Quotes

There is a recommendation that schools spend a certain amount of time teaching music but it really depends on whether the teachers believe in it. In some primary and secondary schools there is no musical provision at all but other well-resourced schools have plenty.

[on singer/actress Emmy Rossum] She is a wonderfully pure soprano, with an exceptional range. But more than this she also brings real character into the voice - so rare for her age.

If you're a composer you do want to know how people are reacting to it but at the same time, of course, the performer is the most important thing.

I'm a composer and therefore I know when I've written a good tune. When you've written a good song is when you know that the lyric is completely coalesced with the song. Sometimes I think I've written melodies that may have got a bit buried because maybe the lyric hasn't worked with the song. Sometimes, actually, it's the other way around. When you're writing for musical theatre the story comes first. If the story's right then the songs will probably come right.

You're the luckiest person in the entire world if you know what you really want to do, which I was lucky enough to know when I was very young. And you're the luckiest person in the world if you can then make a living out of it.

I have lived and worked in Britain all my life. Not even in the dark days of penal Labour taxation in the Seventies did I have any intention of leaving the country of my birth. Despite a rumour put around some years back, I have never contemplated leaving Britain for tax reasons.

More than ever before we need to keep high-flying professionals in the UK. We can't, as we have done in the past, dump on them through penal personal taxation. Of course we know that there have been some shocking excesses in the City of London. But for years we have also had drummed into us that the City of London proudly took over from manufacturing as the UK's main source of income. New Labour rejoiced in the fruits of the excesses of the bankers. Of course, with hindsight, their bonuses were obscene. But New Labour gratefully taxed them.

The regrets in the theatre have always been the shows that you know ought to have worked, but for one reason of another haven't. I suppose if I had one regret it's that I would have loved to have had a long-term partner like Rodgers had with either Hart or Hammerstein. I was really hoping that the Tim Rice relationship would have gone on, but I'm obsessed with theatre and for Tim it's something that he does enjoy doing, is very good at, but it isn't his whole life as it is with me.

What strikes me is that there's a very fine line between success and failure. Just one ingredient can make the difference. A really good example of that is design and 'Love Never Lies'. The London production didn't have any consistency of style, so it would go from say, art nouveau to art deco, to straightforward, old-fashioned showbiz. The Australian production had its own language. It was at one with the piece.

[on composing songs] I've sometimes found that they've taken a while, but then you get the ones where it's so obvious that you think 'that must have been done before', so you go through agonies and get musicologists and people to look at them.

[observation, 2013] In the last few years, everything seems to have gone slightly away from music and more toward the comedy musicals, the 'Hairsprays' and 'The Book of Mormons'. I just don't know if there's a public for something now which is much more serious and is old-fashioned, in the sense that it is melodic.

[on the Cats movie]: The problem with the film, was that Tom Hooper decided that he didn't want anybody involved in it who was involved in the original show. The whole thing was ridiculous.