Michael Crawford teases project as Andrew Lloyd Webber hints at 84-year-old return
Michael Crawford is weighing a return to performing after lunch with Andrew Lloyd Webber, who is hinting at a project for the 84-year-old. Crawford said the pair are still “great mates,” and that he will need months before he knows whether the idea may materialise.
Andrew Lloyd Webber and Michael Crawford
“I had lunch with Andrew Lloyd Webber the other day; we're still great mates,” Crawford said. He added: “He's hinting that he wants me to do something… it may materialise, but I won't know for another few months. I've got to keep practising like crazy for it to be acceptable.”
Crawford said he has already started the work. “I go to [singing] class – I've done three classes this week with my musical director, Nigel Lilley,” he said. That is the clearest sign that this is more than nostalgia: Crawford is preparing as if a stage assignment could actually land.
Phantom and a return
Webber cast Crawford in the principal role in Phantom in 1986, after Crawford had already won viewers in the Seventies sitcom Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em and later became the original Phantom in The Phantom of the Opera in the Eighties. Crawford said he would “love to do a one-man thing, looking back, so that I involve the audience and they think of their early life.”
That idea fits the shape of what he is proposing: a smaller, audience-facing piece rather than a return to the scale of his old musical work. The complication is that nothing is locked in, and Crawford said he will not know for another few months whether the hint turns into a real assignment.
New Zealand, ME and the long journey
Crawford has lived in New Zealand since 2007 with his wife, Natasha MacAller, who is 68. He said, “she's so good for me,” and said the move helped him recover after chronic fatigue syndrome, also called ME, developed while he was performing in The Woman in White in 2004.
“It was my fault – I wore this vast costume, and I lost so much water during every show that in the end, my immune system broke down and I got ME,” he said. “I ended up going to New Zealand and I was better within a year.”
He is now coming back to the UK because “the journey's too much; over 20-odd hours,” and he said he goes to New Zealand whenever it is warm. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, he had been planning a musical with the late West End producer Bill Kenwright, but “He has sadly passed and that fell apart.”
Crawford is also in talks with a production company about a documentary on his life, and he said, “They've done Christopher Reeve, Paul McCartney and Bruce Springsteen.” For now, the immediate read is simple: at 84, Crawford is not announcing a comeback, but he is openly preparing for one.
