Lloyd Webber Makes Song & Dance Over Denise???
Date: 3 May 2002
According to today's
Daily Mail,
Andrew Lloyd Webber has become so enamoured of
Denise Van Outen and her now-proven stage talent that he's planning to resurrect his 1980s
Song and Dance number just for her, sans perhaps the
Dance. Originally a standalone song cycle called
Tell Me on a Sunday, written in 1979 for
Marti Webb with lyrics by
Don Black, the singing act was later combined with dancer Wayne Sleep's ballet,
Dash, to form the whole.
Song and Dance premiered in 1982 at the West End's Palace Theatre, where it played for two years. It was subsequently seen on Broadway, starring Bernadette Peters, and revived in 1990 at the West End's Shaftesbury Theatre. The story centres around an English girl who moves to New York and has various relationships with American men. Though we can't speak for the romantic angles, it's no coincidence that the English Van Outen has just come back from Broadway, where she reprised her Roxie Hart role from
Chicago (she's now finishing off with a final few weeks in the London production of the Kander and Ebb musical). Lloyd Webber apparently likes the idea of somebody "who is the real thing" in
Song and Dance. He plans to try out the revamped and racier Van Outen version at his Sydmonton estate in Hampshire and, if it works, present it in the West End.
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