Dream ticket, once upon a time... Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
According to an interview in the Times, Tim Rice thinks that a lot of today's musicals are "pretty ghastly". He claims that the West End is dominated by producers less interested in searching for the next big thing than identifying whatever's big already and setting it to music ("There's nothing I'd like to see less than a Lord of the Rings musical," he declares). Indeed, Shaftesbury Avenue is so stuffed with nostalgic revivals, Disney spectaculars and ropey rock compilation shows that one is inclined to agree with him. Except, you have to wonder if Rice isn't at least partially responsible for them all.
Let me state at the outset that Rice's youthful collaborations with Andrew Lloyd Webber are works of thrusting, theatrical genius, and that I can and will, if pushed, recite the sparkling wit and miraculous scansion of Rice's libretto to Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat in its entirety, as a result of wearing out the original cast recording as a child.
The malaise set in when the duo went their separate ways. Lloyd Webber announced that he already had a wordsmith for Cats. Understandably miffed at being dumped for a dead, modernist poet, Rice teamed up with Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson to produce Chess, thereby presenting the hairy half of Abba with the entrée to the theatrical world which would ultimately lead to Mamma Mia; without which we would never have had to endure back-catalogue atrocities such as Rod Stewart's Tonight's the Night or Boney M's Daddy Cool.
As for the corporatisation of the modern musical which Rice so deplores, it is worth bearing in mind that he was part of the team behind Disney's Lion King and Beauty and the Beast: the first of which featured dancing baboons and the second a chorus of singing tableware, which gives Rice a unique perspective on the art of pots calling the kettles black.
All of this would perhaps be forgivable were it not for his culpability in helping to encourage one of the most preposterous vanity projects in musical history - the baffling aberration that was Cliff Richard's Heathcliff. How Rice ever came to conceive the saintly Cliff as Emily Bronte's reprehensible sex-monster defies explanation, until you remember that he also buys original Jack Vettriano paintings on the basis that they must be good art.
Considered in these terms, Rice begins to look like the root of all evil. So it's heartening to learn that he's determined to give a final shot at redemption to his one, post-Lloyd Webber project of genuine worth - the 1983 flop, Blondel. It's a terrible injustice that while Lloyd Webber went on to conquer the world, Rice's collaboration with the late Stephen Oliver, a theatre and opera composer of rare genius, sank without trace. It speaks volumes about the timidity of conventional investors that, in order to give Stephen Oliver's music a fresh hearing, Rice has had to dig into his own pocket to fund a fringe production at the Pleasance Theatre in Islington.
Yet, the most worrying assertion Rice makes in the Times interview is that he can see no young musical writers with the ability to supplant oldies like himself: "Where is a single young team or young writer writing fresh new musicals that are successful?" he moans. "I can't think of one."
Perhaps he ought to check out Grant Olding, the composer of the Jacqueline Wilson musical Tracy Beaker Gets Real, currently on a national tour. With his regular lyricist Toby Davies, Olding caught the ear with a one-act musical, Spittin' Distance, presented as part of an innovative season of low-budget musicals staged at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough. Olding and Davies went on to produce the acclaimed Yeti: An Abominamusical at this year's Edinburgh festival, and made a splash at the New York festival of musical theatre in September with a spare, Sondheim-influenced work entitled Three Sides.
Spittin' Distance is now undergoing further development at the National Theatre Studio. Let's hope that, in this case, "development" means it will eventually receive a full production, rather than being reworked into oblivion. Writers like Olding and Davies are the shot in the arm that British musical theatre needs. Who knows, maybe in time even Tim Rice will have heard of them.
