One thing was perfectly clear the other night in Los Angeles, at least inside the Shubert Theater.
When the curtain came down on the last preview performance of "Sunset Boulevard," Andrew Lloyd Webber's elaborate, neo-Gothic musical adaptation of Billy Wilder's classic 1950 film, Glenn Close had suddenly become a big, exciting new star of the American musical theater of the 1990s.It's not as if Close were unknown on the stage. She's a two-time Tony Award winner (for "The Real Thing" and "Death and the Maiden") and received warm reviews for her work in the 1980 Broadway musical "Barnum."
"Sunset Boulevard" is something else. Her performance catapults her into the sphere of megastars. She takes the role of Norma Desmond, the demonic, reclusive silent-film queen whom Gloria Swanson made so dauntingly memorable, and fiercely shapes it into her own unexpected image.
This isn't a Glenn Close you have ever seen in movies. There have been hints of her reserves of power in "Dangerous Liaisons," "Reversal of Fortune" and even in "Fatal Attraction." Yet nothing she has done comes near the commanding figure she creates in this new Lloyd Webber extravaganza, which, with Patti LuPone as Norma Desmond, opened in July in London to mixed reviews.
Close's performance is ravishing. Her looks astonish - the high cheekbones, the Rooseveltian jaw, the eyes staring out from the pale face beneath a thick layer of mascara. She somehow manages to suggest Lon Chaney's silent-screen Phantom of the Opera, and even the one in Lloyd Webber's long-running Broadway chestnut, without sacrificing either her beauty or her intelligence as an actress.
She is no belter in the manner of LuPone. Yet her singing voice is lovely and strong, the phrasing capturing Norma's merciless determination and self-serving wit. If the lyrics tend to blur in moments of high melodrama, it's more because of the vagaries of stage mikes and the uncertain science of sound amplification in today's musical theater. Say this for Close: Her diction is far better than Joan Sutherland's.
Most important, the actress inhabits every square inch of the Shubert's immense stage with mesmerizing authority. She wears the space with the same elegant self-assurance with which she wears her succession of extraordinary outside-of-time Anthony Powell costumes.
It's as if, like Norma Desmond, she knows that the rest of the world exists only as "all those wonderful people out there in the dark," that is, as an audience whose sole function is to attend her with adoration.
Close's triumph seems certain to complicate the question of who'll be playing Norma if the $10 million show comes to Broadway next fall. Though LuPone is under contract to play the role in New York, there's bound to be pressure now to bring in the star of the Los Angeles company.
Lloyd Webber's "Sunset Boulevard" is not Billy Wilder's, though Trevor Nunn, the director, and Don Black and Christopher Hampton, who wrote the book and lyrics, appear to have adapted the film with something like abject fidelity.
What was once an evilly skeptical, bitter melodramatic comedy about Hollywood's self-infatuation has been turned into something quite other. This "Sunset Boulevard" is not a tragedy, though it ends badly. It's a melodramatic romance.
The real shocker is that with Close as Norma Desmond it works.
I'm aware that Wilder, who has seen the musical twice, has been quoted as saying that he loves the stage production but thinks the collaborators could have profited by being less reverent toward his work.
Lloyd Webber's "Sunset Boulevard" doesn't simply pity Norma, as Wilder's does, it also salutes her crazy grandeur. It recognizes that in 1950, Norma, at age 50, would be only 20-some years past her peak. As Joe Gillis (Alan Campbell) tells Norma, "There's nothing wrong with being 50, unless you are acting 20." But in the silent-film era in which Norma is locked, youth is all.
The musical also recognizes that the technological divide between silent and sound films has marooned her, left her isolated on the far side of a metaphorical Grand Canyon. Lloyd Webber agrees when first Norma, and later Max von Mayerling (George Hearn), her butler, former director and ex-husband, sing that they gave the world "new ways to dream."
Lloyd Webber's "Sunset Boulevard" salutes Norma's mad courage and her delusions. Her cuckoo dreams are encouraged. And in numbers such as "Surrender," "With One Look" and "The Greatest Star of All," he makes a convincing case for his romantic view of human nature and movie history.
Lloyd Webber's score is a good one, though the handful of songs is so shamelessly reprised you suspect it might be the music that's pushing Norma over the edge, not Fate, and not the feckless Joe's clandestine pursuit of someone else.
Hearn sings beautifully while giving a wonderful interpretation of Erich von Stroheim's screen performance as Max von Mayerling. All the other voices are first-rate, including Campbell's, but the actor seems a very lightweight Joe Gillis.
Unlike William Holden, who played Joe in the film, Campbell looks like a juvenile out of a musical of the 40s or 50s, someone without any concept of the terrors of economic desperation or, for that matter, of the joys of sleazy opportunism.
Will "Sunset Boulevard" become a Lloyd Webber super-hit on the order of his "Phantom of the Opera"? As someone who could barely sit through "Phantom," and who, when the chandelier softly plummeted, felt cheated (no blood or mangled tiaras in sight), I would say that "Sunset Boulevard" delivers almost everything it promises. It has class.