Review of the actor/musician production of Sunset Boulevard at the Watermill Theatre, Newbury, Berkshire, UK. This is a slightly edited version of a post already made on the West End board but has been posted here in response to my promise to the charming and friendly LePetiteFromage. If anyone wishes to know more please follow the link... https://www.broadwayworld.com/board/readmessage.cfm?thread=972386&dt=18&boardid=3 It was going to be interesting to see if an ALW musical would bear the scrutiny of a small-scale production and this one does very well. You notice the ropey bits of writing in the same way you do on the recording but there aren’t that many of them and this is one of the better musicals to have an ALW score. I don’t think the actor/musician concept added anything to the show in the way I felt it did with Mack and Mabel and was simply used as a device to squeeze a big musical into a very small and intimate theatre. The actors tended to sit on the sides or were unseen offstage when playing them and I read somewhere there were 11 instruments, which is more than I was expecting and so the score still sounded very lush.
The set consisted of a revolving spiral staircase that descended into the organ pipes of Norma’s instrument (the keyboard sat in amongst those pipes looked suspiciously like an electric organ) and was set against a large backdrop of an early black-and-white film star. The car chase was a bit feeble but the enormous mansion was not missed, not even during the New Year’s Eve party scene where Craig Revel Horwood’s staging had Norma icily focussed, walking through her mansion whilst the party happens elsewhere in slow motion around her. There were 12 in the cast, Kathryn Evans as Norma Desmond being the only cast member I didn’t see playing an instrument. As posted elsewhere on this site, this West End veteran is so ripe and ready for this role and she certainly made the most of it. The revelatory moment for me in her performance was not in the singing or the acting but in a small instant prior to As If We Never Said Goodbye when Norma has returned to the studio and is caught in the hustle and bustle with scenery and cameras and lights flying everywhere. She is enjoying the excitement of it all immensely, like a child at Christmas, when suddenly from nowhere a microphone swings directly in front of her face and the expression of pleasure and delight suddenly turns to one of abject horror and she immediately pushes the thing away. If that was in the London production I certainly didn’t notice it and only spotted it here from my seat over the stage as Kathryn was facing away from much of the audience at the time. In her performance it was one of those instances where something very small manages to achieve something revelatory.
Ben Goddard as Joe Gillis played woodwind and electric organ and was possibly not quite world-weary enough for the role but that’s a small complaint. Thom Coles was in there as Artie Green being talented, talented and gorgeous (as he was in Mack and Mabel) – this guy so knows how to sit on a swimming pool handrail. And, as posted by others on the West End board, much more was made here of the Joe/Betty relationship and that in no small way to do with Laura Pitt-Pulford’s performance in the role, wringing every last depth of emotion out of her character.
It was my first time at this now internationally renowned theatre and it perhaps wasn’t as idyllic as it sounds but that was possibly because of all the building work going on. However I’ll definitely be going back should a future season include something of interest.
But I got my mother to pay for the tickets, so it's ALL good. 
