Sunset Blvd Reviews

Telegraph - 4 stars, positive

Watching this knockout revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Sunset Boulevard it belatedly struck me that the show is a weird and disconcerting mirror image of his biggest hit, The Phantom of the Opera.

In Phantom (1986), a hideously ugly middle-aged man falls for a beautiful young woman, prompting some cruel wags to remark that it was a blatantly autobiographical piece about Lloyd Webber's passion for Sarah Brightman, who starred in the original production.

Sunset Boulevard (1993), in contrast, has a grotesque middle-aged woman falling for a hunky young man. No wonder Lloyd Webber was drawn to Billy Wilder's wonderful 1950 film noir.

In its essentials it's Phantom after a sex change, and it provides the composer with another opportunity to do what he does best: create a heart-aching, lushly tuneful musical with more than a hint of madness about it.

The original production was encumbered by over-elaborate sets, and one of Trevor Nunn's more leaden productions. In contrast, this hurtling revival, first seen at the Watermill Theatre in Newbury in the summer, is light on its feet and blessed with both sharp wit and a superb ensemble.

There are many moments in this outstanding revival by Craig Revel Horwood (the nasty judge on TV's Strictly Come Dancing) that send a thrill of excitement coursing down the spine.

The Watermill has pioneered a style (essential in its tiny space) where the actors double as the band. And what fantastic form they are in here, getting full value from one of Lloyd Webber's greatest scores in which superbly ominous and haunting theme music is juxtaposed with stonking great ballads and even a couple of comedy numbers.

Sarah Travis's arrangements are rich and inventive, and the playing, on a wide variety of instruments, has a joyous improvisatory quality.

One minute, an actor's playing a big scene, the next he or she is blowing a mean muted trumpet. One guy even plays the double bass, smokes a cigar and delivers dialogue all at the same time.

As the reclusive silent-movie star Norma Desmond, Kathryn Evans is every bit the equal of such predecessors as Patti LuPone and Elaine Paige, with her weird wild eyes, extravagant hand gestures and air of mothballed hope and corrosive loneliness.

She captures not only the imperiousness of the character ("I am big; it's the pictures that got small") but the vulnerability, too, and she gets superb value from some of Lloyd Webber's greatest anthems, with potent lyrics by Don Black and Christopher Hampton.

By the end of this raw, thrilling performance she has brought the audience to their feet.

Ben Goddard memorably captures the self-loathing as well as the cynicism of her toy-boy lover Joe Gillis; Laura Pitt-Pulford is sweet as the juvenile love interest, and Dave Willetts is both charismatic and golden-voiced as the creepy major-domo, Max.

Horwood's choreography is neat and witty, but it is the sheer panache of the whole ensemble that makes this revival so special, plus the sense that justice has finally been done to a great and undervalued musical.

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This is London - 4 stars, positive

Small is better and sometimes beautiful when it comes to this scaled-down, intimate version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1993 musical melodrama, closely based on the famous Billy Wilder film.

This Sunset Boulevard, with those catchy but clichéd lyrics from Don Black and Christopher Hampton, is another in the Watermill’s appealing line of musicals, stripped down to their best essentials. Instead of the traditional orchestra for a musical, director Craig Revel Horwood makes do with an 11-strong band, most of whom act and sing as well. The versatility of these performers, some playing more than one instrument, delights but never distracts from the main narrative. Sarah Travis’s artful arrangements help you clearly hear the romantic, nostalgic line of Lloyd Webber’s score, from the first moments when a single violin laments the murder of Ben Goddard’s handsome, baby-faced Joe Gillis.

This penniless script writer on the skids falls in with Kathryn Evans’s washed-up, has-been of a film star, Norma Desmond, and in the end falls fatally out with her. Lloyd Webber, as Evita and Phantom Of The Opera reminds us, is fascinated by life-victims.

The rise and fall of the couple’s mutually exploitative relationship, against the backcloth of a ruthless, Hollywood society that shows nothing but contempt for the failed and passé, is the musical’s main business.

The 1993 production incited you to come out singing the praises of the sets, of that vast, spectacular staircase down which Norma comes like a tragedy queen en route to a meeting with destiny. It reeked of sumptuousness. Here the elegant designer Diego Pitarch reduces Norma’s home to a modest spiral staircase under which stands an upright piano, a candelabra perched upon it. The swimming pool into which Joe’s bullet-laden body tumbles is aurally suggested rather than depicted. Yet I was far more closely engaged by the doomed love affair of clinging Norma and unwilling Joe in this version than I was at the 1993 premiere.

The key to the production’s impact is Ben Goddard, whose Gillis emerges as a pathetically young casualty of ambition, without the bulwark of talent. Moving between Norma’s home, where Dave Willetts’s butler keeps reality at bay, and the young Hollywood set, where a script-girl longs for him, Goddard’s Gillis exudes bemused impotence as he falls deeper into the coils of the crazy, smitten Norma. It is of course Miss Desmond, yearning to be back in her famous yesterdays and fantasising about a comeback, who ought to capture the pathos that Lloyd Webber’s score invites — Everyone Needs New Ways To Dream and We Never Said Goodbye.

Dressed strikingly in black and white, Miss Evans deploys a singing voice powerfully impressive in tone and range, particularly when returning to the studios to see Craig Pinder’s compassionate Cecil B. DeMille. When, though, it comes to acting she resorts disastrously to melodramatic burlesque. It is as if some drag queen were sending up Norma in a Vauxhall Tavern drag performance. That Sunset Boulevard still so beguiles owes plenty to Lloyd Webber’s seductive music, to Goddard and those remarkable actor-musicians.

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Independent - positive

Loyally, perhaps too loyally, based on Billy Wilder's great movie, Andrew Lloyd Webber's 1993 Sunset Boulevard, with outstanding book and lyrics by Don Black and Christopher Hampton, was the last of the 20th-century musical blockbusters. Despite great performances by Patti LuPone, Glenn Close and Elaine Paige as Norma Desmond, and a lush, baroque design of a Hollywood palazzo by John Napier for Trevor Nunn's production, the bubble burst over the big global franchise phenomenon.

It did in the Lloyd Webber world, at least, but Disney is still in there larging it up. Sunset ran for three and a half years in London originally, but has retained the affection of the Sondheim end of the musical-theatre market. Why is now clearly revealed in Craig Revel Horwood's small-scale revival, seen earlier this summer at Newbury's Watermill Theatre.

With a dozen actor-musicians playing instruments on stage, filling in the choruses and individual characters, it's a wonderful, organic response to a score that is as dynamic and complex as any that Lloyd Webber has written, creating a harmonic equivalent of tropical decay and splendour in lush melodies full of open fifths, augmented fourths and sevenths, and one of the best of all comeback anthems, "With One Look".

That item is delivered by Kathryn Evans descending a modest spiral staircase with a face that could freeze a charity commission at 10 paces. Evans is one of the great unsung divas of the British musical; it sounds cruel to say she's got everything except star quality, but it's a fact. Her dramatic style and consummate musicianship are some compensation, but the grotesquery of her clinging to faded dreams and the hapless screenwriter Joe Gillis (very well done by Ben Goddard), is affecting, not terrifying.

In the film, Gloria Swanson appears as "herself" and so does Eric von Stroheim as the manservant Max. The rich irony of the musical is that a sidelined silent-movie star makes her case by singing, and the bustle of the film world moving on elsewhere sounds less compelling than the old melodramatic gestures. A similar theatrical irony was employed by Lloyd Webber in his hi-tech lament for steam railway, Starlight Express, the show Kate Winslet now says she saw five times in her youth; Sunset will mean just as much to an older generation

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The Stage - positive

Sunset Boulevard returns to the West End stage following a gap of 15 years in a stunning production by Strictly Come Dancing judge Craig Revel Horwood that strips the show of lavish production values and a traditional pit orchestra.
Kathryn Evans (Norma Desmond) in Sunset Boulevard at the Comedy Theatre, London

Instead, a cast of 13 playing their own instruments perform their way through the score and make use of a minimal set - where a chaise longue can become both a car and, turned length ways, the exterior of a drug store.

The result is a thoroughly impressive, entertaining and moving ensemble piece that draws the audience in to the story of silent movie star Norma Desmond, played to perfection in a triumphant performance by Kathryn Evans, and her infatuation with a young writer called Joe Gillis, played by Ben Goddard. Goddard is perfect as the down on his luck writer who seizes an opportunity to enjoy a more lavish lifestyle in the world of Desmond, regularly finding the humour and wit in the book by Don Black and Christopher Hampton,

But it is Revel Horwood’s tight direction and staging, and his use of actors doubling up as musicians, that steals the show here. Each cast member is equally strong performing a character as they are playing a number of instruments, creating a sound that is rich and full, thanks largely to the clever musical arrangements of Sarah Travis.

The show is an ensemble piece through and through and proof that musicals do not need to be bathed in expensive production values to engage, fascinate and delight. This is a show that truly deserves its place on the West End stage and the standing ovation it received.

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I promised on the other Sunset Boulevard thread, that I come back with a honest opinion on what I thought on actor/musician productions, on a score I am very familiar with.

Yesterday afternoon I had a chance to see Sunset Boulevard at the Comedy Theatre; the theatre was a quarter full, with the top two circles shut.

Lets deal with the inevitable question first, does actor/musician really do it for me, the answer is a half hearted no, still prefer separate actor, musicians, but beggars cannot be choosers and have to say it was nowhere as bad as I first thought, especially when I had the privilege of seeing a whole stage of very talented (call them what you will). I have to be a realist and say that if you did not have combined actors/musician, you would not have one of The Lords finest shows reopen as the production would be too expensive, with separate entertainers and that palatial set.

What really impressed me was the direction of the show and how well it was delivered, no mean feat to coordinate actors/musician/dancing/acting, little did I know at the time it was directed by Craig Revel Horwood, I knew he was involved but assumed as a choreographer, so nice surprise he directed this magnificent number, proof there is more to him, than some Saturday evening bore, where they cannot even get the scoring right.

The set was very cheap, but not tacky, the car chase scene, the mansion and the swimming pool scenes were dealt with effectively.
It always stirs curiosity with me how they can successfully down-scale a show, I admit I do love the original spectacular.

Ben Goddard as Joe Gillis was very competent and delivered his lines with zest and passion, Dave Willets as Max, what can I say about a chap who has been the Phantom and Valjean, I know my place! Now its the turn of Kathryn Evans, what clichés would do her justice, I fell in love all over again and boy what a voice she has and knows how to deliver her lines, it was a privilege to be there and all the cast done themselves justice and delivered a first rate show.

The only minus point of the afternoon was that the theatre was quarter fall and boy what an atmosphere if it was fall!

I cannot think of anything else to say, just go.

Updated On: 12/18/08 at 03:45 AM

You are right, you would needed a pretty talented understudies, I can only suggest that they might have preprepared music, only way round this scenario.

A lot of criticism as been aimed on here at Bill Kenwright, how much of a humbug scrooge, he is, however what he does is effective and he has an eye for making great theatre!

What a wonderful production. I've just spent a really beautiful, magical evening in the theatre with this inspired production that fits the Comedy like a glove.
Im still not a fan of the a/m set up but boy it really works for this show.
Kathryn Evans is simply stunning and the company were perfect.
A pretty full house was really into it and the reception at the curtain was fantastic.

I think he's a clever director but he's just a pratt on TV. He did a great job with a dismal show on 'Beautiful And Damned' a few years back.
I'm sure he'll be asked to do many more shows in the future, one of them will be a huge production for certain.

Updated On: 12/26/08 at 06:56 PM

Craig Revel Horwood is an amazing director (I've worked with him so I've seen at first hand his amazing insight into character and the dramatic needs of a scene as well as his incredible mastery of choreographic story-telling.) Sunset Boulevard is merely the most recent of three stunning productions at the Watermill - and I think his Martin Guerre last year was even better. He's also directed operas in Berlin, the Lion King show at Disneyland Paris and the opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games in Manchester. It's high time he received the West End esteem he deserves.

As for his "Strictly" image - that's pure TV and he projects the persona the producers expect of him. He is actually one of the nicest guys you could ever hope to meet.

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Updated On: 12/27/08 at 06:51 PM

Craig's production of Martin Guerre at the Watermill was a "new" production. It was based on the West End version of the book and score, though there were a number of changes made. One of the changes to the original score was the use of "Live With Somebody You Love" changed from the male duet sung in the West Yorkshire playhouse version to a duet between Arnaud and Bertrande. This replaced "All I Know" - and this was just about the only thing I did not like about the production as "All I Know" is my favourite song in the show and I think it was a defining moment for Arnaud and Bertrande.

But overall I thought the Watermill version was the best I've seen. And Ben Goddard and Andrew Bevis as Arnaud and Martin were both fantastic.

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A lot of arguments have been made of the musician/actor and there is a lot of feeling that this is not good, with some of you pro musician/actor. The cast of Sunset proved to be very multi-talented.

Lets move on from the argument and now ask, if Sunset Boulevard was proposed to be revived with separate cast/musician, would this be possible or would the production costs be prohibitive?