Andrew Lloyd Webber Defends STEPHEN WARD In New Open Letter

Internationally celebrated composer Andrew Lloyd Webber has come to the defense of his most recent West End musical, STEPHEN WARD, following the recent news that the show will close after an extremely short run - one of the shortest West End runs of any of his productions to date, as a matter of fact.

Lloyd Webber responds to reporter Tim Walker's recent column in The Daily Telegraph detailing reasons why STEPHEN WARD suffered such a short life onstage in the new letter, available in full below.

Perhaps most poignantly, Lloyd Webber quotes classic Rodgers & Hammerstein musical SOUTH PACIFIC, remarking, "Fools give you reasons, wise men never try," when explaining why a musical connects with an audience or does not.

The official synopsis for STEPHEN WARD is as follows: "STEPHEN WARD deals with the victim of the Profumo Affair - not, as is widely supposed, John Profumo himself, the disgraced Minister for War, nor even the fatally wounded Conservative government of Harold Macmillan, but the society osteopath whose private libertarian experiments blew up in his own and everyone else's face. In a trial as emblematic to the twentieth century as Oscar Wilde's was to the nineteenth - from which he was the only protagonist to emerge with some dignity and honour. Ward became the targeted scapegoat of a furiously self-righteous Establishment. By no means a hero, he was a reluctant martyr, thanks to an unholy alliance between Press and police of a kind we can all too readily recognise today; inadvertently, he was the hinge between two worlds and the harbinger of a revolution in manners, music and morals when the ordered, stuffy, respectful universe of the fifties gave way to the classless, truculent, unstoppable sixties."

STEPHEN WARD was written by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Christopher Hampton and Don Black. For more information, check out a previous article on STEPHEN WARD here.

Visit the official STEPHEN WARD Facebook page here.

Of note, STEPHEN WARD is set to close on March 29.

View the entire letter by Andrew Lloyd Webber as it appeared in The Telegraph below.

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