Tim Rice, the lyricist whose Evita won a Tony for a book with no spoken lines

Tim Rice

Photo: Thecharmschool / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	November 10, 1944 Amersham, Buckinghamshire, England
Occupation	Lyricist
Known for	Waking Sleeping Beauty, The Sound of 007
Awards	3 Tony Award · 3 Academy Award · Grammy · Songwriters Hall of Fame · Emmy · Johnny Mercer

Evita has no spoken dialogue. Every line is sung, from the funeral that opens the show to the last breath of its heroine, and still the Tony voters gave it the prize for Best Book of a Musical, the award meant for the scenes between the songs. The man who collected it, Tim Rice, had written a libretto that tells its whole story in rhyme. On the poster his name usually comes second, after Andrew Lloyd Webber’s or Elton John’s, and that billing has hidden what he is: a writer whose verse has been sung far more often than most poets have been read.

This season gives him two openings to watch. Jamie Lloyd’s stripped-back Evita, the London staging in which Rachel Zegler sang its most famous number from a balcony outside the Palladium, is heading to Broadway’s Winter Garden Theatre. And in north London a Christmas comedy about Sherlock Holmes arrives with his songs and a different composer beside him: Howard Goodall, in place of Lloyd Webber, who shared the credit when the play opened in Birmingham. The producers have not explained the change. Rice once said the old partnership had run its course, and most of his biggest hits after the seventies came without it.

Sir Timothy Miles Bindon Rice was born on 10 November 1944 at Shardeloes, a country house near Amersham in Buckinghamshire that served as a maternity hospital during the war. He went to St Albans School and Lancing College, decided against university, worked as an articled clerk at a London law firm and spent a year at the Sorbonne before joining EMI as a management trainee in 1966. Two years later he was assistant to the producer Norrie Paramor, working with Cliff Richard. He was already writing with Lloyd Webber: their first attempt, The Likes of Us, was finished in 1965 and not staged until 2005.

What followed is the odd stretch of theatre history in which the record came before the show. Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat began in 1968 as a short piece for a London school. Jesus Christ Superstar was released as a concept album in 1970 before it reached a stage, and Evita took the same route, a double album in 1976 with Julie Covington and Colm Wilkinson, before it opened in London in 1978. Rice wrote like someone trained on the pop single: plain words and rhymes that land on the beat. His sources were the history books and the Bible. He told an interviewer in 1982 that he would “always rather take a true story over an untrue one”, and putting Jesus into a rock opera got him accused of blasphemy.

Nine years after Superstar, he was on the other side of that argument. As host of the BBC’s Friday Night, Saturday Morning, he chaired the studio debate over Monty Python’s Life of Brian, with John Cleese and Michael Palin defending the film against Malcolm Muggeridge and the Bishop of Southwark.

After the run with Lloyd Webber came a series of new partners. With Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson of ABBA he wrote Chess in 1984; its duet “I Know Him So Well” became a UK number one for Elaine Paige and Barbara Dickson. For Disney he finished Aladdin with Alan Menken after the death of the lyricist Howard Ashman, and “A Whole New World” won the Academy Award for best original song and gave Rice his only American number-one single. With Elton John he wrote the songs for The Lion King in 1994, then Aida, which won the Tony for best score in 2000. A third Oscar came for “You Must Love Me”, written with Lloyd Webber for Alan Parker’s 1996 film of Evita.

His other bibliography runs alongside the shows. In 1977 he co-founded the Guinness Book of British Hit Singles with his brother Jo, Paul Gambaccini and Mike Read, and he edited it for nearly two decades, which meant the man writing chart hits was also writing the ledger that recorded them. In 1981 he set up the publisher Pavilion Books with Colin Webb and Michael Parkinson. His autobiography, Oh, What a Circus, published in 1999, takes its title from a song in Evita and stops on the night that show opened in London, as if everything afterwards belonged to a second volume. From 2017 to 2022 he was president of the London Library.

The awards came mostly in American currency. He holds three Oscars, three Tonys, including the book award for Evita, and five Grammys. In September 2018 a Primetime Emmy for the live concert staging of Jesus Christ Superstar made him, Lloyd Webber and John Legend EGOT winners on the same night. He was knighted in 1994, entered the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1999 and was named a Disney Legend in 2002.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lddMjq_bgg

Away from the theatre he has been president of the Marylebone Cricket Club and a regular voice on Radio 4’s Just a Minute. During the pandemic he started a podcast, Get Onto My Cloud, that reads from his autobiography between the recordings. His daughter Eva Rice, named after Eva Perón, is a novelist.

Evita begins previews at the Winter Garden on 27 February 2027, with opening night set for 25 March. The Sherlock Holmes comedy plays Alexandra Palace Theatre from 24 November to 17 January, with press night on 1 December. One show revives words he wrote in his early thirties, the other carries lyrics he wrote past eighty. Both depend on the same thing his Tony recognised in 1980: the composer gets top billing, and the story is still told in Rice’s words.

Tags: writers, musicals, The Lion King, Elton John, Tim Rice, Andrew Lloyd Webber