Once-in-a-Lifetime Only U.S. Event in support of the Release of his long-awaited Autobiography, Unmasked (HarperCollins)

A Rare and Intimate Evening with ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER in Conversation With Special Guest Host and Award-Winning Actress GLENN CLOSE

The Legendary Composer Opens Up about his Life and his Celebrated Musicals, including Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,  Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, Cats, The Phantom of the Opera, Sunset Boulevard and School of Rock

Up Close with the Master Storyteller as He Recounts his Successes and Setbacks, His Private Demons and the Passions that Sustain Him

Andrew Lloyd Webber introduces and discusses his new memoir, Unmasked, in this exclusive literary event on Monday March 5 at The Town Hall.  This program, the only one of its kind in the U.S., features Lloyd Webber in conversation with the award-winning actress Glenn Close, who will serve as a special guest host for the evening. An audience Q&A section is included.

This once-in-a-lifetime event celebrates the publication of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s long-awaited autobiography, UNMASKED by HarperCollins, coinciding with the legendary composer’s 70th birthday.

Written entirely in his own words, the internationally-acclaimed composer recounts his fascinating life and remarkable career in UNMASKED, pulling back the curtain on his groundbreaking musicals including Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar (making its network television debut on Easter Sunday, April 1 on NBC and featuring John Legend, Sarah Bareilles and Alice Cooper), Evita, Cats, Phantom of the Opera, Sunset Boulevard and School of Rock.

Written entirely in his own words, internationally-acclaimed composer Andrew Lloyd Webber recounts his fascinating life and remarkable career in UNMASKED, his new autobiography set for release on March 6, 2018.

With his signature humor and self-deprecating tone, Lloyd Webber shares the details of his early personal and professional years, including his early artistic influences. In UNMASKED, Lloyd Webber takes stock of his achievements, the twists of fate and circumstance which brought him both success and disappointment, and opens up about his personal demons and the passions that sustain him.

Actress Glenn Close will be the special guest host for The Town Hall event. A six-time Academy Award nominee, Close won a TONY award for her portrayal of Norma Desmond in Webber’s Sunset Boulevard, and won a London Evening Standard award for the London Coliseum production of the show in Spring 2016.  She reprised the role this year at the Palace Theatre in New York.

A record of several exciting and turbulent decades of British and American musical theater and the transformation of popular music itself, UNMASKED is ultimately a chronicle of artistic creation. Lloyd Webber looks back at his early influences -- Rodgers and Hammerstein, the pop and rock music of the 1960s, Puccini’s Tosca and the poetry of T.S. Eliot, among others – and takes us behind the scenes in the development of some of his most famous works. He details his collaborations with luminaries such as Tim Rice, Robert Stigwood, Harold Prince, Cameron Mackintosh, and Trevor Nunn, revealing fascinating details about each show and the creative, logistical and political battles involved in presenting them.

Reflecting a life that included many passions (from architecture to Turkish Van swimming cats), full of witty and revealing anecdotes, and featuring cameo appearances by numerous celebrities – Elaine Paige, Sarah Brightman, David Frost, Julie Covington, Judi Dench, Richard Branson, A.R. Rahman, Mandy Patinkin, Richard Rodgers, Norman Jewison, Milos Forman, Placido Domingo, Barbra Streisand, Michael Crawford, Gillian Lynne, Betty Buckley, and more – UNMASKED at last reveals the true face of the man beneath the musical legend.

Full of colorful characters, rich storytelling and illustrated with sixteen pages of color photos, UNMASKED provides unique insight into the life of the man who has entertained millions of audiences around the world with his music. 

The special event at the Town Hall on March 5th promises to be unique “opening night” for this long-awaited memoir, where audience members can join in a rare and intimate conversation between the composer and one of his most iconic stars.   

Each ticket purchase will include a hardcover copy of UNMASKED, which will also be available for sale at The Town Hall on the night of the show.

About Andrew Lloyd Webber:

When Sunset Boulevard joined School Of Rock, Cats and The Phantom Of The Opera on Broadway earlier this year, Andrew Lloyd Webber became the only person to equal the record set in 1953 by Rodgers and Hammerstein with four Broadway shows running concurrently. Other musicals he has composed include Aspects Of Love, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita and Love Never Dies.

His production of School Of Rock is the first British musical to have world premiered on Broadway. He has co-produced his own shows including Cats and The Phantom Of The Opera and as a solo producer he presented the groundbreaking Bombay Dreams which introduced the double Oscar winning Bollywood composer AR Rahman to the Western stage.

Other productions include the Olivier Award Winning Daisy Pulls It Off and La Bete, the record breaking Palladium production of The Sound Of Music and The Wizard of Oz.

He owns seven West End Theatres including the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, the Palladium and most recently the St James which reopened this year as The Other Palace and provides a unique London home for new musicals in development. He is passionate about the importance of music in education and the Andrew Lloyd Webber Foundation has become one of Britain’s leading charities supporting the arts and music.

His awards, both as composer and producer, include seven Tonys, seven Oliviers, a Golden Globe, an Oscar, the Praemium Imperiale, the Richard Rodgers Award for Excellence in Musical Theatre, a BASCA Fellowship, the Kennedy Center Honor and a Grammy for Best Contemporary Classical Composition for Requiem, his setting of the Latin Requiem mass which contains one of his best known compositions, Pie Jesu.

He was knighted by Her Majesty The Queen in 1992 and created an honorary life peer in 1997.

About Glenn Close:

A six-time Academy Award nominee, Close stars in the title role of the film adaptation of Meg Wolitzer’s bestselling novel, The Wife, with Jonathan Pryce and Christian Slater for Swedish director Bjorn Runge.

The film had its world debut at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival premiering to rave reviews for her performance. Close is also in Julian Fellow’s adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Crooked House alongside an all-star cast that included Max Irons, Christina Hendricks, Gillian Anderson and Terence Stamp.

Close reprised her Tony Award-winning role in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Sunset Boulevard  in a new production at the London Coliseum in the Spring of 2016. For that performance she won a London Evening Standard Award and was nominated for an Olivier Award. The full production, starring Close, opened on Broadway this February, for an exclusive limited engagement.
Close made her feature film debut in George Roy Hill's The World According to Garp, earning her awards from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the National Board of Review as well as her first Academy Award nomination. She was subsequently Oscar-nominated for The Big Chill, The Natural, Fatal Attraction and Stephen Frears'; Dangerous Liaisons.
Close received her sixth Academy Award nomination in 2012, along with Golden Globe and SAG
nominations, for Albert Nobbs. She wrote the screenplay with (Man Booker prize-winning novelist) John Banville.

Her recent film appearances include What Happened to Monday, The Girl With All the Gifts, Wilde
Wedding and the upcoming comedy Father Figures. Her film credits include Richard Marquand's Jagged Edge, Barbet Schroeder's Reversal of Fortune, Franco Zeffirelli's Hamlet, István Szabó's Meeting Venus,

Ron Howard's The Paper, Stephen Herek's 101 Dalmatians, Kevin Lima's 102 Dalmatians, Wolfgang
Petersen's Air Force One, Robert Altman's Cookie's Fortune, Rose Troche's The Safety of Objects,
Merchant Ivory's Le Divorce, Chris Terrio's Heights, Rodrigo García's Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her and Nine Lives, Evening, Low Down, 5 to 7, Anesthesia, The Great Gilly Hopkins and Guardians of the Galaxy.

In 2012, Close headlined the fifth and final season of the critically-acclaimed original legal thriller,
Damages. For her riveting portrayal of high-stakes litigator ‘Patty Hewes’, Close won two consecutive Emmys as “Best Actress in a Drama Series” and two subsequent Emmy nominations, along with a Golden Globe Award and three SAG Award nominations. Other television credits include The Shield, The Elephant Man, Something About Amelia, Stones for Ibarra, The Ballad of Lucy Whipple and In the Gloaming, for which she won a CableACE Award.

Close made her theatre, and Broadway, debut in Harold Prince's revival of Love for Love. Her theater credits include The Crucifer of Blood, The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs (Obie Award), Barnum (Tony nomination) and Tony Awards for her performances in The Real Thing and Death and the Maiden, both directed by Mike Nichols. In London, she reteamed with the director of the original Sunset Boulevard stage production, Trevor Nunn, in his Royal National Theatre revival of A Streetcar Named Desire. She returned to Broadway for the 2014 revival production of Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance.