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History Daily

Saturday Matinee: Closing Night

History Daily

Airship | Noiser | Wondery

History

4.42.1K Ratings

🗓️ 30 December 2023

⏱️ 61 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

On today's Saturday Matinee, we go to the theater to learn why Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical, The Woman in White, was one of the legendary composer's least successful productions.



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Transcript

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0:00.0

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0:06.0

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0:10.5

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0:11.6

com. Even if you've never been a participant in a theater production, you know the big feelings of opening night, the nerves, the anticipation, the self-doubt, everyone involved in putting on a play wonders, Will I screw this up?

0:33.8

Is this going to be a failure because of me?

0:36.6

A flub line, a wrong note, a missed cue, a bad casting choice,

0:40.8

a disaster script.

0:42.4

You can feel it. The tension as the curbs. casting choice, a disaster script.

0:42.5

You can feel it.

0:43.8

The tension as the curtain rises and the applause dies down,

0:47.6

and the theater goes quiet, waiting for the first line to reverberate

0:51.4

so that critics and snooty audience members can silently judge the weeks,

0:56.0

months, maybe even years of your work.

0:59.6

But there's another fraught theater moment, Closing Night, the last performance.

1:05.0

Are you wistfully ending a long career defining run?

1:08.0

Will you head to Sardis to toast with Champagne?

1:11.0

Or is this closing night an ignoble one? Are you out of cash, out of fashion, out of luck, out on the street?

1:19.6

One man who knows all of these feelings is Andrew Lloyd Webber. Famous for Cats, Evita, and Phantom of

1:26.1

the Opera, he's also had his share of disappointments. One of them is the Woman in White, which

1:31.6

vanished from Broadway in February of 2006 after 109 performances,

1:36.8

far less than Katz record-setting run of 7,485 performances, a record only broken by Andrew Lloyd Webber's other blockbuster Phantom of

...

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