What: Andrew lloyd Webber’s Stephen Ward musical
When: 3rd December 2013 – 1st March 2014
Where: Aldwych Theatre, Aldwych, London WC2B 4DF (Box Office: 0844 847 2379)
Woss the damage: Prices from £15 – £67.50
The last time we saw or got excited about an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical was back in 1991 when Jason Donovan was cast in Joseph and His Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat. And that excitement was loincloth-related, mainly.
Now we’re older (definitely) and wiser (not so much), we find our attention piqued by the latest Lloyd Webber musical set to open in the West End in December.
Called simply (albeit boringly) Stephen Ward, it’s got sex, spies and 60s society scandal – just a selection of some of our most favourite things here at Le Blow.
Stephen Ward charts the rise and fall of a high society osteopath at the centre of the 1963 Profumo Affair which embarrassed the British establishment by exposing the decadent lifestyle of the London elite as the sexual revolution began.
“It’s a little bit about the last gasp of the old Britain, whilst the new one was about to come and how the whole business led to the downfall of a government,” Lloyd Webber told Reuters at the musical’s launch on Monday.
The musical will give a bawdy look into the lifestyle of a man who mixed party girls and powerful people at seedy London clubs and country houses.
“You’ve never had it so good,” goes one of the songs, a spin on the famous quote from the then PM Harold Macmillan, with the refrain: “You’ve never had it so often.” LOL!
The 60s stylin’ also look pretty sharp:
1963. The scandal that shocked society. Stephen Ward charts the rise and fall from grace of the society osteopath. Friend to film stars, spies, models, government ministers and aristocrats, his rise and ultimate disgrace coincided with the increasingly permissive lifestyle of London’s elite in the early 1960’s. The musical centres on Ward’s involvement with the young and beautiful Christine Keeler and their chance meeting in a West End night club which led to one of the biggest political scandals and trials of the 20th century.
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