The latest revival of Sunset Boulevard—glossily stark and aggressively meta—puts several shades of lipstick on a pig. “Shades” being black, white, and red. “Pig” being a musical that may be one of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s better efforts but remains a bloated, subtlety-free slab of pop melodrama. Director Jamie Lloyd and his chic design team immerse Webber’s 1994 adaptation of the movie classic in a vertiginous zone of inky surfaces and white highlights, all swaddled in incessant billows of stage fog. Soutra Gilmour’s modish costumes are likewise monochromatic, as is her sparse scenic design—essentially a cavernous camera obscura. When the threat of murder arises, lighting designer Jack Knowles floods the stage in a scarlet wash. By the end of the action (slight spoiler), fallen star Norma Desmond (Nicole Scherzinger) is a gothic vision: glowing olive-toned skin, black silk slip, and neck streaked in gore. The remarkable thing about this brutally regimented palette is how it helps distract from the music.
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Granted, I am a Sondheim man and Webber’s syrupy, hammered-home melodies and blunt power ballads—which require equally stunted lyrics—bore me stiff. His musical storytelling is stuck between operetta and English Music Hall; it’s turgid, repetitive, and allergic to nuanced characterization (not to mention genuine emotion). At least with Sunset Boulevard, book writers and lyricists Christopher Hampton and Don Black (talented pros) had excellent bones on which to build. Billy........