The Beautiful Game (musical)

The Beautiful Game (musical)

The Beautiful Game is a musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Ben Elton about a group of teenagers growing up during The Troubles in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1969.

The title of the musical is taken from Pelé's autobiography My Life and the Beautiful Game. The plot, which is centred on a local football (soccer) team, focuses on the attempt to overcome the violence that has engulfed their community. The Catholic team has one Protestant player, Del (who self-identifies as an "atheist") and the coach is a priest. The musical chronicles some of the key players during the emerging political and religious violence. Some of the players become IRA volunteers, and another is knee-capped. The musical also chronicles the emotional change in the protagonist from political ambivalence to becoming an IRA volunteer.

The most successful song from the score was "Our Kind of Love", which originally came from Lloyd Webber's older song "The Heart is Slow to Learn" sung by Dame Kiri Te Kanawa. "Our Kind of Love" was then cut and replaced by the song "The Boys in the Photograph" from the re-worked version in 2008, and used in the sequel to the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical The Phantom of the Opera, Love Never Dies as the title song.