A Hollywood Opera Noir

SPREAD ACROSS THE BOTTOM OF the stage is a buzzing New Years 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 Stmset Boulevard has much the same theme as his greatest hits 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, re reclaiming the latter as a popular rather than elite formal An operatic reading does no disservice to Billy Wilder's film noirs 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.