Theatre
Sunset Boulevard (Ade1phi)
Much Ado About Nothing
(Queen's)
Sarajevo
(touring)
On the Wilder side
Sheridan Morley
If it ain't broke, don't fix it: one of the major achievements of Sunset Boulevard the musical is the remarkable fidelity its makers, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Don Black, Christopher Hampton and Trevor Nunn, have shown towards the original Billy Wilder movie. The recent history of Broadway is littered with the corpses of musicals whose makers thought they could improve on Hollywood originals, and Wilder himself has lived to see two other classics of his, Some Like it Hot and The Apartment, given similarly dismal theatrical after-lives. But from the moment they use on stage the car chase from the 1950 film, right through to Norma Desmond's final descent of her palatial staircase to an audi- ence of cops, it is clear that this one has been conceived not so much as an original musical, rather as a play with songs faith- fully derived from Wilder. Indeed, all the great moments in the show are Billy's, underscored and very occasionally over- scored by Sir Andrew.
The Wilder—Webber marriage works best when one or two great numbers (With One Look' in the first half and 'Too Much In Love to Care' in the second) soar out of Wilder's dialogue. There are other times when the songs seem a little heavy for the story, and it has to be said that in the ensemble numbers neither Black nor Hampton show the acutely cynical under- standing of 1940s Hollywood which charac- terised Larry Golbart's City of Angels, set in the same town and the same industry at the same post-war period. But what will save Sunset Boulevard from the abrupt West End demise of City of Angels is something more than Sir Andrew and a better publici- ty budget: it is the sheer familiarity of Sun- set Boulevard, and the likelihood that those who have always loved it will love it even more with songs.
True, certain elements are now missing: when Eric von Stroheim as the sinister but- ler explained he was also the first husband who had made the career of Gloria Swan- son (as Norma) and with it a whole indus- try of silent pictures, Wilder was treating us to actual Hollywood history as well as movie melodrama: when here a somewhat bland Daniel Bonzali (as the butler) says the same thing of Patti LuPone, we get none of the original shivers of recognition.
What LuPone gives us is the traditional ruined diva, halfway from Callas to Gar- land and at her best in the final mad scene, which Hampton and Black have wisely con- ceived as grand opera rather than silent movies. But as a walk on the Wilder side this is still impressive enough, even if Kevin Anderson has trouble fighting his way through the clichés of a role which man- ages to be simultaneously underwritten and historic: how many other movies or shows have ever been narrated by a man from the bottom of a swimming-pool with several bullets in his chest?
Much Ado About Nothing is not in fact the first Shakespeare on Shaftesbury Avenue since the war (as has been claimed by Queen's management), since Gielgud was at the Palace in the mid-1950s, but it is a lively and unusual romp through the Beatrice-Benedick love's labour with the unusual twist that Benedick (Mark Ryl- ance) is an Ulsterman and about half the height of his Beatrice (Janet McTeer). The production by Matthew Warchus goes hell for leather and moment for moment, sacri- ficing much overall sense for a joyous immediacy which converts masked balls into Wild-Western hoedowns and Italian palazzos into circus tents. As with the forthcoming Branagh movie, the intention here seems to be to introduce Much Ado to anti-Shakespearian or non-Shakespearian audiences, and on those terms it works very well indeed, shifting with agility from the broad farce of Dogberry to the dark drama of the 'Kill Claudio' scene.
Last week at Riverside and this week in Cambridge as part of an ongoing European tour, Sarajevo is a 70-minute cabaret of lament for that tragic place. In dance, drama and song its history is evoked, from the Middle Ages through the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand at the outset of the first world war to the present open wound. The author, Goran Stefanovski, has delib- erately gone for fantasy rather than histori- cal or political drama, and the result is inevitably both dreamy and whimsical: but in there somewhere is a lament of consid- erable poetic power for a lost city.
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