LONDON -- Andrew Lloyd Webber has earned seven Tony Awards, a knighthood and hundreds of millions of dollars for writing some of the most popular musicals of all time, from his 1968 breakthrough, “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,” to “The Phantom of the Opera,” the longest-running show ever on Broadway. Nearly as legendary is his ego, a self-confidence worthy of an impresario whose success has long emboldened him to think on grand scales.
Which is why it was hard to believe Mr. Lloyd Webber when he said, during a recent interview, that he may stop involving himself in future productions of his work.
But he sounded perfectly sincere expounding on that comment as he sat high above the stage of his London Palladium Theater, like a lord in the heavens of the upper balcony. Stagehands below were setting up the yellow brick road for the evening performance of “The Wizard of Oz,” a largely faithful musical adaptation of the cherished film that he produced and for which he and Tim Rice wrote a few new songs. He said he may bring “Oz” to Broadway. Or he may not.
Mr. Lloyd Webber, 63, chalked up his ambivalence of late to the otherwise happy occasions of recently seeing “the two best productions of my shows that I had nothing to do with”: the revival of “Jesus Christ Superstar” at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario, which he hopes will come to Broadway, and a production of “Love Never Dies,” a sequel to “Phantom,” in Melbourne, Australia.
“Love Never Dies” has been a particularly bittersweet experience for Mr. Lloyd Webber, to hear him describe it during a rare and candid discussion. One of the highest-stakes sequels in history, given the popularity of “Phantom,” “Love Never Dies” coincided with Mr. Lloyd Webber’s treatment for prostate cancer. He said he struggled to write the musical, and his usual role as a hands-on producer was scrambled somewhat by his illness. The show opened in London in 2010 to mostly harsh reviews. A subsequent retooling drew some better notices, but overall negative buzz doomed the production, which will close next month.
While the Melbourne version looks more successful, Mr. Lloyd Webber said he was mindful that he did not have a hand in mounting it. “I just said, ‘That’s the score, do what you can,’ ” he recalled telling the director in Melbourne, Simon Phillips.
“So I’ve now decided what I might do is to have nothing to do with my shows for the foreseeable future, which is probably a very sound idea,” said Mr. Lloyd Webber, who was tanned and relaxed in an open-collared shirt and slacks, and whose tone only now and then turned solemn.
Pressed on this notion of self-exile, he pointed out that he also played no role in Des McAnuff’s mounting of “Superstar” in Stratford, which opened last month to laurels from critics. While Mr. Lloyd Webber holds the rights for a Broadway transfer of the McAnuff production, he said he was inclined to assign them to other producers.
“I don’t think I should be involved in bringing it into New York, really, on the grounds that anything I get involved with seems to go wrong,” he said. “I’ve come to this new conclusion. I’ll just smile and turn up at opening nights.”
Well, not quite. To assume that Mr. Lloyd Webber might be pulling back from the theatrical scene underestimates both his self-professed workaholism and his creative interests, which have only widened thanks to his near-giddy infatuation with casting stage shows through television contests. He is also, obviously, a man with strong opinions and a history of acting upon them. (His view that the original “Oz” score was underwritten, for instance, led him to compose new songs like “Nobody Understands Me” for Dorothy and “Red Shoes Blues” for the Wicked Witch.) But some of his recent collaborators said that Mr. Lloyd Webber seemed content to give way.
“Andrew has been very gracious, making it clear that he was happy to let us build our own ‘Superstar,’ ” Mr. McAnuff said by telephone last month.
Mr. Lloyd Webber has also had a largely hands-off role in the first Broadway revival of one of his best-known works, “Evita,” which originally ran in New York from 1979 to 1983 and won seven Tonys, including best musical. The revival, which is expected to open next year, is the brainchild of the Tony-winning director Michael Grandage (“Red”), who said in an interview that he wanted to reflect “all that has been learned about Argentina and, in particular, the life of the Perons since the original production.” He said he had briefed Mr. Lloyd Webber on new ideas for the musical, and added that he felt no pressure to be slavish to the original work.
“While we are keen to pay homage to the original iconic production in certain places, Andrew has also been very supportive of our wish to bring a new version to Broadway,” Mr. Grandage said.
Mr. Lloyd Webber, in tracing the recent career path that had led him to “Oz” at the Palladium, was neither defensive about creative failures nor prone to excuses, like the perfectly reasonable one of prostate cancer. Yet he did show a survivor’s capacity to assess life — and his own faults — without flinching.
I’ve learned, to my cost in some ways, I have a compulsive desire to write and work, and sometimes I’ve let myself into just doing something because I really just needed to do it,” he said. “So I got myself involved with a couple of musicals that probably I should not have done.”
He cited “The Woman in White,” his adaptation of the 1860 mystery novel by Wilkie Collins, which ran for only three and a half months on Broadway during the 2005-6 season (though he did receive a Tony nomination, for best score, his latest). His most recent success on Broadway was back in 1995, when “Sunset Boulevard” won seven Tonys, including for best musical, and ended up running for two and a half years — though it did not recoup its entire $13 million capitalization, a spokesman for Mr. Lloyd Webber said.
“Love Never Dies,” meanwhile, “had so many layers of problems,” Mr. Lloyd Webber said.
“One, I had cancer, and I therefore was not as involved with the production as I might have been,” he said. “And the production itself frankly didn’t deliver, and I was not on the case, and there was nobody around helping me to produce it who was also on the case. What I can’t tell is, I don’t know if there’s a subliminal resistance to the idea of a sequel to ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ anyway.”
While a Broadway production of “Love Never Dies” was postponed after the London problems, Mr. Lloyd Webber revealed that, even with the positive reviews in Melbourne, he was not sure that version would come to New York.
“I think there are a lot of people who would love to see it go there, but I think that we’re all realistic, and I think with the baggage that it’s got, it might be better to just let it be discovered,” he said of the musical, which will be filmed and sold on DVD.
The director of the London production of “Love Never Dies,” Jack O’Brien, a Tony winner for “Hairspray” and other shows, declined to comment when told of Mr. Lloyd Webber’s remarks. (In turn Mr. Lloyd Webber said that he had great respect for Mr. O’Brien.)
These last experiences were so distressing to Mr. Lloyd Webber that he said he was being “very careful” with developing original musicals — so much so that he does not have one in the works. He is talking to the producer Cameron Mackintosh about reviving another hit, “Cats,” in London in 2013 or 2014 (he had no idea if it would come to Broadway), and he is fielding interest in a film version of “Joseph.” His theatrical empire, the Really Useful Group, manages several theaters in the West End and oversees other projects.
For all that, he added, he would love to work on another new musical.
“I just can’t find a subject at the moment,” Mr. Lloyd Webber said. Asked about his sources of inspiration for musical ideas, his voice turned to a whisper. “You never know,” he replied, and then added: “It can just be as simple someone saying something, and out of the blue saying, ‘Yeah, I’ll do that.’ But so far I haven’t found anything at all.”
By comparison, he has found great comfort in his television casting shows, which Really Useful Group has produced with the BBC since the first installment, in 2006, which sought to find an actress to play the lead role of Maria in a “Sound of Music” revival. Mr. Lloyd Webber ended up serving as a judge, offering performers advice and deploying a sexual double entendre or two (unprintable here).
“It was the most dangerous decision that I ever took, because I didn’t know that I would work on television, and, second thing, it could have been a complete, complete disaster if we didn’t find the right girl to play Maria,” he said. Viewers ended up selecting a young actress named Connie Fisher, and, as hoped, many of them ended up buying tickets to see her. The revival ran in London for more than two years, and Mr. Lloyd Webber followed it up with reality casting shows for productions of “Joseph,” “Oliver!” and “Oz.”
While he credited the television series with expanding the audience for musical theater, he also described them as simply a pleasure to do during a time when he needed more laughter in his life.
“There’s no getting around it: Writing is hard, while working with young performers is nearly always a joy,” said Mr. Lloyd Webber, who is now cancer free but whose health still wavers. “I do want to write again. I hope to. But it’s also important for me to realize, as I get older, that I don’t have to be doing everything all at once.”
