Street scene

Lloyd Webber cruises Sunset Boulevard

by Carolyn Clay

SUNSET BOULEVARD, Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber. Book and lyrics by Don Black and Christopher Hampton. Directed by Susan H. Schulman. Choreography by Kathleen Marshall. Set design by Derek McLane. Costumes by Anthony Powell. Lighting by Peter Kaczorowski. Sound by Tony Meola. Projections by Wendall K. Harrington. Musical direction by Michael Rafter. Conductor Lawrence Goldberg. With Petula Clark, Lewis Cleale, Sarah Uriarte Berry, Allen Fitzpatrick, Michael Berry, and George Merner. At the Wang Theatre through July 16.

Film noir meets Phantom of the Opera in Sunset Boulevard, Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical based on the famously tart 1950 Billy Wilder film. As in the composer's chandelier-dropping megahit, a lovesick ghoul haunts an ornate edifice and virtually imprisons a much younger object of desire. Faded silent-film queen Norma Desmond doesn't give reluctant inamorato Joe Gillis the music of the night, just gold cigarette cases and evening clothes. And she racks up a lower body count than the Phantom. Still, the taloned Norma created by Gloria Swanson in the film is scarier than any masked warbler dropping corpses onto the stage of the Paris Opera.

It is unlikely that any stage Norma -- from Patti Lupone to Glenn Close to Elaine Paige or Betty Buckley -- has captured Swanson's desperate, imperious monstrousness. But '60s pop star turned stage diva Petula Clark, who headlines the pared-down production now at the Wang, doesn't try. Hers is an elaborately costumed but frowzy, comparatively vulgar Norma, turbaned and trailing feathers, ricocheting between girlish kibitz and fishwife growl. As for Lewis Cleale's disillusioned screenwriter turned self-loathing boy toy, the performer doesn't do a bad job, but he's more reminiscent of Hugh Grant than of William Holden.

Curiously, given the recurring success here of such Lloyd Webber spectacles as Phantom and Cats, the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Tremont Street has been a long time coming. The show opened in London in 1993 with Lupone as Norma. It debuted in Los Angeles later that year, with Close as the glamorous mummy of the silent screen, before making it to Broadway in 1994 with Close, once again, ready for her close-up and Lupone talking to her lawyers. Despite winning Tony Awards for best musical, book, score, set, and lighting, the show did not become a Times Square fixture. It closed in both London and New York in 1997 (Lloyd Webber blamed the shortage of suitable Norma Desmonds). An earlier, more elaborate touring version failed to make it to Boston. This one, starring Clark (the last London Norma) and helmed by Secret Garden director Susan H. Schulman, marks the musical's Boston premiere.

Not a few found the John Napier set to be the star of the West End/Broadway Sunset Boulevard. The less cumbersome if presumably less showy scenic design by American Repertory Theatre vet Derek McLane on view at the Wang makes hay of film-set artificiality and features a couple of six-story stacks of studio detritus that are vintage McLane. In imitation of the film, the musical opens with a murky shot, projected on a scrim, of a body floating in a pool; a nice touch is the recurrence of the lapping-pool-water effect, like foreshadowing, on the scrim. But when the climactic murder occurs on the stair of the manse, one has to wonder how the body makes it to the outdoor pool. Must have been one hell of a blast.

But such inconsistencies are not a major sin of Sunset Boulevard. It's assumed that we know the material and accept the necessary, sub-cinematic telescoping. What's more problematic is that, despite its faithfulness to the original (some of the dialogue is lifted verbatim), the Lloyd Webber musical encompasses the melodrama but little of the acerbity of the Wilder film. The composer's calling card is the swoony or anthemic ballad, and that is not a proper vehicle for astringency. The result is that you get all of the film's horror-movie hokum (poor Allen Fitzpatrick, as fiercely loyal Desmond factotum Max von Mayerling, hovers like a cross between Jeeves and Igor) and little of its hard-boiled, tongue-in-cheek tone.

You do get the ballads, though. Clark's best musical (and, in cinched black with pancake-sized diamond buttons, best costumed) moment is "As If We Never Said Goodbye," which she sings upon Norma's return to the Paramount lot of her youthful triumphs. Clark's eyes go luminous, her gestures become more graceful, and she sings the cheesy thing pretty well (though, as is the case with Cleale's admirably committed rendition of the scathing, Hollywood-hating title song, feeling plus amplification can cause a singer to bark). There are several more emotion-laden ballads for Norma (the first, "Surrender," proffered to the corpse of her chimp), but the most affecting bit of music is the show's repeated, romantic yet discordant orchestral theme.

Sunset Boulevard is not awful; the source material is compelling, and an earnest attempt has been made to render it a musical. There are some saucy novelty numbers -- though the two-and-a-half-hour show seems padded (seven of the second act's 11 songs are reprises). The subplot, about Joe's repressed romance with starry-eyed would-be screenwriter Betty Schaefer, is no limper here than it is in the film, and Sarah Uriarte Berry is a pert, pretty-voiced Betty. But the bottom line is that, unless you're a dyed-in-the-technicolor-dreamcoat Lloyd Webber fan, Sunset Boulevard is probably not the street where you live.