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Elton John, Music
Sir Elton John was born Reginald Kenneth Dwight in Pinner, Middlesex, England, on March 25, 1947. Dwight began playing piano at the age of four. He was educated at the Royal Academy of Music, to which he won a scholarship at the age of 11. After studying for six years, he left the academy with the intention of breaking into the music business. In 1961, he joined his first band, Bluesology, and spent several years backing up touring bands. In the mid-1960s, he grew dissatisfied with the group’s direction and attempted to strike out on his own.

He didn’t achieve success initially as a songwriter until by happy accident he came into collaboration with lyricist Bernie Taupin. Dwight had failed in an audition at a record label called Liberty Records, but was given a stack of lyrics that Taupin had left with the company. He wrote music for Taupin’s lyrics and began writing letters to him. By the time they met six months later, he had changed his name in homage to his former Bluesology band mates Elton Dean and Long John Baldry. The team began turning out songs at a brisk pace for various recording and performing artists. During this period, around 1968, John began recording singles for release under his own name. He scored his first international hits in 1971 with his second album, which included one of his best-known compositions, “Your Song.”

Since then, his international career as a singer/songwriter and performer has spanned more than three decades, and he is one of the top-selling solo artists of all time. He has won a wide array of entertainment industry honors, including Grammy awards, Tony awards, and an Oscar, and he continues to add innovative work to his personal repertoire of 35 gold and 25 platinum albums.

More to our purpose, John’s music has also become tremendously successful on Broadway. He has written and collaborated on two Tony Award-winning musicals: The Lion King (adapted from the Disney animated film) and AIDA. Opening in London in 2005 is a stage adaptation of the film Billy Elliot, for which John has written the music with lyricist Lee Hall. Also slated for a future Broadway run is John and Taupin’s musical version of the Anne Rice horror novel The Vampire Lestat.

John’s passion for life reaches well beyond his talents in the music industry. His commitment to the fight against AIDS led to the inception of the Elton John AIDS Foundation, which has dispersed a combined total of grants surpassing $50 million to date, making it one of the largest public nonprofit organizations in the AIDS arena.
In 1998, Elton John was knighted by the Queen of England. He was honored by the Kennedy Center in 2004 for his lifetime of achievements in the arts.


Tim Rice, Lyrics
Though Sir Tim Rice initially had every intention of making a career for himself in the law, he somehow managed to get sidetracked into a quite successful life in musical theater as a lyricist.

Rice was born in 1944 in Buckinghamshire, England, and entered the world of pop music as a lead singer for ‘60s-era rock bands. In 1965, after working for EMI Records and noted British rock producer Norrie Paramor, he met a fellow hopeful songwriter named Andrew Lloyd Webber, who had aspirations to compose for the stage.

The duo began a successful composer-lyricist collaboration which achieved its first Broadway success with Jesus Christ Superstar in 1971. Their follow-up Broadway effort, Evita, won two Tony awards. Webber and Rice’s very first musical effort — Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (1968) – finally made it to a New York production in 1982.

In the early 1980s, Rice began collaborating with Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson – members of the rock band ABBA — on the musical Chess. It first appeared on record in 1984 and gained an international following, spawning several hit singles. In 1985, Chess premiered in London’s West End and enjoyed a measure of success, only to flop after its Broadway debut.

Recently, Rice’s name has been associated most successfully with Disney film and stage musical projects. He collaborated with composer Alan Menken on the stage version of Beauty and the Beast and with Sir Elton John on The Lion King (both the film and stage versions) and – most notably for this Willows Theatre production – AIDA. Rice also worked on the scores for the animated films Aladdin (with Menken) and The Road to El Dorado (with John).

AIDA earned Rice and John a Tony award for their score. He has also written the lyrics for the musicals Blondel (music by Stephen Oliver), Heathcliff (John Farrar) and Starmania (Michel Berger). He has received several Oscars and Grammys, and was knighted in 1994.

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