Jeffrey Sweet–Making the Scene

I doubt you need my advice to help you make up your mind about whether to see the revival of the musical version of Sunset Boulevard. There are a few silly bits in which people run around the stage to no particular purpose, but mostly it is as impressive as it intends to be. Jamie Lloyd is a director I’ve admired a lot in the past – particularly for his extraordinary production of Pinter’s Betrayal and a staging of The Sea Gull for the National Theater (available on National Theater at Home) – and some of his signature moves (having characters physically present when other characters are thinking about them) are employed here to good effect. I am tempted to say that he is flirting with the dark side by using video devices echoing Ivo Van Hove (including taking actors onto the street outside for extended video sequences as Van Hove did in his stage version of Paddy Chayefsky’s Network). I prefer Lloyd when he is stripping away tricks and relying on actors and material, but the tricks in this production (video by Nathan Amzi and Joe Ransom) are mostly dazzling and often funny.

Performances? Nicole Scherzinger is a different Norma Desmond than Gloria Swanson, Glenn Close, Karen Mason and Betty Buckley memorably offered, but the fact that she registers decades younger suggests something valid about ageism that has always been part of Hollywood. We are supposed to find Norma’s hamminess cringe-inducing, but the audience ate up Scherzinger’s hamminess in portraying the hamminess. (A standing ovation in the middle of the show. Hey, if you can pull it off, go for it!) Tom Francis is very strong as the doomed writer Joe Gillis, and the supporting cast is generally terrific.

But I have to say I’m pissed off.

Sunset Boulevard is about the murder of a Hollywood screenwriter. But this production is complicit in something worse than the murder of a Hollywood screenwriter. The names of countless producers and associate producers are in the program with attendant bios, but two of the people most responsible for the creation of Sunset Boulevard — two Hollywood screenwriters — go entirely unmentioned.

Allow me to quote my friend Joseph McBride (in his book Billy Wilder: Dancing on the Edge) on the subject of D.M. Marshman, Jr., who is listed as one of the three screenwriters of the original film: “When I asked Wilder what Marshman contributed, he said casually that they gave him credit because he came up with the idea of a screenwriter becoming the kept man of the faded silent film star: in other words, the whole plot! Joe Gillis would have chuckled darkly over that one, but at least Marshman got credit and didn’t wind up floating in a pool.”

This time round, Marshman gets no credit. Nor does Charles Brackett, who co-wrote with Billy Wilder this and several of the other classic films Wilder directed. As for Billy Wilder, in very tiny letters there is a line that says that the show is based on a Paramount Pictures production of a film by Billy Wilder. Very tiny letters.

I can only begin to tell you how offensive I find this. Part of the point of Sunset Boulevard is how wasteful and contemptuous of artists Hollywood often is, and here we have a production in which the existence of the people who created the story is obliterated. Lines in the script and the lyrics Christopher Hampton and Don Black share credit for, not to mention, as McBride says, “the whole plot,” were written by a team two-thirds of whom who have been rendered invisible, non-existent. I have admired a lot of Hampton and Black’s work in the past, but they did not write, “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small” and “I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille.” Shame.

How I wish Billy Wilder were alive to come up with the response the producers of the show deserve.