‘King of the musicools!’ Inside the outrageous musical send-up of Andrew Lloyd Webber
One Man Musical was launched under a veil of discretion, with its creators anticipating it might not last a week. Six months on, after hit Edinburgh and Soho theatre runs, it has a six-week season in the heart of the West End. (Oh, and it was ranked the Guardian’s favourite comedy show of 2024 too.) You’d never guess from the coy title what a sensation this maiden musical-theatre offering from comedy duo Flo & Joan is becoming. But a sensation it is – and will remain, unless its subject, and his lawyers, lodge a belated demand that it cease and desist.
When Flo & Joan – AKA sisters Rosie and Nicola Dempsey – opened the show last summer, they were tight-lipped about which “one man” their musical referred to. But with its fringe success, the cat escaped its bag: the show traces the life story, in song and soliloquy, of the “king of the musicools” Andrew Lloyd Webber. Starring comedian and actor (and a recent Hamlet at Shakespeare’s Globe) George Fouracres, in what I’ll jump the gun and call the performance of a lifetime, it begins as a seeming satire on the career of a man often dismissed as a Thatcherite purveyor of crass mega-musicals. It then develops into something more acute: part-cartoon, part-psychologically rich portrait of an artist out of his time, raging against his vast distance from the zeitgeist.
It’s a monstrous caricature of a self-fascinated toff – yet it also manages to be tender-hearted
“The problem Andrew faces in the show is a problem every artist is scared of,” says Rosie Dempsey. “So we’re writing it thinking, ‘This could happen to us.’” In the show, Lloyd Webber plots another comeback and rails against the cutting-edge relevance of the Hamilton and Hollywood composer Lin-Manuel Miranda – whose name, in Lloyd Webber’s fury, hilariously continues to elude him.
By contrast, Flo & Joan have all the cool(ish) cachet of a well-loved comedy act now turning their hands to musical theatre. They are currently developing a musical “with an original idea and a massive cast” – but struggling to get it made. So researching Lloyd Webber’s heyday for One Man Musical was bittersweet, they say. “His was a time,” says Rosie, “when the musicals machine ran at a million miles an hour, and no one was competing with a phone. He was given all the space and money he needed to make sure his shows succeeded. That doesn’t happen now.”
So the sisters pivoted to One Man Musical instead, as a playful (and affordable) diversion to revive their flagging love for the Edinburgh fringe. “We asked ourselves,” recalls Rosie, “‘Who is one person you could write a good musical about?’ Then we thought, ‘What if Andrew Lloyd Webber, the man who is most famous for writing musicals, gets a musical about himself?’ It felt very funny: a person in the middle of the genre he’s famous for, but having lost all control of how his story gets told.” It helped that the Dempseys grew up as Lloyd Webber fangirls. “Our nan used to play the Phantom album,” says Rosie. “We were both in Joseph at school,” adds Nicola. “We listened to other songs from other musicals – but he was the only writer anyone could name.”
What made Lloyd Webber’s life particularly ripe for show treatment, though, was the sisters’ “complicated feelings” about him. His shows are simultaneously great and awful. “We went and saw Phantom,” says Rosie, “and there are some weird bits in it, but also bits when I was overcome with emotion because the orchestra swells are gorgeous.” Here was a man who bestrode his artform – and sort of ruined it. “Our opinion about him constantly changed,” says Rosie. “Everything we read, going back and listening to his music – what we thought of him was, and is, constantly in flux.”
Lloyd Webber fans have been coming to the show and enjoying it, and it’s Flo & Joan’s surprising even-handedness that makes One Man Musical great. That and the tart and outrageous good humour, plus the firecracker performance of Fouracres, whose Lloyd Webber is both a monstrous caricature of an entitled, self-fascinated toff, and a tender-hearted defence of social misfittery.
“George has an unusual brain,” says Rosie, who spends much of the show at her upstage drumkit, laughing at Fouracres’ antics. “One of the songs, Unusual Boy, is about a kid who was interested in odd things that most kids aren’t. And it dawns on you that George was that boy. That’s where a lot of the empathy comes through.”
Will that empathy be enough to keep the Lloyd Webber lawyers at bay? (The sisters consulted their own lawyers, and consider the show legally legit.) As far as Rosie and Nicola are aware, Lloyd Webber’s people have attended the show. What if Lord LW himself were to materialise in the front row? “I’d be worried everyone would just watch him,” says Rosie. “But I imagine he’s got more important things to do.” Like writing a new musical about the comedy duo Flo & Joan, say? “I would respect that so hard,” laughs Nicola. “What a horrible musical that would be!”
One Man Musical is at Underbelly Boulevard, London, 16 January to 2 March
