“We couldn’t allow things to just trundle along,” Andrew Lloyd Webber says. “We had to make a big change.”

He’s drumming his fingers on the dining room table of his Upper West Side apartment as he recounts the cascade of catastrophes that recently reshaped his life and career.

For so long Lloyd Webber, one of the most successful composers in history, had minted money, with his blockbuster musicals like “The Phantom of the Opera” and “Cats” playing for decades on Broadway and in the West End. But COVID changed that, shuttering theaters, including the six London venues that Lloyd Webber owns and operates. In an instant, the live entertainment juggernaut that he had built meticulously over five decades was struggling to survive.

“I became very aware that there was no alternative source o

See Full Page