Small is better and sometimes beautiful when it comes to this scaled-down, intimate version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1993 musical melodrama, closely based on the famous Billy Wilder film.
This Sunset Boulevard, with those catchy but clichéd lyrics from Don Black and Christopher Hampton, is another in the Watermill’s appealing line of musicals, stripped down to their best essentials. Instead of the traditional orchestra for a musical, director Craig Revel Horwood makes do with an 11-strong band, most of whom act and sing as well. The versatility of these performers, some playing more than one instrument, delights but never distracts from the main narrative. Sarah Travis’s artful arrangements help you clearly hear the romantic, nostalgic line of Lloyd Webber’s score, from the first moments when a single violin laments the murder of Ben Goddard’s handsome, baby-faced Joe Gillis.
This penniless script writer on the skids falls in with Kathryn Evans’s washed-up, has-been of a film star, Norma Desmond, and in the end falls fatally out with her. Lloyd Webber, as Evita and Phantom Of The Opera reminds us, is fascinated by life-victims.
The rise and fall of the couple’s mutually exploitative relationship, against the backcloth of a ruthless, Hollywood society that shows nothing but contempt for the failed and passé, is the musical’s main business.
The 1993 production incited you to come out singing the praises of the sets, of that vast, spectacular staircase down which Norma comes like a tragedy queen en route to a meeting with destiny. It reeked of sumptuousness. Here the elegant designer Diego Pitarch reduces Norma’s home to a modest spiral staircase under which stands an upright piano, a candelabra perched upon it. The swimming pool into which Joe’s bullet-laden body tumbles is aurally suggested rather than depicted. Yet I was far more closely engaged by the doomed love affair of clinging Norma and unwilling Joe in this version than I was at the 1993 premiere.
The key to the production’s impact is Ben Goddard, whose Gillis emerges as a pathetically young casualty of ambition, without the bulwark of talent. Moving between Norma’s home, where Dave Willetts’s butler keeps reality at bay, and the young Hollywood set, where a script-girl longs for him, Goddard’s Gillis exudes bemused impotence as he falls deeper into the coils of the crazy, smitten Norma. It is of course Miss Desmond, yearning to be back in her famous yesterdays and fantasising about a comeback, who ought to capture the pathos that Lloyd Webber’s score invites — Everyone Needs New Ways To Dream and We Never Said Goodbye.
Dressed strikingly in black and white, Miss Evans deploys a singing voice powerfully impressive in tone and range, particularly when returning to the studios to see Craig Pinder’s compassionate Cecil B. DeMille. When, though, it comes to acting she resorts disastrously to melodramatic burlesque. It is as if some drag queen were sending up Norma in a Vauxhall Tavern drag performance. That Sunset Boulevard still so beguiles owes plenty to Lloyd Webber’s seductive music, to Goddard and those remarkable actor-musicians.
Sunset Boulevard
The Harold Pinter Theatre
Panton Street, SW1Y 4DN
