Musical theatre responsible for "Les Misérables", which became the longest-running international musical hit in history. The team, in collaboration with Richard Maltby Jr., continued to produce hits, including "Miss Saigon", inspired by the Puccini opera "Madama Butterfly". The British composer Andrew Lloyd Webber saw similar success with "Evita", based on the life of Argentina's Eva Perón; "Cats", derived from the poems of T. S. Eliot (both of which musicals originally starred Elaine Paige); "Starlight Express", performed on roller skates; "The Phantom of the Opera", derived from the Gaston Leroux novel, "Le Fantôme de l'Opéra"; and "Sunset Boulevard" (from the classic film of
Madame White Snake (opera) composer. "Giving voice to sweeping melodies worthy of Puccini without sounding imitative, and employing such vocal effects as bent pitches, slides and Sprechstimme to suggest the unique idiom of Peking Opera, [Zhou] wove both aesthetics into a unique whole, creating a vivid and freestanding musical world of his own." Madame White Snake (opera) Madame White Snake is an opera with music by Zhou Long and libretto by Cerise Lim Jacobs, published by Oxford University Press. Awarded the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Music, it was premiered on Feb. 26, 2010, by Opera Boston at the Cutler Majestic Theatre. It is based