‘We were all thrown into a traumatic tragedy’: the curse of Sunset Boulevard
In the 1960s, theatre director Hal Prince approached Stephen Sondheim about turning Billy Wilder’s 1950 film Sunset Boulevard into a musical. Starring a lauded Gloria Swanson as former silent movie actress Norma Desmond, who delusionally believes she is on the verge of a magnificent comeback, the film was regarded as a stinging critique of the Hollywood fantasy – perhaps the film industry’s most desolate self-portrait of itself. But Wilder objected. “You can’t write a musical about it, it has to be an opera,” he said. “After all, it’s a story about a dethroned queen.”
Prince never got his way, but neither did Wilder. It would be Andrew Lloyd Webber who developed Sunset into a musical, premiering at the Adelphi Theatre in 1993, with book and lyrics by Don Black and Christopher Hampton. Despite lacking the pitiless savagery of the original, it remains one of his more popular shows; a new production, directed by Jamie Lloyd and starring former Pussycat Doll Nicole Scherzinger as Desmond, opens later this month.
Yet Wilder’s words now feel prescient in a way he never intended. In a case of life imitating art, the performance history of Sunset the musical is also a story full of dethroned queens, not to mention lawsuits, fall outs and allegations of malpractice on a quasi-operatic scale.
Ironically, Swanson was the first casualty. In 1953, age 54, she hoped a Broadway musical of the film would provide her next close-up – an uncanny echo of the film’s plot, in which an unhinged Desmond nurtures a crush on young screenwriter, Joe Gillis, in the hope that he’ll relaunch her career.
Swanson approached singer songwriters Dickson Hughes and Richard Stapley, and sank $20,000 (about $200,000 in today’s money) into the project, while falling desperately in love with Stapley, who, quietly in a relationship with Hughes, was unable to reciprocate. Paramount, initially enthusiastic, strung Swanson along for several years, eventually refusing to release the stage rights, anxious a musical might upstage a film they were intending to reissue.
Meanwhile, the film was in danger of upstaging Swanson. Wilder had designed his movie as a noirish meta-commentary on the industry, even encouraging audiences to regard former silent movie star Swanson and Desmond as one and the same. For years, Swanson found herself only offered inferior versions of the same role.
Another dethroned queen was Patti LuPone – the London show’s first star who won critical acclaim for her “grotesque… seductive…suicidal” Desmond, despite more muted reviews of the musical as a whole. Lloyd Webber had promised LuPone that she would remain with the show when he opened it on Broadway, but in the closing weekends of the London run, he changed his mind.
Instead he cast Glenn Close, who had also been picking up excellent reviews in the critically superior production Lloyd Webber had opened in Los Angeles. Just as Paramount had strung along Swanson, Lloyd Webber had apparently reassured LuPone the role was hers while rumours to the contrary were gathering pace. A humiliated LuPone was contractually obliged to finish the London run. “I had batting practice in my dressing room,” she said later. “Everything went flying into the street.”
In her 2010 autobiography, LuPone accused Lloyd Webber of “orchestrating what would look like to the media a cat fight between two actresses,” and sued him for a rumoured $1 million. The pair settled out of court but, in another meta twist, LuPone used the proceeds to buy a swimming pool, a nod to the pool Joe topples into during the final scene after Desmond – devastated at the collapse of her dream – fires a gun at him. “I call [it] the Andrew Lloyd Webber memorial pool,” she said, and refused to speak to him for nearly two decades.
In LA that June, more trouble was brewing. Before Close finished her scheduled run ahead of the Broadway transfer, Lloyd Webber announced Faye Dunaway would take over as Desmond – despite having no musical theatre experience. He then changed his mind and permanently closed the LA production during rehearsals, releasing a statement that said “the vocal demands of the role were such that it was not possible for [Dunaway] to perform as scheduled.” Another queen dethroned; another lawsuit for Lloyd Webber. The two eventually settled for an undisclosed sum.
That November, the show moved to Broadway, and Close won a Tony for her performance. In March 1995, she took a two-week holiday and was temporarily replaced by her understudy Karen Mason. Yet upon her return, Close accused Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Company of inflating the ticket sales in her absence, to make it look as though the show could do without her.
“I am furious and insulted,” she wrote. “My performance turned Sunset Boulevard around. I made it a hit… We have been cruelly thrown into yet another traumatic tragedy which will, once again, take a huge toll on us all.” Close and Lloyd Webber swiftly made up, and Close reprised the role in a semi-staged version at London’s ENO in 2016, and a year later, on Broadway. Yet the ability of Sunset to become the very monster it critiques remains a curious part of its DNA. Just as the film was a portrait of a bloated Hollywood blind to its imminent collapse, so the fortunes of the musical mirrored the dying days of the mega-budget Broadway musical Lloyd Webber had helped create.
The show, conceived on the same huge scale as previous Lloyd Webber hits Phantom of the Opera and Cats, cost $13 million to produce and never recouped its investment. The set alone – a vast, crumbling Hollywood mansion, a temple to deluded grandeur – cost $2.75 million to build and $1.5 million to install. It closed on Broadway after 122 weeks.
The musical has survived in stripped down form, including a streamed revival at Leicester Curve in 2020 that cleverly used the theatre’s interior as the set. Lloyd Webber has terrific form in matching bankable stars with innovative productions. Scherzinger, who certainly has the voice for the demanding role of Desmond, would be forgiven for hoping their friendship (she starred as Grizabella in the 2014 revival of Cats) will protect her from yet another dethroning. Surely only an imagination as Desmond’s, holed up in her crumbling mansion, would argue a curse hangs over productions of Sunset Boulevard.
Sunset Boulevard previews from Sep 21; thesavoytheatre.com
