On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage SUNSET ON THE MAIN STEM BY STEFAN KANFER The final test of our hardihood came when we were permitted to witness a combat virtually never seen: a fight between a mongoose and a cobra,...
...Norma hears only what she prefers to hear...
...In part because the composer/impresario has become a brand name whose latest product is accepted without question...
...The other members of the cast, from Alice Ripley (Betty Schaefer) to Alan Oppenheimer (De Mille), look and sound their parts, but they are merely so many animate backdrops to the main event...
...Now a feeling of self-disgust overwhelms him...
...Joe: "You used to be big...
...Swanson had been a real queen of the silents, and something valid and touching still clings to the way Norma struts about the mansion on Sunset, convinced that her comeback is only a script away...
...As Gillis, Alan Campbell projects the personality of a genial anchorman rather than a pliable burnout...
...The tenor of this informal quintet is the waiter (David Pittu...
...The music and lyrics are by Craig Carnelia, composer of the most original cabaret material in New York...
...Sunset's songs have neither a contemporary quality nor a sense of the '50s...
...Five voices, in fact...
...When the evening was over, I sensed that the future of the musical belonged to Off-Broadway...
...Her emoting is out of the Kabuki school, yet so was Gloria Swanson's...
...The first was Gloria Swanson's, of course, in Billy Wilder's 1950 film...
...In a few lines, Carnelia captures the nostalgia of a picture taken during World War II: There s a frame around the breezy day There's a path around the tree There's an arm around the bride And the private sort ofpride In the woman in the fall In the silence in the hall Not every number was as poignant, nor did every fantasy take wing...
...The flashy costumes by Anthony Powell are complemented by Andrew Bridge's creepy lighting designs...
...SOME 50 BLOCKS SOUTH, at the Circle Repertory in Greenwich Village, a different kind of musical found its voice...
...And yet, after the script is submitted, Norma does receive a call from her old boss, Cecil B. De Mille...
...Yes, he allows himself to be kept by Norma...
...Right...
...Accompanied by the piano, they allow their ids and memories free play as the waiter turns into a lover, a husband, a therapist, and their kindergarten teacher...
...The inanimate backdrops are the work of production designer John Napier, and every one of them is spectacular...
...We had faces...
...So heavily that its only good lines come from the movie...
...VIEWS OF that combat are not so rare anymore...
...Before the evening is out, Betty is summoned to Sunset Boulevard to witness Joe's indulgent life-style...
...During all this Joe occasionally breaks away from 10086 Sunset Boulevard and wanders back to Schwab's Drugstore, the hangout for young hopefuls...
...Even so, the cast had vibrancy and wit, and Tee Scatuorchio's direction allowed for no longueurs...
...Sunset Boulevard has risen without a trace...
...It's the pictures that got small...
...It may be an adroit strategy for Close, but it destroys any chance of plausibility...
...his one number, "The Greatest Star of Them All," has a dignity missing from the rest of the show...
...During one of his solo flights Joe runs into an assistant director and his fiancee, Betty Schaefer...
...What he has made in great quantity is money—the advance ticket sale approached $40 million...
...Why, then, is this show such an outlandish hit...
...Until this moment Joe could rationalize his compromised situation...
...The studio merely wants to rent her ancient limousine for a period musical...
...George Hearn does much better as the disdainful Max...
...Under Trevor Nunn's direction, these gentlemen strain to produce cinematic effects onstage, effects that were done with far greater artistry on-screen two generations ago...
...Sunset Boulevard topped them all...
...The picture, available on VHS, holds up well after 44 years...
...When the seatholders titter, she acts as if the whole scene were camp...
...Little Jane (Amy Kowallis), a career woman, spends more time with her shrink than with her alcoholic husband and their unhappy child...
...She asks him to collaborate on a new version...
...sound films: "We didn't need dialogue...
...Uptown has become the arena of expense accounters taking their clients to megahits at megaprices...
...The wonder is not that Lloyd Webber optioned the film years ago, but that he has made so little of it...
...Amanda Naughton) is a buttoned-up businesswoman who refuses to grieve after the recent death of her mother...
...A junior screen-writer, she has read an old script of Joe's turned down by the studios...
...Floors and staircases rise, water floats above us, De Mille's sets for Samson become the embodiment of his credo: "The Bible has been a bestseller for centuries...
...Convinced C.B...
...Although the melodies are serviceable, the lyrics are execrable: L.A.'s changed a lot over the years Since those brave gold rush pioneers Came in their creaky covered wagons Far as they could go into the line Their dreams were yours, their dreams were mine But in their dreams were hidden dragons Actually, the only gold that has ever been discovered in Los Angeles was in the jewelers' windows on Rodeo Drive...
...But mostly because the Main Stem is suffering one of the severest droughts in its history: Lloyd Webber's is the only new musical to open on Broadway this season...
...That scenario, The Story of Salome, is to be supplied by Norma and polished by Joe Gillis, a Hollywood hack who has turned an accidental meeting into a profitable business arrangement...
...No matter how long it runs, that is the sole reason it will be remembered...
...The trip to Broadway featured vicious offstage wrangles, last minute postponements and, finally, the spurning of marquee names who had been promised the lead, including Faye Dunaway and Patti LuPone...
...the baritone is the house piano player (Steve Freeman...
...Andrew Lloyd Webber has arranged for audiences to witness the classic confrontation six nights a week, plus matinees, at the Minskoff Theater...
...During these interludes the cast sometimes bursts into song...
...the Philistines...
...He is served hand and foot by her mysterious factotum Max von Mayerling, played by Eric von Stroheim, another relic of the silent era...
...Why should I let 2,000 years of publicity go to waste...
...And Norma's comparison of silents vs...
...Big Jane (Johanna Day) is an unsuccessful poet in search of Mr...
...Perhaps that is enough for him...
...Downtown, where the costs are smaller (to producers as well as to ticket buyers), audiences are getting their kicks from songs and characters instead of dread and circuses...
...What Close lacks is Swanson's utter conviction...
...The book, by lyricists Don Black and Christopher Hampton, leans heavily on Wilder's original work...
...The director threw in everything from the funeral of Norma's pet ape to her last insane descent of the staircase into the arms of waiting policemen: "All right, Mr...
...The director, in the midst of filming his epic Samson and Delilah, is kind but evasive...
...The movie veteran was willing to look foolish as she went over the top for the sake of the picture...
...Hers is the second most ballyhooed interpretation of the role...
...At first he refuses, but as Norma becomes increasingly possessive, he comes to see working with Betty as the key to his golden handcuffs...
...Off she goes to Paramount to consult with the Great Man (played by the genuine article...
...Aided by state-of-the-art amplification, she artfully projects the high notes and covers the low ones...
...The famous 19th-century gold rush took place 500 miles north of L. A., around Sacramento...
...His musical adaptation of Sunset Boulevard was one of the most agitated spectacles since the Hebrews vs...
...De Mille, I'm ready for my close-up...
...Several of his songs have already become standards, and one?The Picture in the Hall"—has been incorporated into Three Postcards...
...After much hype, Lloyd Webber chose Glenn Close to play Norma Desmond, the cracked and faded silent movie queen...
...Norma: "I am big...
...As the supernova, Glenn Close was a wise selection...
...The theater actress plays it both ways: If her neurotic posturing moves the audience, she seems to mean every word...
...In the course of discussing their various joys and tribulations, the women slide from reality to fantasy...
...Somewhere in this voluptuary is a soul and a conscience...
...He heads back to the mansion to grab the few belongings Norma did not buy him, and claim his freedom...
...This time he has borrowed not only from his customary sources, Giacomo Puccini and Maurice Ravel, but also from a composer named Andrew Lloyd Webber—more than one tune echoes the dark arias in The Phantom of the Opera...
...Joe confronts Norma with the truth about her meeting with De Mille, and the cobra and the mongoose have their final, fatal encounter...
...From Double Indemnity to Some Like It Hot, there was never a shortage of grotesqueries in the Wilder oeuvre...
...On Stage SUNSET ON THE MAIN STEM BY STEFAN KANFER The final test of our hardihood came when we were permitted to witness a combat virtually never seen: a fight between a mongoose and a cobra, with the victor engaging a motion picture executive, or jackal...
...Their rewrite sessions begin innocently enough...
...But deep down Joe despises himself for taking advantage of a pathetically deluded woman, and for isolating himself from his contemporaries on the studio battlegrounds while he idly chips away on an unproduceable screenplay...
...These scenes, the monumental central character, the incubus-succubus plot, and the Hollywood trappings seem ideal ingredients for a pop opera...
...Soon, however, Betty finds herself falling in love with her new partner...
...But when you want a rhyme for "years" or "dragons," who needs history...
...Not for me...
...As for those folks in the Conestoga wagons, they were heading for Oregon...
...Similarly, just as the focal point of Cats was its costumes and the unbilled star of Phantom was the falling chandelier, Sunset Boulevard is less about people than the swimming pool in which Joe Gillis ingeniously hangs suspended and the haunted mansion with its huge balustrades and floating vistas...
...Lloyd Webber's music is, as usual, melodramatic, powerfully orchestrated and totally derivative...
...These transgressions exact a prohibitive price: Every time he returns, Norma punishes him with a violent tantrum for leaving her alone...
...What Norma doesn't know—and is not meant to know—is that Paramount has no interest in Salome...
...is eager for her to star as Salome, she hurries home to start a series of diets, massages and exercises in preparation for the day that can never arrive...
...S. J. PERELMAN Westward, Ha...
...Craig Lucas' intermissionless play, Derek McLane's set and Toni-Leslie James' costumes were modest to the point of self-effacement...
...Three Postcards takes place in a single setting: a restaurant, where three thirtyish women are reunited after a passage of several years...
...As played by William Holden, Joe isn't all bad...
Vol. 77 • September 1995 • No. 12
