Andrew Lloyd Webber theatre. He also had originally set music to "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats" at the age of 15. In 1965, Lloyd Webber was a Queen's Scholar at Westminster School and studied history for a term at Magdalen College, Oxford, although he abandoned the course in the winter of 1965 to study at the Royal College of Music and pursue his interest in musical theatre. In 1965, when Lloyd Webber was a 17-year-old budding musical-theatre composer, he was introduced to the 20-year-old aspiring pop-song writer Tim Rice. Their first collaboration was "The Likes of Us", a musical based on the
Charles Hart (lyricist) which got in the way of my characters and plot, and of course he was entirely right. But my ambition was to be an English Sondheim. Being a lyricist is the ideal job for a university-educated dilettante, because it uses up all the rubbish in your education. Hart attracted the attention of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Cameron Mackintosh, who were judges of the Vivian Ellis Awards for music theatre writers in which Hart was a finalist with an entry based on "Moll Flanders". Webber hired him as a lyricist for "The Phantom of the Opera" a year later. He also