What happened to the Rishi Sunak I knew at school?
Jesus Christ Superstar’ at the Palace Theatre, London, 1972 Photo: Getty
I have no idea whether we would have ever repeated that success had I not been late for a dinner in London in 1973. Hopelessly lost, driving around the backstreets of Chelsea, I caught the first few minutes of a programme that told the story of Eva Perón, a lady about whom I knew little more than that she was from Argentina, glamorous and dead. Even that was more than most people, certainly of my generation, in Britain knew about her at the time. I remembered her from my schoolboy stamp collection. I managed to hear the complete programme a few days later and felt that Evita’s story could be the perfect subject for our next extravaganza. The fact that another radio show in the same series about icons of the mid-20th century featured James Dean clinched it for me. Satnav would have denied the world Evita.
When I worked for the Disney studios in the 1990s, my first assignment was an animated feature film, initially entitled King of the Jungle, about a lion cub whose wicked uncle murders his father — Hamlet with fur. I had been working on this project for only a few months when I was asked to switch my priorities to another Disney animated movie that was much further down the road — Aladdin. The brilliant lyricist for that picture was Howard Ashman, who with composer Alan Menken had played a huge part in reviving the Disney studios animation fortunes with
TheLittle Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast. They were now working together on Aladdin, which looked certain to give them and Disney a third consecutive smash hit.
But the great Howard Ashman had become desperately ill and was never able to complete the work he had started on Aladdin. Songs were still needed, in particular the central romantic ballad, and, as the bloke on their block, Disney rushed me into the lyricist’s chair to work with Alan Menken. One of the songs that we wrote together, ‘A Whole New World’, became a massive hit, a number one in America, winning a bunch of awards, including an Oscar. The acceptance of these mementoes was bitter-sweet in that I knew perfectly well that Howard would, indeed should, have been there in my place. Aladdin opens as a stage show on Broadway next year, with ‘A Whole New World’, not an Ashman-Menken showstopper, as the big magic-carpet ride number.
Rebecca Thornhill and Robert Lonsdale star in From Here to Eternity
And now I am heading back to the West End, in the role of producer, as well as lyricist, with a musical version of James Jones’s magnificent 1951 novel From Here to Eternity, made into a Oscar-winning film by Fred Zinnemann two years later. The composer is a new name on Shaftesbury Avenue — Stuart Brayson. He and I met in the early 1980s when he recognised me in the street and handed me a tape of some pop songs he had written. That chance encounter has finally led to his West End debut and my return thence after 13 years.
Of course every career in every field owes a great deal to fortune and to the unexpected, but in the wildly unpredictable world of entertainment this is truer than in most callings. I never know how to advise those starting out in theatre, film or music. Hang around streets with a CD of your work? Take an idea for a book to a publisher who didn’t like it but suggests you meet a young composer he knows who’s looking for a collaborator? That’s how I met Andrew, but I don’t tell would-be Sondheims to take a bad manuscript to a literary agent.
From Here to Eternity is previewing at the Shaftesbury Theatre and opens on 23 October. Tim Rice has written musicals with, among others, Andrew Lloyd Webber, the Disney Corporation and Björn Alvaeus and Benny Andersson of Abba.
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