‘Sunset’ at Home on Broadway : Close Returns to New York Stage, Owning Role of Norma Desmond Body and Soul

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s genius is to produce shows that add up to vastly more than the sum of their parts, and this he has done in “Sunset Boulevard,” which opened Thursday at the Minskoff Theatre on Broadway.

Lloyd Webber and his lovably unsubtle director Trevor Nunn have used more than just the publicity they garnered in the London and Los Angeles runs of the show. Obviously major casting kinks have been worked out along the way and, several lawsuits later, Glenn Close emerges triumphantly owning the role of Norma Desmond body and soul in a production that, while virtually indistinguishable from the L.A. version (Alice Ripley as the ingenue is the only major cast member who did not appear in Los Angeles), looks freshly spruced and glossed for its long-awaited Broadway debut.

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In turban and sunglasses, Glenn Close makes her star entrance descending John Napier’s grand gilt staircase; she seizes the role of Norma Desmond even as she becomes an instant caricature whose grotesque grimace has already been emblazoned on the minds of New York theater-goers the way the song “Memory” was before “Cats” opened here in 1982.

The show’s bitter view of Hollywood, as the place where “dreams are not enough to win a war/Out here they’re always keeping score/beneath the tan, the battle rages” may play to more eagerly sympathetic ears on the East Coast than it did on the West. But “Sunset Boulevard” is still a show you can laugh at even as you become engaged by its gorgeous sets, bravado performances, and a score that can become infectious and sickeningly familiar all in one listening.

The score takes itself very seriously, make no mistake. Its grandiose themes match the stunning gilded front room in movie star Norma Desmond’s mausoleumlike house, yet the show’s set has changed at least four times before the melody varies even once. And while many of the sets and effects (and all of Andrew Bridge’s lighting) are drop-dead gorgeous, others are already on their way to becoming stultifying kitsch, following “Phantom’s” chandelier and “Miss Saigon’s” helicopter. Norma’s chauffeur-driven Isotta Fraschini, for example, cost $50,000 and is simply a cheesy set piece. And when the hero pretends to steer a car while noir footage of a car chase and a giant speedometer are flashed on top of a scrim, it’s even more ridiculous.

With her mournful black-rimmed eyes and red-talon nails, Close seems to have based her Norma less on Gloria Swanson in the original 1950 Billy Wilder film than on Max Shreck’s vampire in the silent “Nosferatu.”

She creates a Norma who is more elaborate and fleshed out than her two biggest songs, “With One Look” and “As If We Never Said Goodbye,” both of them insipid odes to ego that show-tune divas all over the world have and will continue to record. Close’s voice is strong (and sounds better rested than it did last spring in Los Angeles) with a warped pitch that is perfect for Norma, but it is telling that the star is still most affecting in her non-singing moments: when she strikes an exaggerated Theda Bara pose; her despair at the burial of her monkey, with her mysterious caretaker Max helping her offstage as her sobs engulf her; her pantomime of desperation and drinking on New Year’s Eve after she is left by her young lover Joe (Alan Campbell). This last scene is made all the more poignant because we simultaneously see struggling young people in a low-rent Hollywood flat having fun and living free of suffocating illusions.

But Close’s most spectacular moment comes during Norma’s visit to the sound stage where Cecil B. DeMille is filming a biblical epic. A light operator recognizes the star and before he can turn the merciless beam directly on her, she trembles with fear even as she readies herself to fill the sound stage with her glory at the precise instant the light hits her--at that moment Close achieves as close a thing to greatness as this vehicle can deliver.

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As Joe, Campbell looks like a cross between Kevin Anderson, who played the role in London, and Dan Aykroyd. He provides an appealing laconic cynicism, offering the audience a way in which to view Norma’s strange world. He’s often quite funny, when mingling his world-weariness with keen observation, such as when he notes that, decorated for New Year’s, Norma’s house looks like gala night on the S.S. Titanic. He occasionally takes Joe’s noir smoothness overboard into lounge-lizard land, particularly in the title song that starts the second act.

That song shows Lloyd Webber at his most posturing--and Campbell, as well as lyricists Don Black and Christopher Hampton--follow suit.

As Max, George Hearn is corsetted in the iron straitjacket of Erich von Stroheim’s movie performance, and one senses that this usually flamboyant actor may be tired of his thankless part. At times he breaks through--when he stands near the projector watching Norma’s silent films he looks like a corpse in pain. But Hearn’s character also carries the burden of bursting into full-confessional song at the slightest prodding of Joe, one of the more archaic conceits of the show. Norma does this too, but this trait is more understandable in an unhinged diva than in a severely repressed German serving man.

Bob Avian’s few fully choreographed dance bits are sometimes corny, such as when suited movie executives join in the same steps as DeMille’s dancing girls. Anthony Powell’s sumptuous costumes match the Napier sets for heft and believability--the glittering gown and matching robe (always with fur at the cuffs and feather in the hair) that Norma dons for New Year’s seem to weigh and cost as much as Napier’s fabulously solid-looking front gate of Paramount Studios. Even more than it did in L.A., this production reeks of scads of money spent as it is in the stock market--to make scads and scads more money.

Just before her mind deteriorates completely, Norma appears sans wig or turban in a tufted hairdo that makes her look like the bird people in the Cirque du Soleil. While one may be tempted at that moment to call this a performance without vanity, it is not, of course. Other leading ladies have been bloodied and felled in the war to take this role, which is the centerpiece of “Sunset Boulevard,” the musical and the event.

Glenn Close gives herself completely to the role’s pathetic grandeur, and she seems more sure of herself than ever. For an actress who began on the New York stage but gained her greatest fame in the movies, it must be a most satisfying homecoming. Certainly her performance is the most satisfying aspect of a show that started off shakily in London (with a $6-million advance) and took the long route across the globe before landing triumphantly on Broadway (with a $37.5-million advance).

Like Norma Desmond, Lloyd Webber will do what he must do to take the spotlight, and never mind the dead bodies in the swimming pool. They make a great effect.

* “Sunset Boulevard,” Minskoff Theatre, New York, (800) 307-4007. $25-$70.