Less than a mile from 20th Century Fox and not much farther from Paramount Pictures, the Shubert Theatre couldn't be better situated for the U.S. premiere of Andrew Lloyd Webber's new musical "Sunset Boulevard."
Smack in the Industry's heartland, struggling actors and powerful directors share the stage with mysterious Westside palazzos you can't see from the street.
"It's why I wanted to do this here," Lloyd Webber said one recent afternoon in the living room of his own rented Westside palazzo . "There's something very invigorating about working on a show called 'Sunset Boulevard,' when in fact, you're living 30 yards from it."
The composer has been swaddled in Beverly Hills luxury for weeks now, reworking his musical and readying it for American consumption. The highly promoted, long-anticipated adaptation of Billy Wilder's classic film opens Thursday starring Glenn Close as faded silent screen star Norma Desmond and Alan Campbell as struggling screenwriter Joe Gillis.
As everyone knows, Lloyd Webber is the fabulously successful composer who turned T. S Eliot's poetry about cats into one of the biggest hit musicals ever. And this time around, his raw material would seem even more promising: the reclusive Desmond, the handsome young opportunist Gillis and the Hollywood that destroys them.
"Sunset Boulevard" premiered July 12 at London's Adelphi Theatre with Patti LuPone, Kevin Anderson and a record box-office advance of $8 million. Mixed reviews apparently haven't dampened sales, which still claim the West End's largest advances. Some of the London cast will probably transfer to Broadway next fall, while cities from Australia to Canada are lining up to book future productions.
But first comes Los Angeles. The show set a record in August for opening-day sales at Century City's Shubert, and producers say they expect to open with advances of $8 million to $10 million.
It remains a risky proposition, however. Lloyd Webber and his investors are gambling $12 mil lion on the production here, and the Shubert Organization has thrown in another $5 million by upgrading its Century City theater largely to the composer's specifications. The stakes are high too for actress Close, who has done little public singing since "Barnum" on Broadway in 1980.
If things go as planned, everybody wins. Close adds a new dimension to her career, the Shubert houses a lucrative long run in its newly redone theater, and Lloyd Webber gets another hit.
To better their odds, producers have missed few promotional opportunities. Their advertising budget of $700,000 is considerably higher than the L.A. budget for Lloyd Webber's "The Phantom of the Opera," which was already a hit in New York before opening at the Ahmanson Theatre in 1989, and includes 20 billboards along with the usual print, radio and TV ads.
Press releases go out on heavyweight, cream-colored stationery with the distinctive "Sunset Blvd." logo, and there are plenty of them. The usually reclusive composer is not only granting interviews but holding press conferences. London-based Lloyd Webber was on hand to unveil his star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame in February, and last month, he even showed up at a record store for two hours to sign autographs and plug his new show.
It took him more than 20 years to get "Sunset Boulevard" onstage, and Lloyd Webber is doing everything he can to capitalize on the film's popularity as well as his own. He and his creative team all refer to their effort as a homage to the film classic.
Such familiar lines as Desmond's "I \o7 am \f7 big. It's the pictures that got small" have been moved unchanged from film to stage and are nearly always spoken rather than sung. Co-writer Christopher Hampton readily acknowledges that he has "cannibalized the script," and New York Times critic Frank Rich referred to that faithfulness as "arguably to the point of artistic imprisonment."
Now, having read those reviews and watched five months' worth of London audience reactions, Lloyd Webber and team have brought back to Los Angeles what they learned. After considerable tinkering, the show opens here with not just a new cast, but also a new opening, a new song and other changes.
"This is a town where very much you are judged by your rewards," actor Campbell says. "That isn't the same somewhere else, which is why I think the show will have so much resonance for Los Angeles."
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Written by Wilder, Charles Brackett anM. Marshman Jr., "Sunset Boulevard" marked the beginning of Hollywood \o7 noir.\f7 Winner of three Oscars, the 1950 film has long been both a mainstream and cult classic and was granted landmark status by the Library of Congress.
"I knew I was in an important film when I read the script," says Nancy Olson Livingston, then a 20-year-old UCLA student who was cast as ingenue Betty Schaefer, Gillis' love interest. "We were going to look at what Hollywood was all about--how it distorts lives and makes people do terrible things."
