Tom hooper

Tuesday

Alexander Larman

The evolution of Andrew Lloyd Webber

Unless you have been rock-bound over the last few weeks – or avoiding all social media, which in 2025 amounts to much the same – you can scarcely have missed the controversy over the recent three-night gala staging of the Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar at the Hollywood Bowl. Jesus, you see, is not played by a white man, as is customary, but Cynthia Erivo, the Wicked star who is black, female and queer. This has not gone down well with traditionalists, but Erivo is one of the most talented singers working today – as well as a fine actress – and so, if the first reviews are to be believed, she blew the roof off the Hollywood Bowl, stealing the show entirely from a starry cast including Adam Lambert and Josh Gad.

Andrew Lloyd Webber (Getty)

Tuesday

Alexander Larman

A century of Hollywood’s spectacular flops

From our UK edition

Gore Vidal once sighed that ‘every time a friend succeeds, I die a little’, and there is inevitably a sense that when some idiotic blockbuster makes $1 billion worldwide, our collective intelligence loses a couple of IQ points. It’s a relief, then, when the worst examples of their kind, made at enormous cost to negligible artistic impact, flop hideously: proof that audiences will not fork out for any arrant piece of trash. The most recent high-profile failure of this kind was Todd Phillips’s bewilderingly poor Joker sequel, Folie à Deux, which insulted its audience and thus precipitated its commercial failure.

Thursday

Deborah Ross

Top of my must-watch mustn’t-watch: Cats revisited

From our UK edition

At the outset of lockdown I gave you my list of top mustn’t-watch films — that is, the ones that aren’t worth the bother — with the rider that when Cats is released digitally it will, however, likely be a must-watch mustn’t-watch. ‘I absolutely must watch this mustn’t-watch,’ you may even have said to yourself, after reading some of the wonderfully terrible reviews. (The Daily Telegraph gave it zero stars. Variety said it was one of those ‘once-in-a-blue-moon embarrassments’.) And it is as hoped.