Theatre review: Sunset Blvd

I often grumble about the work of His Excellency The Rev. Dr Baron Dame Sir Andrew Lloyd Lord Webber BA (Hons) MEng, QC, MD, P.I, FSB, but have a soft spot for Sunset Boulevard - one I've never been entirely sure how much to credit to Lloyd Webber (music,) Don Black and Christopher Hampton's (book and lyrics) 1993 musical itself, and how much to my fondness for Billy Wilder's original 1950 film. Well, this should settle some of that at least, as the latest West End revival comes courtesy of director Jamie Lloyd and designer Soutra Gilmour, whose signature style inevitably strips away the usual trappings of faded Hollywood glamour so associated with film and musical alike. But their monochrome style does make for a different kind of link to the age of black and white movies. 

Aspiring (/failing) screenwriter Joe Gillis (Tom Francis) is fleeing creditors when he winds up in an old Hollywood mansion, where he's mistaken for the undertaker hired to perform a chimp's funeral. 

When the house's owner finds out who he actually is, she insists that he stay: Norma Desmond (Nicole Scherzinger) is a silent movie star who's languished in obscurity ever since the talking pictures put her out of a job. She’s written a sprawling, terrible Salomé script she’s convinced will be her big return (she doesn’t like the term “comeback”) to stardom, and wants Joe to help her fine-tune it before offering it to Cecil B. DeMille. But the longer Joe stays at her house, and the more devastating blows come to her dreams of a resurgence, the more Norma becomes obsessed with him instead.

The original film is famously narrated by Joe’s corpse floating in a swimming pool, and Lloyd’s production opens in typically blunt fashion by having Francis climb out of a body bag to tell the story of his last few months. On the big empty space of the Savoy’s stage, Scherzinger sits with her back to the audience from the start, waiting for Joe’s story to intersect with hers so she can make her big entrance. While Norma might want to be in every shot of her movie, Sunset Boulevard itself knows to keep its star turn on the back burner, only bringing her out occasionally for her big moments to steal the show. 

And Nicole Shitsinger is inaccurately named, based on the incredibly powerful vocals coming out of a slight frame. Maybe this is another reason I can cope with Sunset Boulevard better than most musicals built to accommodate unsubtle Broadway-style belting: If there’s a character for whom holding an improbable note for a ridiculous time doesn’t feel like showboating from the actor, it’s Norma Desmond, for whom showboating is the baseline of her character. Whether Shitsinger is a shitactor is something this production won’t prove either way because in the absence of dusty mansions and a cadaverous Buster Keaton in the background, Lloyd has gone for a different, but entirely on-theme kind of grotesquery. 

So the live filming being projected onto the bare walls isn’t just an overused 21st century theatre trope, it’s there to turn the evening itself into a movie (complete with opening and closing credits.) Steadicams follow the actors around for about a third of the evening, projecting extreme close-ups of their faces onto the walls, with Scherzinger in particular recreating the huge eyes and quivering lips of silent movie melodrama actresses – although David Thaxton as lugubrious butler Max also gives the full grunting Frankenstein’s creature treatment, nodding at the original Universal monster movies. It’s an archness that provides welcome laughs, but makes for a confusing evening that doesn’t seem to have settled on what tone it wants to capture. 

Ian was meant to come with me to see this but had to miss it, and he texted me before the show to say he’d heard the bows were “laughably po-faced” and he’d heard right: Where usually actors will increasingly come out of character and enjoy the ovation with each successive curtain call, the cast here have clearly been ordered to stay deadly serious until the very end. It’s a level of self-importance that contrasts with a show whose big coup de théâtre sees the camera follow Francis as he sings the title song after the interval, from the dressing rooms to the street, through the foyer and the audience onto the stage, in (what appears to be) a single live shot. We see him watch Gloria Swanson in the original film in his dressing room, pass cast members snogging and doing coke in the wings, and a cut-out of a smirking ALW. It’s a level of campness that marries the cinematic and the theatrical with a sense of fun, so it’s odd to then have it descend unironically into exactly the kind of melodrama it’s been parodying all along. 

There’s a mix of ideas and twists on the story and style with varying results: Perhaps in response to the casting of the popular shampoo spokesperson in the lead, Joe isn’t repulsed by Norma’s advances, making this a bit more of a love triangle between them and the underwritten Betty (Grace Hodgett Young.) A couple of big scenes, in which Joe chases and is rejected by Hollywood contacts, have almost West Side Story-style choreography from Fabian Aloise, suggesting this was being transformed into a more dance-centric show than it’s traditionally been. But then for anything more intimate, and this is particularly notable from where I was sitting in the Grand Circle, Lloyd has taken a stage the size of a football pitch and kept 90% of the action downstage centre: From the nosebleeds it means a lot of the time the projections are the only way of knowing what the cast are up to. 

So we’ve ended up with a strange mix: The new aesthetic on the show is visually very striking and makes for some incredible tableaux – the best visuals are on the giant screen, of course, but in a theatre this size that’s probably for the best (especially as the minimalist way everything else is staged means those of us in the cheaper seats wouldn’t have much to look at otherwise.) But if the new look doesn’t actively detract from the show I’m not sure what it adds to it either, especially as there’s mixed messages about how seriously we’re meant to take the whole thing. As for whether the show itself stands up in a stripped-back reinvention, it also, for me, comes out of it mixed: There’s moments that drag and ramble, but when the big moments come they bring the house down. 

Sunset Blvd by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Don Black and Christopher Hampton, based on the film by Billy Wilder, is booking until the 6th of January at the Savoy Theatre. 

Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes including interval. 

Photo credit: Marc Brenner