‘Is this show a legal minefield? Yes it is. But on we go.” So begins musical comedy duo Flo & Joan’s One Man Musical, a fringier-than-fringe venture placing Andrew Lloyd Webber centre-stage in his own autobiographical show. Is mixing it with all the commies and hippies now assembled in Edinburgh a sign that Lord LW is desperate for a break? Not a bit of it, insists the Cats man, who posits his “show about me!” as just another triumphal hero’s journey to place alongside those of Evita, Joseph and Jesus Christ.
Ah, but is it really “a show about me” – or a show about him? Authorship is the source of much meta-theatrical deviousness in One Man Musical, of which Lloyd Webber (George Fouracres) insists he is auteur, and who the hell are these two upstart women at a keyboard and drumkit behind him? It’s a winning concoction, that leads the famous Tory and buster of West End blocks all through his wild days, his mad existence – to a place, finally, where Lin-Manuel Miranda (a name that remains amusingly beyond Lloyd Webber’s grasp) is king and ALW’s popular touch is starting to look a bit clumsy.
If I initially wondered whether Fouracres’ voice was up to the challenge – the first number is a bit of a caterwaul – I was swiftly reassured by what ends up as a silence-the-doubters performance. Venturing Lloyd Webber as a haughty but pugnacious squire figure (if tweeds could speak …), albeit one with a lifelong attachment to his childhood moggy Perseus, Fouracres’ Andrew is “the best there ever was”: commercial genius, overflowing fount of good ideas, and a romantic lead, too – if you share his romantic ideal (few now do) of the deformed monster wooing the virgin bride.
I make it sound like a hatchet job, but it isn’t. Weaving Lloyd Webber-alike motifs into their score, those aforementioned ghosts at his feast Flo & Joan acknowledge the snobbery directed towards his music, and the poignancy of being left in the slipstream of cultural change. They do also pack the show with wickedly impertinent jokes, usually at the expense of ALW and his “musicools”. Audiences will love it – even if the lawyers demur.