If the song had extra edge and urgency than it did in her Cafe Carlyle club act last year—well, therein hangs a tale most of showbiz knows now: how she was diagnosed in previews with stage one cancer, took five days off for surgery and recovery, then resumed the chaotic work-in-progress, making sure that the show goes on as originally planned.

Spunk and spine seem second nature to Friedman, who happily happens to be playing that in Marian Halcombe, a snoopy spinster weeding her way through a highly haunted English manse full of family skeletons. So tapping into those inner resources was hardly a reach.

It's tough role in the best of health, but Friedman plowed on with ferocious determination, scurrying about in an assortment of weighty Victorian gowns, pausing occasionally to deliver a full-out ballad to the back row, at one point fending off a near-rape and—did I neglect to say?—acting up a storm that charges the action and keeps the narrative on track.

Then, after making it to the standing ovation, Phase II began—the real performance, making it through the glittering gauntlet of well wishers and glad-handers and tug-of-war press jockeying at Tavern on the Green. At one point, she gamely braved the midnight chill for a suddenly improvised photo op in the Tavern garden and then returned to the press room for additional interrogation. This went on for a good 90 minutes, until her publicist asked if she'd like to sit down for a while. A splendid idea, she thought—and off she was swept to the main dining room where the first night revelers welcomed her with personal, warming applause, and she settled into a covey of ingenues at the front table: Judy Kuhn, Christine Andreas and that earth mother of them all, Barbara Cook.

Through it all, the smile stayed in place. You'd take her for a heroine playing a heroine. "I'm really not," she pooh-poohed. "The guy at the news vendor is calling me a heroine. He's selling papers. I'm just trying to prove you can get through this. What is around the corner, one doesn't know, but you might as well live life as if you're going to be alive. If I can encourage anybody to do that, great! I'm in the process of learning how to deal with it myself, and I'm being taught how to do it by the experts. I've decided to trust them."

Some of these experts—her surgeon and two other doctors—surprised her at the opening. She broke through the roped-off barricade to get to them and introduced them to the press.

Sonia Friedman, in the strange spot of being her sister as well as one of her major producers, was kvelling to beat the band. "It's the most wonderful, remarkable experience for us both—to be here together, making our Broadway debuts together. One's in awe of what Maria can do, what she is, her character, her strength. This show is the biggest thing I've ever had to undertake. I normally just do plays in London. [She has done 650 productions!] To be asked suddenly to produce a million-pound musical in London—it was just something I had to do. And to have my own sister being the star of it was the icing on a great cake."

All plans are on hold, she says, until a medical verdict is reached. "Maria is going to be told quite soon what her after-care is going to be. We don't really know right now." Chemotherapy? "Not necessarily—but she'll be getting radiation, though not for a while."

Excusing 1997's By Jeeves (which some will do), The Woman in White is the first new Andrew Lloyd Webber musical since Sunset Boulevard docked at Broadway and 45th (at the Minskoff, right across the street from his new place of business) a decade ago.

It hardly seems that long since he has never really been away. On Jan. 9, his The Phantom of the Opera (which will have been residing at the Majestic for 18 years to the day) will scare his Cats out of the top spot as Broadway's longest-running show with its 7,486th performance.

The man with the one-two Broadway punch is a little incredulous at this new turn of events. "You never think of it, do you? I can't really process it. I feel very, very lucky."

He hasn't been idle during this 10-year interim, but Whistle Down the Wind (which he wrote with Jim Steinman in 1997) and The Beautiful Game (which he wrote with Ben Elton in 2000) did not make it from London to New York. "The Beautiful Game is something that I really wish had been brought here," he lamented. "Sadly, people think of me as the Andrew Lloyd Webber of Cats and Phantom, and they forget that I also wrote the musical that anticipated everything to do with terrorism. That was The Beautiful Day."

Being the most successful Broadway composer of all doesn't make Lord Lloyd Webber any less shy, although he has (at least at this opening) lost the deer-in-the-headlights look he usually flashes at premieres. When he entered the Tavern press arena, a sudden hush fell over the room, and one could almost hear him squirming. He dutifully did his paparazzi duty, posing with his principals and mustering a vague smile. He even talked to a video camera, at surprising length, while a shot was being set up, but, when that was over, he bolted for the exit, missing the collective jaw-drop of the press corps behind him.

At his table, his wife and business associate kept most reporters at bay. He politely, if perfunctorily, answered a few questions, but ducked those about The Woman in White. "It's the first night tonight, and I'm quite tired," he said heavily while La Friedman was doing everything but handstands in the next room. "I don't think we should really do an interview right now. If I'm going to do an interview, let's do it another time, shall we?"

The most asked question of the evening, easily, was "How do like working with Maria Friedman?"—to which Michael Ball shot back, "Oh, a nightmare," countering any cloying response with comedy. "Naughty, contrary...," he started itemizing until he got the laugh he wanted. Stage lovers before (in Stephen Sondheim's Passion), they are here cast adversarially, he as the heavy (in all senses of the word) Count Fosco who pumps most of the skullduggery into the show. "We have a kind of short-hand with each other. We just know instinctively, and we change things all the time. She's a joy. Completely simpatico!"

Giving the count's villainy a comic twist is the fat suit that Ball must bear every performance. "It gets considerably heavier as the night goes on, with all the sweat. You have to constantly take fluids, and it does change how you move, but that's a good thing. I want to be light and dainty, but I look kind of absurd trying to be that in this suit."

Not the least of Fosco's eccentricities is his fondness for rodents, and his big second-act number—"You Can Get Away With Anything"—is shared with an arm-crawling white rat (Beatrice, by name: her understudy is Charlotte). "You make up stuff as you go along in that number. The rat makes it up even though it's performing. She did tonight. She was so good. Whatever she does, you have to go along with." In Act I, he pulls a white mouse (Trixie) out of his pocket. "It's not a toy. It is a real, live and, tonight, peeing mouse."

Otherwise, they take direction—if not from Cats director Trevor Nunn, who has been concentrating on making The Woman in White a tighter show than it is in London. "We made some changes," he admitted. "We tried to clarify the narrative. We tried to make to make the show a little bit shorter, particularly in the last act. And we made a few musical changes, but not huge ones. With an interval, I think it runs two and three-quarter hours. It was very difficult to tell tonight because the audience didn't assemble until 20 minutes after the appointed time, and they were determined to have a 35-minute interval."

The director, too, was a thoroughgoing Friedman fan. "Maria is the real thing because she's a wonderful actress. She could easily have a sensational career if she couldn't sing a note. She just happens to be one of the great singers. She's so musical. That sounds almost patronizing, but when I say she's so musical, I mean the instinct to do things with music, to make the music speak, to personalize the music. It's just remarkable."

Unsurprisingly, Nunn was on the first flight back to London after the opening. "I'm about to do a production of Peter Shaffer's wonderful play, The Royal Hunt of the Sun, which I once set up at the National Theatre when I was running the National, and there were all sorts of problems that meant we had to not do the production at that time. But Peter signed a document, saying the only theatre that could do The Royal Hunt of the Sun was the National and the only director to do it was me. So it's come around again, and the National said, `Please, will you come back and do it?' So I am. We start rehearsals pretty much immediately into the new year." Which begs the question of cast, but Nunn ducked that one. "I'm going to make a big announcement about that soon, and not to you."

Shaffer, a Tony winner for Equus and Amadeus, was in attendance with his Amadeus producer Liz McCann. A friend at their table mentioned that Shaffer's Five Finger Exercise, which hasn't been seen locally since its original Broadway production of 1960, would be eminently revivable. "I'd love to see that again," Shaffer admitted. "Talk it up."

The first-night guest list ran rangily from six-foot-six Tommy Tune to four-foot-seven Dr. Ruth Westheimer. He: "I just came from a big big production meeting on Doctor Dolittle. I'm getting so excited. We start preproduction Nov. 28, then we start practical rehearsal on Dec. 12, and we open in Houston Jan. 27." She is a self-confused Phantomaniac: "I have seen Phantom of the Opera 24 times. Everytime somebody came to visit, from Israel or Europe, I'd say, `I'll get you tickets to Phantom. I love Phantom, but I'm not going again.' Then, right when I'm making the order, I change my mind and go again. Twenty-four times! I need a new Andrew Lloyd Webber so I hope I've found a new passion."

Others in attendance: Barbara Walters, "Sex and the City's" Kim Cattral, choreographers Rob Ashford and Jerry Mitchell, directors Jerry Zaks and Des McAnuff (the latter, now that Jersey Boys is on Easy Street, is preparing for a full scale production of Lucy Simon's musical Zhivago at his La Jolla Playhouse in April), Cats' Liz Callaway, Kathie Lee Gifford (taking her fashion cue for the evening from the title and feeling embarrassed nobody else did), Michael Feinstein with Roslyn Kind, Cilla Black, Harvey Evans, orchestrator Jonathan Tunick, playwright David Ives, and composer Craig Carnelia (who just had a sensational revival of Is There Life After High School at the York Theatre Company). All these, and Sir Cliff Richard.

Sunset Boulevard's Alan Campbell attended with his wife, Lauren Kennedy, who inherits Sara Ramirez's Tony-winning Lady of the Lake routine in Spamalot on Dec. 20. Christopher Sieber, himself a Tony nominee for that show, was raving about the replacements' first read-through this week. "Lauren was wonderful, and Simon Russell Beale [who's replacing Tim Curry as King Arthur] is a great lesson for all of us.

The Campbells are former Upper West Siders, now Westchesterians—up by Glenny (Glenn Close, his Norma Desmond). "Now that the wife is working, I've taken up diaper duty." Temporarily taking a breather from diaper duty is Charlotte Jones, who adapted Wilkie Collins' 1860 pageturner into a 2005 stagetuner. "I've got two small children, and I've spent the last nine months changing diapers so this is very glamorous for me," she said. The Women in White is her first musical. "For America, I did some rewriting via e-mail, but we kept working on the London show as well so, by the time we came to the American production, the book was in quite good shape. I saw it in London two weeks ago, and I think the ensemble is perhaps even stronger than the London company." Now she was moved on—or back—to straight plays from whence she came. "I've just written a new play, and it's going to be on at the Almeida in London next year. It's called The Lightning Play. It's an emotional thriller about a family, set at Halloween." David Zippel, the City of Angels Tony winner who put words to Lord Lloyd Webber's music, will rate his own musical salute in the "American Songbook" series at Lincoln Center on Feb. 24—Go the Distance: The Lyrics of David Zippel. "I'm casting it with B's: Brent Barrett, Barbara Cook and Brian D'arcy James," he quipped. Also, his musical with Cy Coleman and Wendy Wasserstein—Pamela's First Musical—will premiere at Palo Alto. In the title role, Angela Christian strikes quite a different image than she had as Miss Dorothy, the best pal of Thoroughly Modern Millie. "I may be the titular character this time, but I am certainly not the protagonist," she allowed.

Although the Collins book wasn't required reading for the cast—"the musical is very freely adapted so it wasn't necessary"—she availed herself anyway. "I absolutely wanted, and needed, to read it because there is a ton of backstory that I can still apply to myself, whether or not it's in this particular script. It was actually mandatory for me because a lot of this script is ambiguous. They wanted the audience to wonder whether or not my character was a ghost. The book is fantastic and it did wonders for helping me find this poor girl."

Most of Count Falco's nefarious plans are implemented by Ron Bohmer, who graduated to grim villainy by way of knockabout comedy (specifically, Gerard Alessandrini's fun-poke at Broadway, Forbidden Broadway, Vol. 8—Special Victims Unit). Indeed, they overlapped for a while. "They're such different animals," he said. "The wonderful thing about Forbidden Broadway is that it's a very by-the-seat-of-your-pants kind of thing. In many cases, you learn the songs that afternoon, throw on a costume and just go out there and act like an idiot. I have a history with that show. It was my first real job in New York." The mind boggles at what Alessandrini will make of The Woman in White. "He came to our second preview," Bohmer noted. "Actually, I was quite relieved to hear he loves the show. He thinks it's terrific. I don't know what he's going to do yet, but I think it's going to have something to do with a slide project."

Probably the most controversial aspect of the show is the rush of scenery that is projected on unadorned white revolving walls—sort of a Cinerama slip-and-slide show—and has been known to cause some mild motion sickness. Indeed, adjustments were made in the original London production because the scenery shifted so swiftly it left the audience a bit seasick. "I feel in the grip of a ravishing nausea," is how actor-composer Ed Dixon described the swirl of spectacle. He has a few shows up his sleeve now. As composer-lyricist-book writer, he has a production of Fanny Hill "that is going to go into the York in January, and we'll open on Valentine's Day. Then, I'm going to go to Washington D.C. to do The Persians, which I did for Tony Randall's company. It's the same production. Ethan McSweeney's directing it, with many of the same cast. Then, also in D.C., I'm going into Eric Schaeffer's Mame June 1at the Kennedy Center with Christine Baranski and Harriet Harris. I'm Lindsay Woolsey. Max von Essex will be Patrick, Emily Skinner will be Gooch and—a sight I'm longing to see—Mary Stout will be Mother Burnside."