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Feb. 22nd, 2025 09:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsThe other show I recently saw on Broadway was the new revival of Sunset Boulevard, which is just an absolutely fascinating example of what staging and direction can do to a familiar show.
The friend I went with pitched it to me with a link to this review: "have i ever seen sunset boulevard. no. am i FASCINATED by a show that hates its source but is maybe good? yes." Thinking about it, I don't think I'd ever previously seen Sunset Boulevard staged either, but I've heard the music a bunch, which is what listening to Broadway Pandora Radio a lot in the early 2000s gets you, and read a lot about it because that's what reading a lot about the history of noir gets you, so it feels deeply familiar and known to me despite the fact that I have never, technically, been to a production.
So forth we went, and returned afterwards to the question of whether the show does hate its source: no! I don't think it does! Genuinely, I think it loves its source/s, the film and the musical both, and what it's trying to do is aggressively situate itself as a musical in the context of them.
For those to whom it is less familiar, the basic plot of Sunset Boulevard: in 1950s Hollywood, a desperately out-of-work screenwriter extremely behind on his rent accidentally ends up at the house of forgotten silent film star Norma Desmond, who lives in a mausoleum to her own past fame and is convinced that once she finishes the script she's working on, she can launch herself back into stardom. Once he takes a job as her script doctor, he finds himself feeding her professional and romantic obsessions in an increasingly Gothic spiral that inevitably culminates in tragedy.
In the original film, Norma Desmond was played by Gloria Swanson, a famous silent screen siren who was once once such a valuable asset to her studio that she was "carried in a sedan chair from her dressing room to the set", and her Significant Gothic Butler by Erich von Stroheim, a famous silent film director who had not directed a picture since 1933. It is a gothic noir About Movies, About Hollywood Culture, About Fame -- and the Andrew Lloyd Webber Broadway musical is likewise About Movies, About Hollywood, About Fame; what this new production does, I think, is also make it About Theater, about film and theater, about how those are and are not the same thing.
The show's sets are existent, but minimal. The biggest element is a huge projection screen, and the crew -- and sometimes the cast -- have cameras with which they walk onto the stage, getting up close, projecting faces. The cameras are not invisible; the cast know that they're there. Norma is always playing to them. Other characters react to them in variable ways, but they know that they're being watched. The projections are always in black and white, and so is most everything else; it's high-noir, high-chiaroscuro, almost no color on the stage whatsoever, really effectively creepy. If you had asked me before this if an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical could genuinely scare me, I would have confidently said no! I would not have been correct!
The most striking staging choice of the show -- and, I think, the one that most clearly portrays its directorial vision, its argument -- is during the opening number of the second act, "Sunset Boulevard," a song about About the Hollywood Dream [derogatory]. This number is entirely filmed. It starts with the actor playing Joe backstage, watching Sunset Boulevard (film) on a little TV in a dressing room. He progresses down through the whole theater on a long set of back stairs, exchanging nods and looks and smiles with the other cast members, patting a little cardboard standee of Andrew Lloyd Webber and then he walks out the door and starts walking down Broadway, singing -- singing to the camera right in front of him, to the lights of Broadway, the traffic around the theater, his own marquee poster [derogatory]. We, the audience, are watching this on the projection screen, and so is Norma Desmond. She has a chair pulled up right in front of the screen, watching him, completely and obsessively absorbed, and does not look away until Joe walks back into the theater and down the aisle to finish up the number.
Watching this onstage, we naturally assumed that this little Broadway promenade was something that had been filmed in the run-up to the show and was the same every night. NO. EVERY NIGHT, Tom Francis as Joe does a little walkabout on around Broadway, singing intensely at the camera, projected live onto film onto stage. Here is a phone recording of his evening stroll as seen from the outside; here's a version they did for the Olivier Awards, which gives at least a little bit of the vibe. It is a bit embarrassing to admit that in this the year 2025 I feel so strongly about an Andrew Lloyd Webber song of all things but I also am a little obsessively absorbed by this number. What a piece of staging, what a funny and brilliant and absurdly, perfectly bombastic way to say something about theater and film and image and obsession and Your Own Legacy and the way all these things relate to each other.
The other really striking moment, for me -- the moment that makes this theater, that emphasizes everything you can do in theater and not in film -- is at the very end, after Norma has shot Joe, and has retreated fully into her delusions. She's acting to the cameras, and then breaks off: "I can't go on with the scene. I'm too happy."
This line is directly from the film Sunset Boulevard, and in that movie it's a single line delivered all together; you don't have time to wonder if "I can't go on with the scene" is a turning point, reality catching up to Norma Desmond at last. But in this production, we have just watched most of the cast deliberately move away from the cameras, one by one, as they move out of the story: they're disgusted. They can't do it any more. And in this production, "I can't go on with the scene" is delivered on its own, a huge, frightening outburst. This is live theater that knows it's live theater. It's theater that knows about its own marquee posters and about Andrew Lloyd Webber and about its cast's successes and failures with fame in the past and about its whole long history, and sitting in the audience, you have a moment to think: could it be now? Is she going to snap out of it? Is now when she walks away?
Good production! The friend I went with is planning to see it again and I wish I could too. Also I guess now I do have to actually see the movie.
The friend I went with pitched it to me with a link to this review: "have i ever seen sunset boulevard. no. am i FASCINATED by a show that hates its source but is maybe good? yes." Thinking about it, I don't think I'd ever previously seen Sunset Boulevard staged either, but I've heard the music a bunch, which is what listening to Broadway Pandora Radio a lot in the early 2000s gets you, and read a lot about it because that's what reading a lot about the history of noir gets you, so it feels deeply familiar and known to me despite the fact that I have never, technically, been to a production.
So forth we went, and returned afterwards to the question of whether the show does hate its source: no! I don't think it does! Genuinely, I think it loves its source/s, the film and the musical both, and what it's trying to do is aggressively situate itself as a musical in the context of them.
For those to whom it is less familiar, the basic plot of Sunset Boulevard: in 1950s Hollywood, a desperately out-of-work screenwriter extremely behind on his rent accidentally ends up at the house of forgotten silent film star Norma Desmond, who lives in a mausoleum to her own past fame and is convinced that once she finishes the script she's working on, she can launch herself back into stardom. Once he takes a job as her script doctor, he finds himself feeding her professional and romantic obsessions in an increasingly Gothic spiral that inevitably culminates in tragedy.
In the original film, Norma Desmond was played by Gloria Swanson, a famous silent screen siren who was once once such a valuable asset to her studio that she was "carried in a sedan chair from her dressing room to the set", and her Significant Gothic Butler by Erich von Stroheim, a famous silent film director who had not directed a picture since 1933. It is a gothic noir About Movies, About Hollywood Culture, About Fame -- and the Andrew Lloyd Webber Broadway musical is likewise About Movies, About Hollywood, About Fame; what this new production does, I think, is also make it About Theater, about film and theater, about how those are and are not the same thing.
The show's sets are existent, but minimal. The biggest element is a huge projection screen, and the crew -- and sometimes the cast -- have cameras with which they walk onto the stage, getting up close, projecting faces. The cameras are not invisible; the cast know that they're there. Norma is always playing to them. Other characters react to them in variable ways, but they know that they're being watched. The projections are always in black and white, and so is most everything else; it's high-noir, high-chiaroscuro, almost no color on the stage whatsoever, really effectively creepy. If you had asked me before this if an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical could genuinely scare me, I would have confidently said no! I would not have been correct!
The most striking staging choice of the show -- and, I think, the one that most clearly portrays its directorial vision, its argument -- is during the opening number of the second act, "Sunset Boulevard," a song about About the Hollywood Dream [derogatory]. This number is entirely filmed. It starts with the actor playing Joe backstage, watching Sunset Boulevard (film) on a little TV in a dressing room. He progresses down through the whole theater on a long set of back stairs, exchanging nods and looks and smiles with the other cast members, patting a little cardboard standee of Andrew Lloyd Webber and then he walks out the door and starts walking down Broadway, singing -- singing to the camera right in front of him, to the lights of Broadway, the traffic around the theater, his own marquee poster [derogatory]. We, the audience, are watching this on the projection screen, and so is Norma Desmond. She has a chair pulled up right in front of the screen, watching him, completely and obsessively absorbed, and does not look away until Joe walks back into the theater and down the aisle to finish up the number.
Watching this onstage, we naturally assumed that this little Broadway promenade was something that had been filmed in the run-up to the show and was the same every night. NO. EVERY NIGHT, Tom Francis as Joe does a little walkabout on around Broadway, singing intensely at the camera, projected live onto film onto stage. Here is a phone recording of his evening stroll as seen from the outside; here's a version they did for the Olivier Awards, which gives at least a little bit of the vibe. It is a bit embarrassing to admit that in this the year 2025 I feel so strongly about an Andrew Lloyd Webber song of all things but I also am a little obsessively absorbed by this number. What a piece of staging, what a funny and brilliant and absurdly, perfectly bombastic way to say something about theater and film and image and obsession and Your Own Legacy and the way all these things relate to each other.
The other really striking moment, for me -- the moment that makes this theater, that emphasizes everything you can do in theater and not in film -- is at the very end, after Norma has shot Joe, and has retreated fully into her delusions. She's acting to the cameras, and then breaks off: "I can't go on with the scene. I'm too happy."
This line is directly from the film Sunset Boulevard, and in that movie it's a single line delivered all together; you don't have time to wonder if "I can't go on with the scene" is a turning point, reality catching up to Norma Desmond at last. But in this production, we have just watched most of the cast deliberately move away from the cameras, one by one, as they move out of the story: they're disgusted. They can't do it any more. And in this production, "I can't go on with the scene" is delivered on its own, a huge, frightening outburst. This is live theater that knows it's live theater. It's theater that knows about its own marquee posters and about Andrew Lloyd Webber and about its cast's successes and failures with fame in the past and about its whole long history, and sitting in the audience, you have a moment to think: could it be now? Is she going to snap out of it? Is now when she walks away?
Good production! The friend I went with is planning to see it again and I wish I could too. Also I guess now I do have to actually see the movie.
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Date: 2025-02-22 08:48 pm (UTC)Okay; that's extremely cool. I have never attached to the musical of Sunset Boulevard specifically because of the music, but I am glad that this production is doing something so intricate with it.
Also I guess now I do have to actually see the movie.
Gloria Swanson gives an incredible performance as exactly the kind of Miss Havisham-like haunting of her own cinematic past that in real life she totally wasn't.
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Date: 2025-02-24 03:32 am (UTC)