Parenting & Family Quote by Andrew Lloyd Webber

Calling his own take a "corny answer" is classic Andrew Lloyd Webber: a wink at sentimentality before he leans into it anyway. He knows the criticism that haunts blockbuster musicals - that they’re basically expensive bedtime stories - and he disarms it by agreeing, sort of. If audiences for musicals are "children in different ways", he’s not insulting them; he’s defending the genre’s core transaction. Musicals ask for a particular kind of buy-in: emotion first, plausibility later. Webber frames that as a feature, not a flaw, and slips himself into the role of custodian of wonder rather than mere hitmaker.

The phrase "aren't they?" is doing quiet work. It turns a claim into a shared secret, inviting the listener to admit their own need for grand feelings, easy tears, and melodic catharsis. That’s also a canny cultural move: it rebrands escapism as psychological truth. Not childishness, but the part of adulthood that still wants permission to feel uncomplicated things in public.

Then the mood shifts: "There are things of mine I'm sorry haven't come here". Under the genial generalization is a flash of professional ache - the geography of taste, the uneven afterlife of a career. "Here" suggests a particular market, city, or institution that confers legitimacy. For a composer associated with mass appeal, the subtext is unmistakable: I gave you the pop operas you embraced; I wish you’d taken the rest of me, too.