Does anyone, including her own mother, love Nicole Scherzinger as much as Andrew Lloyd Webber? Doubt it!
Billboard interviewed the legendary composer ahead of the release of his memoir Unmasked, and Webber gushed about Scherzinger’s supreme ability at playing a sad, old cat clinging to a blanket for her only sense of warmth and tactile reinforcement. Scherzinger, you may remember, played Grizabella in a West End revival of Webber’s Cats a few years ago. Webber told Billboard:
Nicole Scherzinger, how long have you got? Nicole is, in my view, one of the most talented artists I’ve ever worked with. She’s also in my view somewhat ill-advised, because she should have done Cats on Broadway…Nicole is a superb, wonderfully talented girl. And I speak with the complete devotion to her talent when I say I wished she’d been advised differently. I know that in America she’s sort of ‘ex-Pussycat Doll’ and not the talent I know her to be. But her performance of “Memory” in many ways is as good as you’ll ever hear. Barbra’s is, in a way, smoothed out — the way she always wants everything to be, perfect. But Nicole’s is something that is an astonishing thing. She’s a God given musical theater actress who has not given herself to musical theater.
Hm. Agree to disagree. This performance of “Memory” is in many ways as good as you’ll ever hear or see or never stop thinking about because once you’ve seen Celine Dion in a tail and wig made to look like cat ears (I guess she’s a Maine coon?) honestly what else is there??
The Billboard piece purports to ask Webber about the “juiciest” moments of his memoir. These include: Princess Diana doing splits backstage at Cats (“A little bit of the royal personage, more than you normally would have seen, was revealed”); Barbra Streisand getting claustrophobic during a performance of Cats and requesting a glass of milk before she left (“That is a thought that in my entire career has not been put to me,” said Webber when Billboard suggested she was joking), and his alleged feud with Patti LuPone (“I’ve never had any feud with Patti at all”).
If this is the juicy stuff, I fear the dry stuff would make my eyes crust over. These are like the barely weird dreams I have that in the morning make me feel bad about myself for having such a defective imagination. And Andrew Lloyd Webber lived this!