Cheap music
Sir: After reading Sheridan Morley's letter of 23 May, 'Cats and dogs', full of his characteristic quibbling and blether and not to say inept choice of simile, I feel I must leap to Alexander Chancellor's defence by complimenting him on his remarkably perceptive and apt comments on Cats.
Sheridan Morley points out that Lloyd Webber has not always been a commercial success (a point incidentally that Mr Chancellor did not maintain), and cites Jeeves as the one revealing failure. I must remind Mr Morley, however, that we are being constantly persuaded, through continual bombastic promotion, as Mr Chancellor astutely points out, that as a result of Evita and Jesus Christ Superstar anything of Lloyd Webber's will be an instant success and must at all costs be seen. Jeeves seems to me to confirm Mr Chancellor's premise that Lloyd Webber is only capable of 'coming up' with cheap music inflated with his own pretentious airs.
Now T.S. Eliot's charming and subtle poems of Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats have fallen victim. It is beyond me why anyone should want to celebrate the fact that Lloyd Webber and most of the entourage who seek to profit from him are British. Clearly, this is the embarrassment the media wish to impress upon us and to export in these so-called stricken times.
It seems to me quite fair to regard the musical as a characteristic American theatre genre, one that essentially has been developed by them. I'm sure that those small fry British exponents of it whom Mr Morley quoted, with the exception of Gilbert and Sullivan who wrote 'comic operas' (a distinction I think they, as indeed Coward and Novell°, would have been most insistent upon), would readily have acknowledged the predominance of composers such as Berlin, Porter, Gershwin, Kern, Rogers etc. Again I find myself in total agreement with Mr Chancellor that the American musical has been dead (certainly lyrically when one considers the above names) for nigh on 20 years, with the significant exception of Sound of Music which is nevertheless approaching that age. Sweeney Todd is of course a recent example of a musical that did lie down very quickly.
I cannot help feeling that had the promotion of Cats been kept on a par with most West End theatre promotion, one could at least have been left in peace to form one's own conclusions about it.
Francis Loder 68 Cadogan Place, London SW1
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