People know that TV impressionist Faith Brown can "do" a lot of different voices - from Margaret Thatchers imperious tones to Cilla Blacks Liverpudlian twang. But few remember she has a voice of her own....

a strong singing voice. Now Yorkshire audiences are about to be reminded in sensational style - Brown stars as the legendary Norma Desmond in the first British touring version of Andrew Lloyd Webbers West End hit, Sunset Boulevard.

Mounted by Lloyd Webbers Really Useful Theatre Company, the musical visits Hull New Theatre, October 10-27. Its a coup for the New, being the only venue in this region so far announced and just the third to be visited on the new national tour. "I used to be labelled the female Tom Jones because of the voice. Isnt it weird how things come around?" says Brown who began her career singing with her brothers, The Carrolls.

"I can get Top C without any problem. Ive broken a glass before today with my voice. But people get such a shock when they hear Im playing Norma because they dont know I can sing.

"Andrews songs are to die for. He likes every note hit perfectly. Thank goodness, he loves it - in fact, he said its better than the original."

Based on Billy Wilders 1950 movie about a faded silent movie queen planning to make a comeback, Sunset Boulevard has a score that includes ballads such as With One Look and As If We Never Said Goodbye. The original London production opened in 1993 and ran for four years. It featured a number of different leading actresses, including Patti LuPone, Elaine Paige and Petula Clark and was seen by more than two million people. The Broadway version initially starred Glenn Close and won seven prestigious Tony Awards. Desmond, who entraps penniless young screenwriter Joe Gillis to help her ambition - here played by West End regular Earl Carpenter - is one difficult diva in the old Hollywood style.

"Playing this role is beyond my wildest dreams," adds Brown who featured on series of TVs Who Do You Do? People pigeon-hole me. They put me in a little box labelled, Faith Brown, funny lady with big boobs. They dont realise theres a serious lady here.

"I have seen the film but I never saw any of the other stage Normas. Andrew said maybe that was a good thing because it could have influenced me, being an impressionist. I do it my own way.

"It is a dark piece, but Im told my version is lighter than the others. Still, I do cry in it. Normas a very manipulative person, but there again, I have a vulnerability and I try to bring that out in her." Brown has appeared in a couple of musicals before but nothing on this scale. She played Stella, a mother, in Summer Holiday at the Blackpool Opera House, and Miss Hannigan, in Annie, at Guildford.

But when she heard on the grapevine that auditions were being held for Sunset Boulevard - "I knew it was my role".

She adds:/b "When I went for the audition, I was petrified because I wanted it so badly. Then they asked me to come back - and there were a lot of heavy-duty people going for it. They said the composer would be coming in that time and I was more nervous than I was before a Royal Variety Performance.

"I sang With One Look and I glanced up and Andrew - it was his birthday - had his head in his hands. I thought Oh, he hates it! But, do you know, he was crying. I suppose not for one minute would Andrew have thought I would be his Norma - and then he heard me sing. Isnt it funny how things happen in weird and magical ways?" She takes the demanding role for eight performances a week which, she admits, is "a lot on the larynx".

"Ive had a whole bottle of honey in the last few days. I have a teaspoon every now and again. It helps soothe the larynx." The show has a cast of 28 and an orchestra of 13. Twelve 40ft trucks transport the sets, costumes and props used in its 13 scenes. Many props come from America, including cameras used originally to film vintage Hollywood movies.

"No amount of money has been spared. The sets are stunning, my costumes are to die for, everything has cost a fortune," confirms Brown.

The only downside, as far as she is concerned, is that the tour lasts 12 months and she is already missing her home in Buckinghamshire, husband Len Wady and their 23-year-old daughter, Danielle.

It is well documented how Brown tried for 12 years to have a child. After Danielles birth, she put her career on hold for a while.
"Thank God I have one able-bodied child. Shes like my mum, who tells me what to do. She says I have to leave Norma Desmond in the dressing room. I would never become like Norma because I have my feet firmly on the ground. I dont like temperamental divas. But Norma is under my skin." Now it is the cast of characters whose voices she can mimic so cleverly that is on hold.

Brown does, however, give a blast of Cilla as she explains: "Surprise, surprise - I dont want to do them any more." Reverting to normal, she adds, "At this moment in time, I just want to do this. This is the dream. This is the role I have hoped for - and now its MINE."

THE YORKSHIRE POST
Sunset reviewed
by Linda Murdin

THEY'VE long had a Boulevard in Hull, just as they have in Hollywood. It's the home of the rugby league club, Hull FC. Intense drama, partly in black and white, takes place there in front of a cheering crowd. And so it does in Sunset Boulevard, Andrew Lloyd Webber's magnificent West End musical, now visiting Hull's New Theatre as the only Yorkshire venue on its first British tour.

Otherwise, these two Boulevards, while currently in the same city, remain worlds apart.A quasi-operatic score is not the sort of score they want at the rugby ground. Nor do questions of fantasy and illusion have any place there: you only get real life at Hull Boulevard.


In Sunset Boulevard, based on Billy Wilder's classic black and white film about a faded movie queen planning a comeback, you're never quite sure what's true and what's false. Indeed, the stunning, ambiguous ending makes you wonder if you should not have taken the whole show at face value after all. Could it all be a representation of the film in which Norma Desmond actually did make her return to the silver screen?

With projected, simulated film clips emphasising the thinness of the fact-fiction dividing line, you can tie yourself up in a web of such musings. But that's as nothing compared with the tender trap in which poor Joe Gillis finds himself. A penniless screenwriter, he flees debt-collectors (cue entertaining car chase using theatrical techniques to mimic a movie cliche) only to land up at Desmond's home on Sunset Boulevard.

All gilt ornate staircase and black and gold gauze curtains, Rob Howell's design here manages to be both opulent and spooky. The festooned drapes are reminiscent of cobwebs and Desmond turns out to be a man-eating spider. She's a "femme fatale", yet, as played by TV entertainer Faith Brown, she has an emotional fragility that only adds to her mesmerising impact.

Faith Brown? Yes, the famous impersonator of Mrs Thatcher, among others, also has a musical voice and started her career as a singer. Before arriving in Hull, only the third venue on the tour, Brown told me that people pigeon-holed her as "funny lady with big boobs". In fact, big - as in Desmond's legendary line, "I am big. It's the pictures that got small" - could be the by-word for the whole of Brown's commanding and deliberately melodramatic performance.

Big voice, big lips, big frocks, big hands all are used to maximum advantage, her attenuated fingers recalling the Phantom of the Opera, another predator living in twilight world who's brought to the stage by Lloyd Webber.

Director Robert Carsen, renowned internationally for his work with classical operas, ensures that Desmond's style of old-fashioned "grande dame" glamour contrasts sharply by the youthful freshness of Gillis's colleagues at the film studios: has-been as opposed to wannabes, in other words.

Sometimes using black screens that crop the New's large stage and frame the youngsters like the edging of celluloid strips, the scenes cut swiftly from one environment into the other. They switch from the luxury of a gilded cage to the simplicity of an empty studio containing genuine antique filming equipment; from a diva's stately movements to lively dance scenes involving a large ensemble of 22.

It's fashionable for critics to sneer at Lloyd Webber's lushly romantic style of music, but I'm afraid I've always been a sucker for it. Played by an orchestra of 13, the score of Sunset Boulevard sounds in many ways typical of his work. But, although the title song, as well as With One Look, are relatively well-known, on the whole it contains fewer readily recognisable tunes than the composer's other blockbusters.

Most of its oft-repeated, interlocking refrains, are of the insidiously insistent type that you can't get out of your head for days afterwards. It's an interesting coincidence that the book and lyrics of this tale of a dangerous liaison, involving a manipulative woman and the destructive power of unrequited love, were co-written by Don Black and Christopher Hampton. Hampton was responsible for the translation of Les Liaisons Dangereuses currently at the York Theatre Royal (see above).

That play's movie version starred Glenn Close, who also played Desmond when Sunset Boulevard opened on Broadway, where it won seven Tony awards.

I do have some slight complaints about this new touring production. The sound system on Press night occasionally gave an artificiality of tone that was clearly not intended to be another echo of the artificiality of Hollywood.

As Gillis, West End regular Earl Carpenter provides a loose-limbed, likeable toy-boy with a strong and pleasant singing voice. Yet his relaxed performance would benefit from an injection of meanness and moodiness and more electricity between him and his alternative love, Betty Schaefer (Ceri Ann Gregory).

But there's no lack of emotional charge in the portrayal given by Michael Bower as Desmond's servant Max. His dead-pan stoicism melts into tenderness with his faultless and movingly rendition of The Greatest Star of All.

Minor cavils aside, the show meets the high standards of quality-control always applied by the producers, Lloyd Webber's Really Useful Theatre Company. It's in a completely different league from most touring musicals. So scrum down for Sunset Boulevard.

Rating *****