‘Sunset’ to Take a New Direction : Theater: Despite the London success of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical, a creative team is revising the show before its U.S. premiere in L.A.

Solid ticket sales haven’t stopped mega-composer Andrew Lloyd Webber from tinkering with “Sunset Boulevard,” his new work based on the classic 1950 film.

Lloyd Webber and his creative team already trimmed the show that’s been playing the Adelphi Theatre in London since July. Now they’re in town making more changes for its U.S. premiere at the Shubert Theatre on Dec. 9, starring Glenn Close as reclusive, aging actress Norma Desmond.

The show here, Lloyd Webber says, will be very different from what opening-night audiences saw in London, where last-minute technical problems consumed enormous attention and delayed the opening 10 days. “The whole thing was a nightmare,” the composer said.

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Lloyd Webber was much more upbeat about the Los Angeles production. Interviewed at the Beverly Hills mansion he’s rented a few blocks from the actual Sunset Boulevard, the composer spoke glowingly of everything from the Southern California landscape (reminiscent for him of the South of France, where much of this latest musical was originally written) to the geographical proximity of the film’s co-writer and director, Billy Wilder.

“The cast is wondrous, Glenn is singing excellently, and the whole company is very good news,” Lloyd Webber said. “With musicals, you are sometimes on a roll, sometimes not, and at the moment, we are.”

Things are going so well here, in fact, the composer says, that he also feels no immediate pressure to open a second U.S. production on Broadway. Given both Los Angeles’ strong track record for Lloyd Webber shows and the attention his London production received, Lloyd Webber said, “we may not go to New York for a bit. . . . Obviously we will go to New York, but (not) for the reason we would originally go--to get international press. We don’t need to, because we’ve done it.”

“Sunset Boulevard” premiered in London with the largest advance ever for a West End show--5 million pounds (approximately $7.8 million). And despite mixed reviews, calls to London ticket agencies indicate few good seats available now even into mid-March. The composer says he’s planning to extend sales beyond the current April 9 deadline.

Tickets have been on sale for “Sunset Boulevard” here since Aug. 1, and the composer says Los Angeles advances are currently about $7.5 million. That’s half the $15-million advance for the Ahmanson Theatre’s production of Lloyd Webber’s “The Phantom of the Opera,” on sale for seven months--more than twice as long--prior to its opening May 31, 1989.

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Stakes for “Sunset Boulevard” are also high here. In Los Angeles, the production will cost about $10 million, he says, as compared to $6 million in London. Tickets are currently on sale here until September, 1994.

So why not do a little hustling? A press event previewing the show has been announced for this morning, including visits with three of the show’s four principals--Alan Campbell (who plays screenwriter Joe Gillis), George Hearn (faithful servant Max von Mayerling) and Judy Kuhn (ingenue Betty Schaefer)--as well as a press conference with Lloyd Webber and director Trevor Nunn.

The show’s continuing artistic overhaul results from changes Lloyd Webber says he would have made originally if he hadn’t been “caught in the trap of being a producer as well as a composer. And a producer in the theater is not somebody who’s dealing with a piece of celluloid. You’re dealing with--literally--is it safe to let people come into the building at all?”

So the creative team--including lyric and book writers Don Black and Christopher Hampton and director Nunn--made changes in London after the opening. Today’s show differs from the original by less than 20%, the composer says, “but it would appear more. For instance, the first act on its opening night played an hour and 22 minutes; it now plays an hour and eight minutes.”

Changes accelerated on this side of the Atlantic. Wilder had already made some suggestions about the London production that were acted upon, for instance, and he has apparently made a few more here. Lloyd Webber said that he’s presently hoping to have Desmond’s car onstage, as Wilder advised, but he wasn’t able to do it in London.

The huge set of Desmond’s mansion will still be enormous--and, at about 30,000 pounds, considered the largest set ever to appear in a U.S. musical--but darker and more intricate than it was in London. And the entire Shubert production, Lloyd Webber said, “will not even be physically, not even look-wise, the same as London.”

“We’ve been able to go much further than we did in London into the sort-of monochrome world of the movie. We’re not going to try to make the production black and white, but we’re going into far darker colors . . . and we’re making (Desmond’s) house far more full of nooks and crannies and places where you can’t quite see your shadow.”

Besides streamlining the first act, they’ve reorganized the opening number and done more underscoring to make the show more operatic. There’s a new song that becomes Betty’s theme throughout the show, and a revised ending that he calls “nice and to the point and harrowing.” He’s also developed the relationship between Desmond and Von Mayerling, “which I think we’ve perhaps left a little undernourished in London.”

Asked about his London star Patti LuPone, who is contracted to open in the show on Broadway as well as in London, Lloyd Webber said he was “baffled” by the spate of recent media rumors and gossip about the Tony-winning performer. “Patti has made a wonderful Norma Desmond. . . . She’s very, very good in the part.”