As If We Never Said Goodbye

By Michael Walsh

FEW SHOWS HAVE ARRIVED ON Broadway hauling as much excess baggage as Sunset Boulevard, the Andrew Lloyd Webber megamusical based on the Billy Wilder film that opened last week. Having already conquered London and Los Angeles, Sunset has generated enormous expectations -- reflected in a record advance sale of $38 million. There's been backstage drama aplenty, as the mercurial composer sacked not one but two leading ladies, and snubbed New York by opening the $13 million American production in Los Angeles last year. No doubt, legions of Lloyd Webber haters would love to see the infuriatingly successful British interloper have another flop like his last Broadway outing, Aspects of Love.

Sorry, folks, but the show's a hit, thanks in large part to Glenn Close. The actress projects authentic glamour as Norma Desmond, the demented former silent-screen star who wins her final close-up on a police blotter. Close starred in the L.A. production and won the Broadway part after Lloyd Webber reneged on a contract with Patti LuPone, the creator of the role in London; it cost him $1 million to buy LuPone out. Faye Dunaway, meanwhile, was engaged as Close's successor in L.A., only to be fired when Lloyd Webber decided her voice was not up to the part; her $6 million lawsuit is pending. Close, her mobile face and twitching hands working overtime, captures all the character's narcissistic neuroticism, and she sings in a clear soprano that, if unschooled, is nevertheless a welcome relief from LuPone's raw edge.

The radiant Sunset may not be Lloyd Webber's best score, but it is his most seamlessly and artfully constructed. There is a resemblance between this show and The Phantom of the Opera -- reclusive mad protagonist conceives passion for young member of opposite sex -- but that is merely plot. Musically, Sunset's real forebear is Evita. The angular, chromatic recitatives for Norma explicitly recall Eva Peron's egocentric ravings. If the music of the new show lacks Aspects' delicious subtleties and Phantom's gothic flamboyance, it still offers two of Lloyd Webber's best songs in With One Look and As If We Never Said Goodbye.

Director Trevor Nunn and designer John Napier, the Cats team, have fashioned one coup de theatre after another, reprising Wilder's opening with the newly deceased hero (Alan Campbell as Joe Gillis) facedown in a swimming pool, and working up to a levitating mansion. This larger-than-larger-than-life approach ; doomed the gentle Aspects, but it suits the more histrionic material of Sunset. Some of the lyrics, though, have got to go. To have Joe sing that L.A. has changed a lot "since those brave gold rush pioneers/ Came in their creaky covered wagons" is ridiculous. L.A. barely existed in 1849; the gold rush took place 400 miles to the north; and the prospectors mostly came by sea, it being difficult to get wagons over the Rockies. Even in Hollywood they can't manage that.