A heavy rock backbeat pounds through the theater's walls and into the otherwise placid administrative wing that overlooks Pennsylvania Avenue. Twenty minutes later the grinning Mr. Steinman, with gray hair hanging below his shoulders, strolls in wearing blue jeans, a blue oxford shirt, sneakers, a black leather jacket and a black necktie that has on it the image of a skull. A woman's face floats in each of the skull's eye sockets. And if I can't create it in my art, at least I have this tie. And that never gets talked about, and that hasn't been used in theater.
Theater tends to have very literal lyrics.
Mr. Steinman actually started out in the 1970s trying to create musicals at the New York Shakespeare Festival for the legendary producer Joseph Papp, who threw an ashtray at him when Mr. Steinman said he was leaving the theater to make records. Several things have drawn the irreverent Mr. Steinman back to the stodgy old theater world. More significantly, Mr. Steinman thinks that audiences have changed, thanks in no small part to Mr. Lloyd Webber. Rather than appealing to a coterie crowd in a single New York City theater each night, Lloyd Webber musicals attract huge throngs in cities across the country and around the world. Andrew Lloyd Webber is musical theater's answer to Pearl Jam.