Thatcherism and Andrew Lloyd Webber's Musicals

Abstract: This article delineates the key tenets of Thatcherism and considers the ways they might be enacted in Andrew Lloyd Webber's 1980's oeuvre. The author focuses on three shows that have often been linked with Thatcherite aesthetics: Cats (1981), Startlight Express (1984), and The Phantom of the Opera (1986). The article demonstrates how the musical language and dramaturgy of these musicals participated in larger cultural discourses shaped by Thatcherism, discourses that lauded "traditional values" and a "glorious" British past, that bridled against elitism, and that shifted the perception of the role of government and the relationship between the individual and the state.