation once again. Even his most sneered-at musical (especially after the nightmarish film version) has been reborn: last year saw Cats get a fabulous queer makeover Off Broadway as The Jellicle Ball.

Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre has also played a key role in this Lloyd Webber resurgence, staging slick, rock-fuelled versions of Jesus Christ Superstar (in 2016) and Evita (2019). Now the latter, again directed by Lloyd, is making an explosive West End transfer with a buzzy leading lady who is almost as divisive as Eva Perón herself.

That star is Rachel Zegler, who shot to fame in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story in 2021, and has since come under fire for vigorously voicing her Pro-Palestinian views while promoting the appalling Snow White movie.

Zegler, 24, will certainly attract a younger crowd to arguably Lloyd Webber’s boldest, most creatively satisfying and most sharply satirical work. Lloyd located both its dark heart and its protagonist’s gutsy, youthful, raw ambition in a contemporary production that knocked me sideways when I saw it in the park.

It may feel even more pertinent in this summer’s London Palladium run given its echoes of influencer culture and celebrity merging with populist politics (notably, it’s Donald Trump’s favourite musical). Lloyd has described his take as “Eva Perón does Coachella”, capturing the energy of both an explosive gig and his experience of attending Buenos Aires football games, “where whole stadiums shake”.

With Zegler on board, a Broadway transfer of Evita seems likely, meaning next year’s Tonys could be another encore for the irrepressible Lloyd Webber. He’s also reuniting with his former partner, lyricist Tim Rice, on the Victorian whodunnit comedy Sherlock Holmes and The 12 Days of Christmas, premiering at Birmingham Rep in November.

There is more to come from his alliance with Lloyd, too: they’re currently working on new musical The Illusionist, which is based on the 2006 magician film and is due to premiere in 2026. Lloyd has said it features the composer’s “best score in years”.

Thanks to this game-changing collaboration, the sun hasn’t set on Lloyd Webber’s empire just yet.

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