STEPHEN WARD Recording Release Date Moved Up To 12/30; Preview Two Tracks

The cast recording for the highly anticipated new West End musical STEPHEN WARD by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Christopher Hampton and Don Black is now available for pre-order, with its release date now officially moved up to the tail-end of December according to a new announcement.

Two preview tracks from the forthcoming release are now available to peruse, as well.

Plus, a new glimpse behind the scenes of Lloyd Webber working alongside the show's stars Charlotte Blackledge and Charlotte Spencer is now available to view.

Of note, Lloyd Webber has been providing consistent updates on the progress of the new musical, as BroadwayWorld previously reported here.

Also, see previous coverage of Andrew Lloyd Webber attending rehearsals for STEPHEN WARD late last month, available here.

Preview two tracks from the STEPHEN WARD cast album at the official Soundcloud site here.

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 features music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, with book and lyrics by Don Black and Christopher Hampton as well as direction by Richard Eyre. The musical begins previews in the West End on December 3. For more information, check out a previous article on STEPHEN WARD here.

Pre-order the original London cast recording of STEPHEN WARD here.

View a larger version of the photo of Lloyd Webber, Blackledge and Spencer in the studio below.

Photo Credit: StephenWard