ARTICLE: Melbourne     The trouble with Sunset By STEPHANIE BUNBURY THERE is no business like show business, and no show business quite as buoyant as that of Andrew Lloyd Webber. The $15 million Sunset Boulevard, which hits Melbourne tonight, is the latest in the string of triumphs that has brought Sir Andrew an estimated personal income of a breathtaking $52 million in one year. But Sunset Boulevard has also cost Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber a small fortune - in settlements out of court, pay-outs and a revamping of the show itself - since it first opened in London three years ago. Sunset has been Sir Andrew's trouble child. By last year, theatre people in London were referring to "the curse of Sunset Boulevard". It visited the Melbourne production briefly on Monday at a preview when its star, Debra Byrne, collapsed on stage as a result of a middle ear infection. However the trouble with Sunset started slowly. Initial reviews of the show were mixed, as they usually are for blockbusting musicals, but The Times' critic suggested that Sunset Boulevard would still be running in a century's time. And why not? Certainly, the Really Useful Group, in which Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber has a 70 per cent holding, has plenty invested in its future. In London, the RUG bought a West End theatre, the ornate Adelphi, as its permanent venue. In Germany, a theatre was built in the middle of nowhere, in the woods outside Wiesbaden, especially for Sunset Boulevard. RUG has a 10-year lease on the theatre. The buses keep on coming and it is full every night. People have flocked to Sunset Boulevard on the strength of the Lloyd Webber name. In New York, despite a sour pasting by Frank Rich, the so-called "Butcher of Broadway", in The New York Times the show broke all box-office records with $55 million in advance sales and went on to clean up seven Tony awards. Tonight, it opens at the restored Regent with $12 million in advance tickets sold - a local record. Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber's magic has worked again. Arguably, the magic has worked a trick many of us thought impossible: adapting one of most gloomily atmospheric, acerbically scripted films in the Hollywood pantheon to the inescapably frivolous world of musical theatre. Norma Desmond, so memorably portrayed in Billy Wilder's 1950 film by a decayed Gloria Swanson, is a silent screen goddess who has retired into her mansion with her costumes, memories, frustration and a sinister manservant. Into this mausoleum comes a hard-up young scriptwriter, Joe Gillis, who soon becomes an essential prop in her fetid fantasy world. She eats him alive. The point of the film was to venture into a pocket of the misery behind the bright lights and glamor of Hollywood. But what do Andrew Lloyd Webber's usual audiences want but Miss Desmond's own fantasy - the bright lights, the glamor - just for one night? In the event, there is plenty there for them. The reputation of John Napier's set comes before it: it costs millions of dollars and is both a feast for the eyes and one of the engineering marvels of the theatrical universe. One sequence manages to combine a studio back lot, a car chase and a deserted garage, complete with vintage car; the whole stage, filled with the overwhelming encrustation of baroquerie that is Norma Desmond's mansion, rises to reveal another stage with the world outside. It is absolutely amazing, the very stuff of the mega-musical. The costumes are equally astonishing. Anthony Powell had to make them as outlandish as Norma herself, without trying to compete with the trappings of the set. "I thought: what can I do that isn't going to disappear? So I thought well, you know, things that catch the light, metallic, glitter, all the rest of it and keep them very, very simple." In the end, he decided to use a lot of animal prints. Tigers and leopards are inherently glamorous. "And somebody once told me, and I've never forgotten it, that a psychologist once said that women who wear those wild animal prints tend to be promiscuous. "And I thought what nonsense, but then I started looking at women who did wear that and it was actually true." He laughs uproariously. There is something rather refreshing about the mega-musical business; the people down the line don't take themselves half as seriously as the actors on the cutting edge. Not that the old Sunset of serious intent has not been allowed to drop completely below the horizon. The lyrics, many drawn directly from the original script, have the crystalline quality one would expect of Christopher Hampton, who also adapted Les Liaisons Dangereuses and almost everything is sung, which gives the show an added operatic gravitas. Catherine Porter, a sparky American who is in Melbourne to play Betty Schaeffer, the equally sparky young aspiring writer with whom Joe Gillis falls in love, spent a year in the show in London. "Yes, it is commercial," she says, "but it can be a dramatic story of extreme pathos in which you feel for this woman who is a has-been and who is desperately mad and tragic. If it's done well, it can be quite touching. And with what is given musically to help the drama, again if it's done well, it can be very powerful." But power, even the magical power of Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber, has come at a price. Sir Andrew has absolute quality control over his shows. He is famous for popping in on them, wherever they might be, to check that everything is tickety-boo. It was this exacting eye that decided to rework the show before it went to Los Angeles, at a cost of $18 million. It was worth it: with Glenn Close in the lead, it took Los Angeles by storm. He then closed Sunset for a month in London to change that version, at a cost of $3 million. So far, so perfectionist. It was then that Sir Andrew started having Norma trouble. Patti Lu Pone, who opened the show in London to better notices than those of the songs she sang - "grand but predictable", according to Frank Rich - was supposed to transfer to Broadway. Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber decided to send Glenn Close instead. A furious Miss Lu Pone had to be bought out at a rumored cost of about $1.5 million. Faye Dunaway was to take over from Close in Los Angeles. Three days before the curtain was due to rise, Sir Andrew sacked Miss Dunaway and closed the show altogether. A total of $6 million of advanced bookings had to be returned. He announced Faye Dunaway could not sing the part well enough; following the kind of grandiose writ for damages that befits a great star, she then walked away with a sum estimated at $2 million. Last year, Glenn Close had her own turn at stage rage when she found that RUG had wildly exaggerated box office figures during a two-week period when she was on holiday, in an effort to boost her understudy, Karen Mason. Ms Close was, by her own admission, "furious and insulted" and, in a letter to Sir Andrew, said: "I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that my performance turned Sunset Boulevard around. "I made it a hit. It has existed on my shoulders . . . If I could leave Sunset tomorrow I would." Perhaps the curse comes with the mega-musical territory. Sir Andrew is not a placid man. Equally, according to Catherine Porter, the women who play Norma Desmond do tend to acquire some of the characteristics of that grande dame. She worked with three Normas in London, and usually felt like "the other woman", on stage and off. It's a curious business, the Andrew Lloyd Webber international conglomerate. After the debacle in New York about the box office returns, Glenn Close wrote to the maestro: "You and your people have made me and my colleagues feel that all you care about is the money." In one way, this is self-evident: when a single leopard-skin frock costs something like $15,000, money must be a concern. And whatever the actors may think of the product, they want to be in the shows. Elaine Paige cleared her diary to fill in as Norma in London for just seven weeks while Betty Buckley recovered from surgery. "That sort of role doesn't come along too often for women of my age so I thought why not, let's go for it," she said. Later, when Glenn Close left the show, Betty Buckley returned to her native New York and Paige took over from her in London: more moves in the Sunset quadrille. "It sounds cliched," says Catherine Porter, "but it's something you dream of as a little girl, to be in that big show. Everyone in musical theatre wants to work for Andrew Lloyd Webber and sing his music at some point in his or her life. "It's like you want to meet the most popular girl at school and get to know her because you want to know what it's about. And to be seen with her is a good thing, too. Andrew Lloyd Webber is the most popular guy at school." She giggles naughtily. "And the richest!"