London Critics Like the Revamped ‘Sunset Boulevard’ : Theater: The show was closed for three weeks, the lead players replaced, the production brought into line with the L.A. version. Most say the extra $1.5 million was worth it.

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s high-risk relaunch of “Sunset Boulevard” appears to have paid off--in the eyes of theater critics here, at least.

Last month Lloyd Webber closed the show for three weeks, replaced leading players Patti LuPone and Kevin Anderson, and changed the production to bring it into line with the successful version of the show now playing in Los Angeles.

“We opened before we were ready,” Lloyd Webber said last week about the original London production. “We didn’t spend enough time in rehearsal. We were overconfident.”

But the revamped version, which cost an extra $1.5 million to stage, was unveiled to critics Tuesday night. Most found the new version of “Sunset Boulevard” an improvement, with new leads Betty Buckley (as the fading silent movie star Norma Desmond) and John Barrowman (playing her younger lover, the cynical screenwriter Joe Gillis) singled out for praise.

Mid-market tabloid newspapers, whose readers form the core of audiences for Lloyd Webber musicals, led the praise. Nicholas de Jongh in the Evening Standard went overboard for Buckley, waxing ecstatic over her “million-dollar voice.”

“I cannot remember a single performer so transforming and making a show,” wrote De Jongh. “Miss Buckley, taking over the role of Norma Desmond, the silent movie star whose comeback never comes, is overwhelmingly poignant.”

“Lloyd Webber’s great gamble has already paid off with the richest dividends, artistically speaking,” said the Daily Mail’s Jack Tinker. The show was “visually far more tasteful, far more taut in its narrative and far, far more intense emotionally.”

The upscale broadsheet papers were more restrained, but generally enthusiastic. “Tighter and sharper,” wrote the Guardian’s Michael Billington, who applauded an “infinitely better chemistry” between the new leads. Jeremy Kingston in the Times noted the changes gave “a greater momentum to the story.”

Paul Taylor of the Independent played a little one-upmanship with his colleagues by stating he was the only British critic to have seen the L.A. version as well as both London productions. His verdict? The new show was “darker, tauter . . . a great deal better.” He found Barrowman the most effective of all the Joe Gillises, but much preferred Glenn Close, the Norma Desmond of the L.A. production, to Buckley.

The Daily Telegraph’s Charles Spencer alone disliked the new production: “The result is the same: an overblown though often lushly melodic musical that does less than full justice to Billy Wilder’s black masterpiece of a film.”