Two words: treat yourself!Last year they treated us to Bryn Terfel and Emma Thompson in SWEENEY TODD, this year movie star Glenn Close returns to the lead role of Norma Desmond, the manipulative and deluded old silent film star who prowls around her dilapidated mansion on Sunset Boulevard ensnaring a young writer, Joe Gillis, to collaborate on a comeback film that will never happen.
SUNSET BOULEVARD isn't a bona fide masterpiece like SWEENEY TODD but this presentation is so classy it makes you feel it is.
They call it a concert staging but it’s pretty lavish. Skeletal walkways and staircases wrap their way around the magnificent orchestra centre stage. It may not be a complete set but it perfectly suggests both an industrial Hollywood film studio and a rambling old house. I liked it much more then the cumbersome art deco scenery usually associated with this show. The new staging allows the action to move swiftly from incident to incident bringing a fresh vitality to proceedings and it’s augmented by some beautiful props including the grand old car that’s so central to the plot.
The musical, based on Billy Wilder’s ingenious, Gothic movie of the same title begins and ends with a corpse floating in a swimming pool, graphically represented in this production by a dummy being flown up from the orchestra pit on wires so it appears to float high above the audience as if we’re seeing its progress through the water. The orchestra pit continues to represent the pool in Norma Desmond’s Hollywood mansion throughout and we’re treated to the sight of the handsome Michael Xavier as Joe emerging from it, wearing just swimming trunks, at the top of Act Two.
The big question everyone was asking ahead of the press night was whether Glenn Close would still be able to sing the lead role, aged 69 and twenty years after she won a Tony Award for playing Norma Desmond on Broadway. Elaine Page who successfully starred in the West End version was sat a few rows away from me.
The whole audience held its breath as the orchestra played the introduction to her first number. As Close started to sing in a light wavering voice that strayed in and out of tune it seemed we were in for a long, excruciating evening watching a former star on the wane but she was holding back to fool us. The role requires the actress to switch between head and chest voice and when she switched to her lower register the power was all there and then some! The Glenn Close singing voice isn't the most melodious of instruments but there’s a gutsy rawness that really suited the last, desperate passion of the fading movie star Norma Desmond, matched with her extraordinary stage presence the effect is incredibly powerful.
Composer Lloyd Webber and lyricist Don Black give her some breathtaking out pouring of emotion too in solos like WITH ONE LOOK and AS IF WE NEVER SAID GOODBYE. Thrillingly orchestrated with soaring strings these songs felt like some of the best musical theatre writing London’s enjoyed in a long time.
Her co-stars Michael Xavier, as the reluctant toy boy who succumbs to the luxury Norma showers on him and Siobhan Dillon as an attractive fellow screenwriter who draws him back to reality were in fine voice too, both great beauties. Fred Johanson as Norma’s loyal butler brought enormous gravitas and dignity to the evening as his own tragic story was revealed.
A first class evening of premier league musical theatre.
Alistair McDowall’s PONOMA was one of the most talked about productions of 2014. McDowall’s new piece “X” premiers at The Royal Court and the Yorkshire playwright once more creates a vivid world of dystopia and fear, this time by setting the action in a futuristic space base orbiting around Pluto. Yet despite McDowall’s imaginative writing, which raises questions about the fate of human kind, Vicky Featherstone’s production of “X” is one that audiences will either love or hate.