The idea proved anything but irresistible. No one wanted to finance the project: the show’s producer, Cameron Mackintosh, had to solicit small-fry investors through newspaper ads; Lloyd Webber took out a second mortgage to make up the ultimate shortfall. He had composed an epic, genre-spanning score, using a Moog synthesizer to imitate meowing, but, when he played it for Twyla Tharp, hoping that she would choreograph what would have to be a very dance-heavy musical—Valerie would permit the production only if they relied entirely on Eliot’s material, which left little room for plot or spoken dialogue—Tharp said no. A director candidate fell asleep while Lloyd Webber was pitching him. A Warner Brothers executive reminded him that half the world favored dogs. “But somehow that insane, incurable, blinkered optimism that overtakes reason and leads otherwise normal men to stage musicals had wormed far too deep,” Lloyd Webber writes in his memoir, “Unmasked.” He scoured London for a theatre that would fit his “suicidally stupid musical.”