A Hollywood Opera Noir

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

TITLE: SUNSET BOULEVARD (

AUTHORS: MUSIC BY ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER; BOOK AND LYRICS BY DON BLACK AND CHRISTOPHER HAMPTON

WHERE: LONDON

THE BOTTOM LINE: Billy Wilder's satire of Hollywood still evokes the pain of losing fame, but musicalizing it has added little.

Spread across the bottom of the stage is a buzzing New Year's Eve party of Hollywood wannabes, at their center a failed scriptwriter turned kept man who is enjoying a brief and perilous brush with freedom. Hovering immediately above, in splendorous isolation, is the woman who keeps him, a Hollywood has- been turned loony recluse, stalking the ornate staircase of her pseudo palazzo in murderous rage. The juxtaposition is a miracle of stagecraft -- the weighty rococo mansion thrusts up and over the partygoers with noiseless ease -- and is also the signature moment of London's most anticipated theatrical event this year. In Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical adaptation, the movie classic Sunset Boulevard has much the same theme as his greatest hit, The Phantom of the Opera. Normal life is lived in company, the two shows say, but great passion demands an almost secluded privacy. If leaving reality for fantasy is demented, it is a noble madness. If hothouse love flashes into possessive violence, that only proves its poetic grandeur.

Lloyd Webber's goal in recent years has been to bridge the gap between the musical and the opera, reclaiming the latter as a popular rather than elite form. An operatic reading does no disservice to Billy Wilder's film noir, which has been preserved more than adapted. The climax, when the fallen star Norma Desmond shoots her lover and he tumbles into a swimming pool, has opera's larger-than-life emotion. So does the denouement, as she lapses into madness and announces, to a Cecil B. DeMille visible only to her, that she is ready for her close-up. It is apt that her home now resembles the old opera house in Paris where Phantom is set and that her finale echoes the mad scene of Lucia di Lammermoor.

But if musicalizing Sunset Boulevard does not detract, it does not add much either. Of nine songs centered on Norma, just one achieves what dialogue alone could not. When she returns in what she imagines is triumph to the studio that dropped her two decades before, she envisions glories to come in As If We Never Said Goodbye. If the scene were spoken, her delusion would be pathetic. The song, in effect an interior monologue, defers her disillusionment to celebrate her undiminished presence. The assertive With One Look and the lilting, wistful New Ways to Dream are engaging paeans to bygone achievements. Her pretty boy's 11 numbers amount to even less. Only his cynical anthem to ambition, Sunset Boulevard, derives added power from being sung. The most conspicuous lack, a satisfying duet, is inherent in the original. This is not so much a love story as a deceitful encounter between two moral failures, a woman absorbed in self-love and a man mired in self-hate.

Even so, Lloyd Webber's creation is probably better than the ponderous London performance. Director Trevor Nunn excels at narrative clarity, which is present in the original, but not at nuancing characters, which is sorely needed with such miscast stars. As Norma, renowned for delicate beauty, Patti LuPone is too tempestuous, too earthy and too coarse of feature, especially her aardvark nose. As her lover, Kevin Anderson looks pudding-faced and pudgy, so long gone to seed that the supposedly vast age difference disappears -- until the finale, when LuPone inexplicably appears 20 years older than she was moments before. While she is a fine if loud singer, he is at best ordinary. The supporting cast is without exception mediocre or worse, at a level unthinkable for Broadway, where this show is, faute de mieux, the most eagerly anticipated musical of the season to come.