What is the name of the international company set up in 1977 by English composer and impresario of musical theatre whose well-known works include "The Phantom of the Opera" and "Jesus Christ Superstar"?
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Really Useful Group The Really Useful Group Ltd. (RUG) is an international company set up in 1977 by Andrew Lloyd Webber. It is involved in theatre, film, television, video and concert productions, merchandising, magazine publishing, records and music publishing. The name is inspired by a phrase from the children's book series "The Railway Series" in which Thomas the Tank Engine and other locomotives are referred to as "Really Useful Engines".
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Andrew Lloyd Webber Andrew Lloyd Webber, Baron Lloyd-Webber (born 22 March 1948) is an English composer and impresario of musical theatre. Several of his musicals have run for more than a decade both in the West End and on Broadway. He has composed 13 musicals, a song cycle, a set of variations, two film scores, and a Latin Requiem Mass. Several of his songs have been widely recorded and were hits outside of their parent musicals, notably "The Music of the Night" from "The Phantom of the Opera", "I Don't Know How to Love Him" from "Jesus Christ Superstar", "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina" and "You Must Love Me" from "Evita", "Any Dream Will Do" from "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" and "Memory" from "Cats". In 2001 the "New York Times" referred to him as "the most commercially successful composer in history". Ranked the "fifth most powerful person in British culture" by "The Telegraph" in 2008, the lyricist Don Black stated "Andrew more or less single-handedly reinvented the musical."
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42nd Street (musical) 42nd Street is an American musical with a book by Michael Stewart and Mark Bramble, lyrics by Al Dubin and Johnny Mercer, and music by Harry Warren. The 1980 Broadway production, produced by David Merrick, directed by an ailing Gower Champion and orchestrated by Philip J. Lang, won the Tony Award for Best Musical and became a long-running hit. The show was produced in London in 1984 (winning the Olivier Award for Best Musical) and its 2001 Broadway revival won the Tony for Best Revival.
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Pocket Opera Pocket Opera is an opera company based in San Francisco, California which has been presenting operas in English since 1978. The company was founded by Donald Pippin, whose musical career has spanned over six decades. Born in Zebulon, North Carolina and educated at Harvard University, Pippin began his career as an accompanist at George Balanchine's School of American Ballet in New York City.
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Squonk Opera Squonk Opera is a group of interdisciplinary performing artists from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Led by artistic directors Jackie Dempsey and Steve O'Hearn, Squonk Opera formed in 1992 and has created thirteen distinct shows and performed in over 250 venues in the United States. Squonk Opera has been touring internationally since 2003 - to Scotland, Belgium, Germany and twice to South Korea, where they opened both the Busan International Performing Arts Festival and the World Music Theater Festival. Over 200,000 people have seen Squonk around the world, and reviews include "insane majesty" from The Scotsman, and "...surreal and poetic" from USA Today.
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Opera Opera (] ; English plural: "operas"; Italian plural: "opere" ] ) is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text (libretto) and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. In traditional opera, singers do two types of singing: recitative, a speech-inflected style and arias, a more melodic style, in which notes are sung in a sustained fashion. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance. The performance is typically given in an opera house, accompanied by an orchestra or smaller musical ensemble, which since the early 19th century has been led by a conductor.
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Boston Lyric Opera Boston Lyric Opera (BLO) is an American opera company based in Boston, Massachusetts, founded in 1976.
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List of Christmas operas Christmas operas are operas which are thematically based on either the Nativity of Jesus or secular Christmas stories. The earliest Christmas operas appeared in the early 17th century, not long after the creation of the art form. Because of the ban on secular theatrical works during the season of Advent, these early Christmas operas, while elaborately staged, were based on religious themes relating to the Nativity. By the mid 19th century the ban on secular operas during Advent had ceased, and operas based on a wider array of Christmas themes, such as Santa Claus and King Wenceslaus, emerged. Several operas have been inspired by Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol", including works by composers Bernard Herrmann and Thea Musgrave. The story of the Magi has also been the basis of several operas, including Gian Carlo Menotti's 1951 opera "Amahl and the Night Visitors". Initially written for television performance, Menotti's opera has become the only modern Christmas opera to earn an enduring place in the live opera performance repertoire. In the 21st century, composer Kevin Puts' "Silent Night" (2011) achieved critical success and won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2012.
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Strand Lighting Strand Lighting is an international theatre and television lighting company founded in 1914 in London's West End that supplies lighting fixtures and controls for the entertainment industry. Strand's products have been used on countless theatre productions and TV shows worldwide.
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Norwegian National Opera and Ballet The Norwegian National Opera and Ballet (in Norwegian, "Den Norske Opera & Ballett") is the first fully professional company each for opera and ballet in Norway, the only such professional organisation in the country. Its current residence is the Oslo Opera House, since the spring of 2008.
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The Phantom of the Opera (audio drama) The Phantom of the Opera, an adaptation of the novel of the same title by Gaston Leroux, is an audio drama created by Big Finish Productions for BBC Radio 7, broadcast in December 2007.
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Les Ballets de Monte Carlo Les Ballets de Monte Carlo (The Monte-Carlo Ballet) is a classical ballet company established in 1985 by Her Royal Highness the Princess of Hanover in accordance with the wishes of her mother, Princess Grace of Monaco. It is the official national company of the Principality of Monaco.
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Purcell Operatic Society The Purcell Operatic Society was a short-lived but influential London opera company devoted to the production of stage works by Henry Purcell and his contemporaries. It was founded in 1899 by the composer Martin Shaw and folded in 1902. Its stage director and production designer was Gordon Craig whose productions for the company marked the beginning of his career as a theatre practitioner. Their debut production of Purcell's opera "Dido and Aeneas" in 1900 was one of the earliest staged performances of the work in modern times.
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Iris Theatre Iris Theatre is a professional theatre company created in 2007 by Dr. Daniel Winder to produce work at the world-famous St. Paul's Church, Covent Garden. Its first show was T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral which was attended by the then Archbishop of Canterbury, The Right Rev'd & Right Hon. Lord Rowan Williams, who went on to be a patron of the company.
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The Merchants of Bollywood The Merchants of Bollywood is an Australian musical written and directed by Toby Gough. The show is about the history of the Bollywood film industry, and it is named after Hiralalji Merchant and his grand daughter Vaibhavi Merchant, two notable Indian choreographers. The set and lighting design was by Liz Berry and the costumes were designed by Falguni Thakore and Bipin. The musical has been described as "an Indian version of the Billy Elliot story" and is choreographed by Vaibhavi Merchant. It was the first ever Bollywood production to tour straight from Film City in Mumbai. When the show reached Australia in February 2008, there had been 400 performances seen by 500,000 patrons. The show toured the United Kingdom, various parts of Europe, the United States, Australia, Canada and various parts of Asia.
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Berliner Ensemble The Berliner Ensemble (] ) is a German theatre company established by playwright Bertolt Brecht and his wife, Helene Weigel in January 1949 in East Berlin. In the time after Brecht's exile, the company first worked at Wolfgang Langhoff's Deutsches Theater and in 1954 moved to the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, built in 1892, that was open for the 1928 premiere of "The Threepenny Opera" ("Die Dreigroschenoper").
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Phantom of the Paradise Phantom of the Paradise is a 1974 American musical rock opera horror comedy film written and directed by Brian De Palma, and scored by and starring Paul Williams. In the film, a disfigured composer writes his music for a woman he loves so that she will perform his music. However, a record producer betrays him and steals his music to open his rock palace, The Paradise. Betrayed, the composer dons a new appearance and exacts revenge on the producer. It co-stars William Finley and Jessica Harper.
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Nigel Levings Nigel Levings is an Australian stage lighting designer. He has designed lights for over 400 productions. He works extensively on operas, and has designed a large portion of Opera Australia's repertoire. Some of his most significant works include operas such as "The Demon" at the Bregenz Festival and for Zurich Opera; "Billy Budd" for the Welsh National Opera, Opera Australia, Canadian Opera Company, and for the English National Opera; "Nabucco" for Opera Australia; "Wozzeck" for Opera Australia; "L'Orfeo" for Innsbrucker Festwochen der Alten Musik and the Berlin State Opera; "A Midsummer Night's Dream" for the 1994 Edinburgh Festival; "La Belle Vivette" for the English National Opera; "Simon Boccanegra" for the Royal Opera House, Washington National Opera, and Dallas Opera; "Falstaff" for Théâtre du Châtelet; "Idomeneo", "Turandot", and "The Barber of Seville" for the Houston Grand Opera; and "Queen of Spades" for the Dallas Opera.
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D'Oyly Carte Opera Company The D'Oyly Carte Opera Company is a professional light opera company that staged Gilbert and Sullivan's Savoy operas nearly year-round in the UK and sometimes toured in Europe, North America and elsewhere, from the 1870s until 1982. The company was revived for short seasons and tours from 1988 to 2003, and with Scottish Opera it later co-produced two productions.
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Royal Ballet Sinfonia The Royal Ballet Sinfonia is the Orchestra of Birmingham Royal Ballet.
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Titanic (musical) Titanic is a musical with music and lyrics by Maury Yeston and a book by Peter Stone that opened on Broadway in 1997. It won five Tony Awards including the award for Best Musical. "Titanic" is set on the ocean liner RMS "Titanic" which sank on its maiden voyage on April 15, 1912.
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The Spirit of England The Spirit of England, Op. 80, is a work for chorus, orchestra, and soprano/tenor soloist in three movements composed by Edward Elgar between 1915 and 1917, setting text from Laurence Binyon's 1914 anthology of poems "The Winnowing Fan". The work acts as a requiem for the dead of World War I and is dedicated "to the memory of our glorious men, with a special thought for the Worcesters".