Like many another lavish Lloyd Webber show, the spectacle overwhelms the drama. Production design wizard John Napier smashingly duplicates the floating-body opening shot of the movie and turns Norma’s mansion into a rococo palace worthy of some gilded-age robber baron. But though the book (by Christopher Hampton and lyrcist Don Black) apes the movie’s script–sometimes word for word–the acrid emotional pull of Wilder’s movie is nowhere to be found. Encased in Trevor Nunn’s vast production, what was savage and heartfelt has become grandiose camp, flashy but surprisingly dull. “Sunset Boulevard” never succeeds at its most basic task–making us care about Norma and gigolo Joe (Alan Campbell) and his young girlfriend Betty Lloyd for rousing uplift, seems to miss the point about crazy Norma, whom he salutes as a woman who “never knew the meaning of surrender.” As if surrendering her grip on reality didn’t count. Still, his score has its noirish felicities–Norma’s Sondheim-like aria “As If We Never Said Goodbye,” and the catchy “New Ways to Dream,” sung by George Hearn in the Erich von Stroheim role of Norma’s servant. But he’s picked on the wrong tale to dress up in all this extravagant musical plumage. Wilder’s soiled intimacy has been dry-cleaned into Lloyd Webber’s impersonal pomp.
