Glenn Close played Norma Desmond on Broadway in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard in 1993 when she was 46 and she won a Tony Award. Twenty-three years on she returns to the role in a semi-staged production by Lonny Price at London Coliseum and she gets the sort of rapturous reception that most actors can only dream of.
The musical is based on the legendary 1950 Billy Wilder movie about a once-great screen idol of the silent film era, now long forgotten, who lives all alone with her butler, and fantasises about making a comeback as Salome.
The book and lyrics by Don Black and Christopher Hampton stick pretty close to the original screenplay; but, inevitably, without the frisson of the film, Sunset Boulevard (synonymous with Hollywood) is but a shadow of its former self.
Star quality is difficult to define but it’s always instantly recognisable. Glenn Close has it. The first night audience roared its approval when she sang With One Look.
And they roared again when she sang New Ways to Dream. The final scene, when Norma Desmond descends her staircase, quite mad, thinking the cameras are filming her Salome, really does need the wonderful gilded, sweeping staircase that designer John Napier gave her in Trevor Nunn’s original production to have its full impact.
Michael Xavier is her young lover and Fred Johanson is a striking presence as the film director turned butler. The ENO’s orchestra is on stage, conducted by Michael Reed. Lloyd Webber’s lush romanticism has rarely sounded so good.
Of the 79 plays written by Alan Ayckbourn, How The Other Half Loves, at Theatre Royal Haymarket, is one of his very best. There are three married couples: the airily vague upper-middle class (Nicholas Le Prevost and Jenny Seagrove); the stridently vulgar middle class (Tamzin Outhwaite and Jason Merrells); and the dull, boring lower-middle class (Gillian Wright and Matthew Cottle, very funny). The action takes place in two separate living rooms but they share the same set, so events in both households can take place simultaneously.
The farce springs from the lies a wife and her lover tell to cover up their affair; but it’s Ayckbourn’s technical virtuosity that makes the comedy so original and appealing.
Le Prevost has some of the funniest lines. He plays the bumbling, clueless husband, whose intervention leads to a totally innocent (and utterly sexless) couple being incriminated. Alan Strachan directs. The high spot, a classic comedy scene, is when two separate dinners, which take place on two different days in two different places, are played concurrently at the same dinner table. The expert timing, verbally and physically, is a comic delight.
There must surely be better plays for James Norton and Kate Fleetwood to perform than Tracy Letts’s claustrophobic Bug, a bizarre psychodrama which premiered 20 years ago and which fails to grip in Simon Evans’s production at Found111 on Charing Cross Road. The most horrific moment is watching Norton doing dentistry on his teeth with a pair of pliers.
Right Now, another psychodrama at Bush Theatre, written by Canadian actress Catherine-Anne Toupin, tries to find erotic comedy in a mother suffering from postnatal depression but succeeds only in being crude and irritating.
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