Years ago in Berlin, I watched an older, ruddy-cheeked German friend—now deceased—smear a quarter inch of butter on a large cracker, then overlay that with a half inch of schmaltz (clarified goose fat), then top that with bacon, and then finish it off with slabs of brie. As the friend raised this object to her mouth, smiling euphorically, my wife Julie and I reflexively grabbed each other’s hands under the table, fearing the instant wrath of the coronary gods.
This distant memory is the aptest metaphor I can summon for the director Jamie Lloyd’s new staging of the 1993 Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Sunset Blvd., just opened on Broadway following a much-decorated London run. Not to be outdone by the building-sized, megawatt GIFs of supermodels quavering on Times Square, or the hundreds of other emptily “epic” mega-spectacles blaring across our mediasphere, Lloyd has for some reason taken one of the most bloviated, bombastic, and absurdly hyperventilated musicals ever conceived and striven to render it . . . well, still more bloviated and bombastic.
The signature style of this British directing star—previously seen in New York with Pinter’s Betrayal, Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, and Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac—stresses the focusing power of stripped-down design. Muted color palettes, sparse or absent furniture, the stage-as-stage. I found these productions acute and perceptive, powerfully essentializing what deeply mattered in those complicated dramas.
Sunset Blvd. is another animal, because it isn’t complicated. Webber, Don Black and Christopher Hampton reimagined the wryly witty 1950 Billy Wilder film (about the hilariously vain, has-been movie star Norma Desmond and the hunky screenwriter Joe Gillis who succumbs to her deadly snare) as a sung-through operetta, draining it of all wit, nuance and subtlety to emphasize a handful of oversimplified core feelings in the central characters (I deserve better; I’ll never be cowed; You deserve better; Don’t give up). Only the magnetic magic and lucid relatedness of Glenn Close, who starred in the original Broadway production, saved this show from bathetic oblivion in 1993.
Lloyd approaches it by adding tankerloads of fog to his stark directing idiom, along with gigantic and persistent video closeups of his lead actors projected live onto rear screens from hand-held steadycams. His Norma is a svelt, dark-haired, ballet-dancing hottie in a little black dress (played by the Grammy nominee Nicole Scherzinger), quite a departure from the sunken-eyed harridan in a shawl Gloria Swanson played onscreen, or the aging biddy in a turban Close played onstage. In addition, Scherzinger is given a young double (Hannah Yun Chamberlain) who shows what Norma looked like at 17, which is utterly inexplicable. Scherzinger herself looks 25 (she’s really 46)—you can barely tell the actresses apart.
Sunset Boulevard’s famous story is about Hollywood puffery and the vacuousness of images, but it’s also about self-delusion and missed connections among particular, interesting people. There are some good actors and singers in Lloyd’s show—including Scherzinger and Tom Francis, who plays Joe—but none of the lyrics are comprehensible due to overamplification and a general imperative to belt, and there are no credible human relationships, comic, erotic, or otherwise.
All attention is directed toward vainglorious pseudo-relationships between people and cameras, or people and objects. In a second act video intro, for instance, Francis, on his way to an outdoor dance number performed on the brightly lit street, actually stops on a backstage stairway to greet a cardboard cutout of Andrew Lloyd Webber! Okay, you get it: everything is fake and alienated in Tinseltown. But how much mind-numbing repetition does it take to clarify that? What’s the point of essentializing bombast? After a half hour or so, it amounts to butter on cheese on schmalz.
I suppose the likeliest explanation for this oleaginous blimp is that Lloyd has tired of the serious-art ghetto and is now itching to be a franchise, maybe even graduate to mass market superwealth, like Webber. Well, if that’s his angle, he better think soon about trademarking his style, because in two shakes of a steadycam, friends, AI is comin’ for us all.
HEY ALEXA! IT’S 2030 AND I’M BORED. I’VE SEEN ALL THE VINTAGE MUSICALS ON NETFLIX AND NOW I WANNA SEE ANY BROADWAY SHOW FROM THE 1980S OR 90S—I DON’T CARE WHICH—DONE IN THE STYLE OF JAMIE LLOYD. AND PLEASE UPDATE THE STAR! I WANT HER TO LOOK LIKE . . .
Photos by Marc Brenner
Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber
Book & Lyrics by Don Black and Christopher Hampton
Directed by Jamie Lloyd
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