'The Little Foxes'

There are some plays that, when I read they’re on the boards somewhere in New York City, I seriously try to get to a performance.  Waiting for Godot’s like that; Jitney was; Much Ado About Nothing and Twelfth Night are, too.  Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes is definitely one of those must-see plays for me—so when I read that Manhattan Theatre Club was producing it on Broadway with two sterling actors, Laura Linney and Cynthia Nixon, alternating in the two lead female roles of Regina Giddens and Birdie Hubbard, I knew I had to try to see it.  Hellman (1905-84) is one of the great  playwrights of the 20th century, one of the United States’ most accomplished women dramatists, and Little Foxes is generally considered her masterwork.

I’d seen a production of Little Foxes on Broadway before—with a rather illustrious cast.  It was back in July 1981 and it featured a very famous actress in her stage début: Elizabeth Taylor (1932-2011) played Regina Giddens.  The production was an experiment of sorts—not so much to see if movie-star Taylor could do a stage part, but to see if audiences would buy a production starring a movie actress (among a cast studded with other film and TV names, though ones with previous stage credits).  The producer, Zev Bufman, and Taylor were contemplating launching a repertory program of great plays on Broadway starring actors from the world of film, to be called the Elizabeth Theatre Group.  The Little Foxes played 126 regular performances and eight previews, completing its limited run (with an extension). 

(The rep program, however, flamed out.  Bufman and Taylor had plans for productions of Noël Coward’s Private Lives (starring Taylor and Richard Burton), Emlyn Williams’s The Corn is Green (with Cecily Tyson), Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth (with Taylor), Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s Inherit the Wind, and even more challenging fare, including Shakespeare plays (with Taylor—and why not, if Marlon Brando and Mickey Rooney could do it, albeit on film).  In 1983, Bufman presented the Coward and the Emlyn Williams, but the project went no further.  Dealing with movie and TV stars—not Taylor, by the way—turned out just to be too . . . ummm, “difficult.”)

The Little Foxes premièred on 15 February 1939 at the National Theatre (now the Niedlerlander), directed by Herman Shumlin, with Tallulah Bankhead as Regina Giddens, Frank Conroy as Horace Giddens, Charles Dingle as Benjamin Hubbard, Carl Benton Reid as Oscar Hubbard, Dan Duryea as Leo Hubbard, and Patricia Collinge as Birdie Hubbard.  The play ran for 410 performances and in 1941 was made into a film by Samuel Goldwyn Productions under William Wyler’s direction.  The cast was largely the 1939 Broadway company, with Bette Davis taking the role originated by Bankhead.  Productions followed across the country and abroad, but there were major revivals in New York City as well.

In 1967-68, the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center presented Little Foxes under the direction of Mike Nichols, with Anne Bancroft (Regina), Richard A. Dysart (Horace), Margaret Leighton (Birdie), E. G. Marshall (Oscar), Austin Pendleton (Leo), Beah Richards (Addie), George C. Scott (Benjamin), and Maria Tucci (Alexandra).  Then came that Bufman production with Taylor at the Martin Beck Theatre in 1981, directed by Austin Pendleton (who’d played young Leo Hubbard in ’67-’68), with Tom Aldredge (Horace), Joe Ponazecki (Oscar), Dennis Christopher (Leo), Maureen Stapleton (Birdie), Anthony Zerbe (Benjamin), and Joe Seneca (Cal).  A new resident company at Lincoln Center, the Lincoln Center Theater, revived the play in 1997 under the direction of Jack O'Brien, with Stockard Channing (Regina), Kenneth Welsh (Horace), Frances Conroy (Birdie), Jennifer Dundas, Brian Kerwin (Oscar), and Brian Murray (Benjamin).  In 2010, the New York Theatre Workshop brought avant-garde Belgian director Ivo van Hove in to helm a new staging. 

The Little Foxes was presented on the Philip Morris Playhouse (CBS radio) 10 October 1941.  The radio adaptation starred Tallulah Bankhead.  In 1949, the play was adapted by Marc Blitzstein as an opera entitled Regina.  It premièred at the 46th Street Theatre on Broadway on 31 October 1949.  George Schaefer produced and directed Robert Hartung’s television adaptation of Little Foxes on 16 December 1956 for the Hallmark Hall of Fame on NBC.  The cast included Greer Garson as Regina, Franchot Tone as Horace, Sidney Blackmer as Benjamin, E. G. Marshall as Oscar, and Eileen Heckart as Birdie.

The MTC revival at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre on Broadway started previews on 29 March and opened on 19 April.  Diana, my usual theater companion, and I saw the 8 p.m. performance on Friday, 3 May; the production is scheduled to close on 2 July (extended from an 18 June closing).  The production has garnered six Tony nominations, announced by the American Theatre Wing on 2 May for 2016-17: Best Revival of a Play, Best Performance of an Actress in a Leading Role in a Play: Laura Linney (Regina), Best Performance of an Actor in a Featured Role in a Play: Richard Thomas (Horace), Best Performance of an Actress in a Featured Role in a Play: Cynthia Nixon (Birdie), Best Costume Design of a Play: Jane Greenwood, Best Direction of a Play: Daniel Sullivan.  (The 71st Annual Tony Awards ceremony will be held on 11 June.)  MTC’s Little Foxes has also received nominations for seven Drama Desk Awards, including Outstanding Play Revival; six Outer Critics Circle Awards, including Outstanding Revival of a Broadway Play; and three Drama League Awards, including Outstanding Revival of a Play. 

The idea to cast two actresses to switch roles was Linney’s, who’d already been signed to play Regina when she suggested to Sullivan “this crazy idea.  What if we asked another great actress, say Cynthia Nixon, and we rotated parts?”  Both Sullivan and Nixon—who, like Linney, had always wanted to play Regina—were excited by the notion.  The two actresses alternate every four performances of the eight in a week.  (The original idea was to switch off every two shows.  Sullivan extended the rehearsal period to give the cast time to get used to playing opposite two different Reginas and Birdies.)  In an article on the MTC production, theater writer Lonnie Firestone compared two actors swapping roles this way to an older, but now uncommon theater practice:

[It’s] a cousin of sorts to repertory theatre, in which an ensemble cast performs different plays on alternating nights.  Both offer an opportunity for actors to showcase their mastery of more than one part.  But sharing roles within one play adds another element—namely, it heightens the antipodal relationship between two focal characters. 

The theater invited journalists to see the show twice, once for each pairing, and many did—but most paying theatergoers will only see the play once (as Diana and I did), so we can only conjecture how much different the performance will be when the actresses switch roles.  Neither Linney nor Nixon thought there’d be an immense difference between the alternate portrayals.  “I think some things will be similar, just because the play is so well written,” said Linney back in mid-March.  Nixon responded, “They aren’t the roomiest characters.”  Of course, one of the beauties of live theater is that even when the same actor is playing the same role, every performance is different, and each actor’s performance affects every other actor’s performance.  It’s one of the most exciting aspects of doing theater as distinct from film and TV.  The tiniest changes have immediate repercussions, so switching actors has to have an effect—and many of the reviewers described the often subtle distinctions between Linney’s Regina and Birdie and Nixon’s portrayals of the same characters. 

None of the three artists had ever done this kind of performance before—and it is rare in high-profile productions, but it’s not unknown.  In a 1935 production of Romeo and Juliet at the New Theatre in London’s West End’s (now the Noël Coward Theatre) John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier alternated as Romeo and Mercutio.  In a 1994 production of Sam Shepard’s True West at London’s Donmar Warehouse, Mark Rylance and Michael Rudko alternated the roles of the brothers Austin and Lee, and in 2000, Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly repeated the casting stunt at the Circle in the Square Theatre on Broadway.  As recently as 2011, Danny Boyle directed an adaptation of Frankenstein by Nick Dear at London’s National Theatre in which Benedict Cumberbatch and Johnny Lee Miller alternated as Victor Frankenstein and his monster (sharing an Olivier Award for Best Actor that year).

The Little Foxes is an old-fashioned family melodrama—on steroids.  The title, reportedly suggested to Hellman by Dorothy Parker, comes from the Song of Solomon 2:15 in the King James version of the Bible: “Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes.”  The Hubbard siblings do a bang-up job of spoiling the vines and everything else.  As Addie (Caroline Stefanie Clay), the Giddens’s maid (and a former slave), says: “There are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it. . . .   And other people who stand around and watch them eat it.” 

In 1900, brothers Oscar (Darren Goldstein) and Benjamin Hubbard (Michael McKean) join forces with their sister, Regina Giddens (Laura Linney at the performance I saw) to raise money to establish a cotton mill in their small Alabama town (identified in Another Part of the Forest as Bowden, a fictional place) in partnership with Chicago industrialist William Marshall (David Alford).  The brother’s are counting on Regina, who as a woman had been left out of their father’s will and has no money of her own, to get her wealthy banker husband, Horace, to contribute a third of the capital.  Birdie Hubbard (Cynthia Nixon on that Friday evening), Oscar’s gentle and sensitive wife, considered Southern aristocracy by the parvenu Hubbards, doesn’t approve of the Hubbard greed and urges Alexandra (Francesca Carpanini in her Broadway debut), Regina’s 17-year-old daughter, to escape the avaricious plotting of the family—and to avoid the plan to marry her to her cousin, Leo Hubbard (Michael Benz), Oscar and Birdie’s 20-year-old son.  Horace Giddens (Richard Thomas) is under treatment for a heart ailment in Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. 

After Regina’s and the Hubbards’ letters to Horace fail to bring the necessary money, Regina sends Alexandra to bring her father home on the train.  Weakened by the trip, Horace, about 45, denies the money his wife wishes.  Leo, a feckless and ineffectual boy who works for his Uncle Horace, steals Union Pacific Railroad bonds worth $88,000 ($2.4 million today) belonging to Horace and gives them to his father and Benjamin; the brothers cut Regina out of her share of the scheme.  Horace soon discovers the theft and when he tells his wife the stolen bonds will be her inheritance from him, she becomes enraged.  The revelation of Regina’s true character causes Horace to suffer a heart attack; Regina withholds the medicine necessary to save his life, and watches as Horace dies.  Regina confronts Oscar, Benjamin, and Leo with the theft of the securities, demanding 75 percent of Hubbard Sons and Marshall, Cotton Mills, in return for not exposing their crime.  In the last scene, Alexandra bids her mother goodbye, unable to bear any longer the greed and selfishness of the family.  The MTC production runs two hours and 35 minutes, including two intermissions. 

(In 1946, Hellman wrote a prequel to Little Foxes, Another Part of the Forest, whose Broadway début the playwright herself directed.  The nouveau-riche Hubbard family is shown here in 1880 and patriarch Marcus Hubbard, 63, dominates his conniving son, Benjamin, 35, and his weaker son, Oscar, in his late 20’s, with the tyranny that’s made him a rich and powerful man in the small cotton town of Bowden, Alabama, and surrounding Rose County.  He’s reduced his sensitive and religious wife, Lavinia, around 60, to a neurasthenic.  Only his beautiful, 20-year-old daughter, Regina—played by Patricia Neal in her first Broadway outing, winning both a Tony and a Theatre World Award—whom he worships, can control Marcus, which she does for her own selfish purposes.  She wants to marry John Bagtry, a 36-year-old Confederate army veteran, who only felt useful during the war and longs to go to Brazil to join the forces of the military, conservatives, and landowners fighting to preserve slavery there. 

(The Bagtrys have become land-poor, and John’s cousin, Birdie, 20, has appealed to Benjamin for a loan which would salvage Lionnet, the family’s cotton plantation.  He arranges the loan to benefit his family’s business and himself, but when Regina learns the money would make it possible for John to go to Brazil, she thwarts the transaction.  Oscar brings Laurette, about 20, the local prostitute with whom he’s become enthralled, to the Hubbard house for one of Marcus’s musical evenings; Benjamin purposely gets her drunk and she creates a scene.  Marcus orders both sons to leave home, but when Benjamin learns from his mother that his father’s fortune was made from profiteering off his fellow Southerners and an act of deceit and treachery during the Civil War, he blackmails Marcus into giving him control of the family funds.  Now Benjamin becomes the new tyrant of the family, forcing Oscar to marry Birdie and Regina to give up John.  Regina turns her attentions to Benjamin, even though she hates him, to further her own desires.  Just as he’d destroyed others, Marcus is a broken and lonely man at the end of the play, the victim of his own greed.)

MTC’s promo for The Little Foxes says “the play has a surprisingly timely resonance with important issues facing our country today.”  There are, of course, issues of race and gender that sadly have a contemporary ring: the casual racism with which Cal (Charles Turner) and Addie, the black servants, are treated—though Hellman portrays them with both great dignity and independent spirit.  (In Another Part of the Forest, Hellman informs us that Oscar rides with a group of nightriders and that the Hubbards have clashed with the local Ku Klux Klan.)  But for Hellman, a communist and anti-capitalist who was haled before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), it’s the depiction of American business that’s most pointed.  As Nixon puts it:

One of the things that the play says is that—and this is very in evidence nowadays—we think of people who amass huge fortunes as just being “good at business.”  But what that phrase sometimes conceals is that there’s a lot of cutthroat maneuvering in many different kinds of businesses for people who want to get ahead.  And there are many different kinds of bending of rules—cheating and violence and backstabbing and more.  A lot of the fortunes that were amassed in this country have that at their base.  This is something that the African-American community has been saying for a long time.  There is so much corporate malfeasance and these people almost never go to jail.  There are these two parallel worlds at the bottom and the top of criminal behavior; one group gets heavily prosecuted and one barely even gets perused.

I can guess whom the actress had in mind.  (If I’m right, I have the same thought.  How about you all?)  The same association arises when Linney addresses a question about whether she thinks the Hubbards are “evil”:

We see this behavior now a lot.  It’s not rare.  I think people will recognize a lot of people they know in the Hubbards.  I don’t think it’s that hidden anymore.  That behavior used to be a little hidden because it was seen as in bad taste and people had a reputation, and now people don’t care.  Now there’s strength in behaving badly.  So there’s a different perspective that America is in now.  It’s also sort of a warning—it’s a play of warning, I feel.

Near the end of the play, Benjamin tells Regina that “throughout the country there are hundreds of Hubbards,” and “they will own this country some day.”  Several reviewers reported a shudder rippling though the audience at those lines, and, indeed, that day may have come.

The Little Foxes Diana and I saw is absolutely excellent!  First of all, I sort of like all those old-fashioned plays, especially by writers like Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Hellman, Clifford Odets, and William Inge—top-flight craftspeople.  Second, companies like MTC, Signature, Primary Stages, Second Stage, the Public, Lincoln Center Theater, and others, do such good work on their productions—especially (but not limited to) their casting—that it’s a joy to watch the work that’s been done—design, directing, acting, the whole nine yards!  Third, perhaps to repeat myself, the acting is terrific, especially (but again, not limited to) Nixon and Linney.  Even though I know the situation and circumstances are contrived, the actors make it look so natural that I’m convinced it is.  While Sunset Boulevard was not worth the ticket price, Little Foxes is, and then some.  What a great evening!

This is easily one of the strongest ensemble casts I’ve ever seen, up there with the Jitney company last winter (see my report on 24 February) but not many others.  Still, the roles of Regina and Benjamin are the movers and shakers of the story, followed closely by Horace (who doesn’t appear until the middle of act two).  Linney’s Regina is focused like the proverbial laser beam on her goal—getting out of her house, the little southern town, the marriage she hates and resents, and getting to the wide world represented by Chicago.  To do that, she needs money of her own.  That she fails to achieve this aim doesn’t diminish Linney’s steely resolve to get there—it only makes her ending more devastating—and more deserved.  Because Linney’s usually a softer actress, more emotionally vulnerable, playing the resolute, unbending Regina makes the performance both more surprising and more edgy.

Conversely, Nixon, who usually plays stronger, less pliable characters, gives a more precarious performance as the brow-beaten and dismissed Birdie.  We get to glimpse what she might have been had she not married Oscar and come under the sway (in Another Part of the Forest) of his father, a nastier bully than even Benjamin.  Nixon’s Birdie pulls some of this back out again when she takes her niece aside and warns her to get out from under the Hubbard curse—and acknowledges that she doesn’t really like her own son.  That’s probably the last anyone will ever see of that entombed spirit, but Nixon’s portrayal will pull your heartstrings to the breaking point.  As Benjamin, Michael McKean gives a frighteningly believable portrait of a ruthless, soulless, conscience-less money-chaser.  Winning is all that matters, or indeed means anything; there’s nothing left to him but greed for its own sake.  It sounds one-dimensional, but in McKean’s hands, it has shades and variations—all in pursuit of one goal: to beat the other guy (or, in the case of his sister, gal—Benjamin is an equal-opportunity predator).  Richard Thomas almost makes Horace likeable—or maybe it’s just his contrast with Regina and her brothers.  It’s certainly partly a product of Thomas’s stage persona—Diana and I saw the same quality in the actor’s portrayal of von Berg, the Austrian aristocrat in Arthur Miller’s Incident at Vichy (see my report on 16 December 2015)—but there’s still a bright streak of cruelty and meanness in Thomas’s banker.  If the Hubbards are the bulls of this menagerie, Horace is the snake.  Thomas may seem like a harmless garter—but he turns out to be a viper.

The other members of the ensemble, from Darren Goldstein’s Oscar and Michael Benz’s Broadway début as Leo to David Alford’s Yankee industrialist, William Marshall (another Broadway début), display nuances and personality gradations that individualize each of them and together they provide the matrix in which the Hubbard fungus grows.  Some are abettors and others inhibiters, but they all contribute to the agar.  What they grow together is reprehensible—but the process is miraculous to see.

Scott Pask’s faded elegance of the Giddens’s parlor perfectly fits the tone of the play and Sullivan’s production.  I could almost smell the must hanging in the air of the house, aided by Justin Townsend’s soft lighting that evokes the spring evening in the deep south.  Nothing, however, could render the material and chronological atmosphere of Hellman’s play better than the costumes devised by Jane Greenwood.  It’s no wonder that she was singled out from the design team of Little Foxes for Tony recognition: the clothes for the production are as telling—of character and status—as any of Hellman’s dialogue or the behavior of any of the actors.  The difference between Regina and Birdie?  Look at what they wear.  The kind of men Benjamin and Oscar are?  Their clothes may not make the men—but they damn sure reveal them.

Daniel Sullivan’s staging is so realistic that I might have thought the actors were improvising if I didn’t know better.  But more than that, he guided the cast to performances that perfectly reveal who these folks are, what they want, and how they see themselves.  As directed by Sullivan, The Little Foxes is just an extremely well-mounted production of a well-written modern classic that hits all the bases.  Acting students, directing students, and theater students all should be assigned to see it! 

All the award nominations for Little Foxes are deserved and the nominees are legitimate contenders for the awards.  This is not a case of needing to fill out a bracket or not having enough competition in a category (as a few reviewers claimed in the case of Glenn Close’s 1995 Sunset Boulevard Tony), or a sop to a vet or a “critics’ darling” (to invoke William Goldman’s The Season again as I did in my Sunset Boulevard report).  This production earned its nominations.  Day-um!  (I haven’t been this high on a performance since I can’t remember when.  It’s exhilarating.)  Kudos!!

On Show-Score, based on a survey of 56 published reviews, The Little Foxes received an average rating of 85.  The website included in its tally several out-of-town outlets, which I usually discount, so I’ve recalculated Show-Score’s numbers for 53 local or national reviews:  the adjusted average is 81; the notices are 98% positive, 2% mixed, and none negative.  The highest scores are three 95’s (including one for Variety), with 18 90’s (including the New York Times, the Village Voice, and the Hollywood Reporter); the low score is 60, backed by three 70’s (New York, Talkin’ Broadway, and NJ.com/Newark Star-Ledger).  I’ll be surveying 26 notices for my review round-up.

The New York Times’ Alexis Soloski, calling MTC’s Little Foxes a “nimble, exhilarating revival,” wondered “Is the play too tidy, too well made, too clear-cut in its morality to fight for a place in the first rank of American theater?”  Soloski continued, however: “Maybe. But it comes pretty close.  And very well armed.”  The Times review-writer reported, “Mr. Sullivan’s confident production doesn’t deny melodrama, but it prefers psychological and social detail over Southern gothic fripperies.”  In the New York Daily News, Joe Dziemianowicz dubbed the production a “crisp and taut revival of Lillian Hellman’s 1939 acidic and darkly humorous Southern potboiler.”  Dziemianowicz assured readers, “Under Daniel Sullivan’s sure-handed direction, the show satisfies no matter who’s playing Regina,” adding that the “production's good-looking.” 

The Little Foxes’ “lessons are none too subtle,” wrote the Wall Street Journal’s Edward Rothstein, describing the play as a “melodramatic classic.”  Noting that Linney and Nixon are “two accomplished actresses,” Rothstein reported, “Under Daniel Sullivan’s direction, the rest of the cast is remarkable (and flexible).”  Characterizing the play as a “costume melodrama” in a “zesty Broadway revival,” Matt Windman asserted in am New York, “Although ‘The Little Foxes’ calls attention to a lot of serious issues (including economic inequality, corporate greed, spousal abuse, racial prejudice and alcoholism), at heart, it is an unapologetic soap opera with over-the-top characters and unbelievable machinations.”  Windman felt, “Director Daniel Sullivan approaches the play with a “let’s just roll with it and have a good time” attitude, leading to a simple but effective production full of old-fashioned theatricality.”  While the amNY reviewer found that Linney and Nixon were “fine” in both roles, he affirmed, “The fullest performance actually comes from Thomas.” 

In Long Island’s Newsday, Linda Winer’s “Bottom Line” was: “Strong revival, delicious alternate casting.”  She opened her review with the declaration, “The next time anyone challenges the need to have nonprofit Broadway houses alongside the commercial theaters, I’m going to shout out, ‘The Little Foxes.’”  Winer characterized the revival as “strongly cast” and said that Sullivan approached “what is generally dismissed these days as a melodramatic old potboiler” with “crackling seriousness.”  After seeing more plays about Hellman than productions of her work over the last 20 years, Winer “was struck by the snappy, tight writing and the psychological truth in the people who gather in the Giddens’ parlor (beautifully designed by Scott Pask) to manipulate life, death and money.”  Calling Linney and Nixon “sublimely intelligent actors,” the Newsday review-writer added, “The rest of the cast is far more than background, especially the ever-challenging Richard Thomas as Regina’s decent, dying husband and Michael McKean as the smoothest of the mean relatives.” 

For the Newark Star-Ledger, Christopher Kelly called The Little Foxes “a ripe melodrama” presented in an “effective, but straight-over-the-plate production.”  (One of the few reviewers to disparage the double-casting gimmick, which he observed “tends to be a lot more interesting to actors and theater insiders than to audience members,” Kelly stated, “One pretty good version of one pretty good play seems like more than enough.”)  Like Diana and me, the Star-Ledger writer saw Linney as Regina (he didn’t go back for the other pairing), and he found, “For the most part, Linney resists the high-camp dudgeon that Davis brought to the movie, opting for a more psychologically grounded Regina.”  Kelly’s caveat, however, was: “But while that’s a laudable choice, it also drains the proceedings of some potential electricity—a matter compounded by Sullivan’s steady, but restrained pacing.”  In the end, while he found the set and costumes “predictably handsome,” the production “never quite gets the pulse racing.”  In the Record of New Jersey’s suburban Bergen County, Joseph Cervelli labeled the play “venomously delicious” which is “being royally revived” by  MTC.  Praising Sullivan’s “expert” direction, Cavelli affirmed, “There is not one false move or miscalculations in this revival which is one of the highlights of the season.”

Tara Isabella Burton of the Village Voice dubbed the play “sumptuously sour” and the MTC revival “brilliant.”  Burton wrote that “the production invests us as much in the pain and suffering behind the mask-stiff moral carnivores as it does in the victimhood—or, more often, Hellman suggests, cowardly paralysis—of those they’re chomping on.”  According to the Voice reviewer, director “Sullivan’s genius is not to contort the play into a funnel for banal message-making, but to let a team of virtuosic actors loose onstage and let them battle as viciously for our sympathies as they fight one another.”  In summation, Burton asserted, “It would be easy to reduce The Little Foxes to a good play about terrible people.  Nobody gets off scot-free in Hellman’s script, or Sullivan’s staging,” she pointed out.  “But in the constant dynamic juggling of our sympathies, The Little Foxes is something so much better—and so much more affecting: It’s a fantastic play about flawed human beings.  Spoil the grapes the foxes may, but we want to watch them do it.”

In New York magazine, Jesse Green called Little Foxes a “breakneck melodrama” that’s “busily slapping down shibboleths and exposing hypocrisies” in a “handsome” but only “good-enough revival.”  In Green’s words, “The play isn’t subtle; it’s just delicious.”  He felt that “the acting opportunities are juicy from top to bottom,” the man from New York found, “It’s largely in the calibration of the men’s roles that the production falters.”  He argued with the casting of the “aggressively likeable” Thomas and thought that “under Sullivan’s somewhat grandstanding direction,” McKean’s and Goldstein’s “pacing and affect suggest something too close to comedy.”  What the production “gets right,” Green felt, and is “powerfully effective, . . . is Hellman’s dissection of (and shocking prescience about) the way a systemic lack of power can turn into manipulative fury.”  But the final notion that the Hubbards of the world will take over the country is “a swift kick in the American grits, and worth the price of admission, whichever Regina is proving him right.”  In the New Yorker’s “Goings On About Town” column, the reviewer described the play as possessing “a Greek tragedy’s implacability and the taut plotting of a film noir” and the MTC revival is “traditional in every respect but one”—the casting gimmick.  Each actress “brings very different shadings to Regina” and the anonymous writer recommends seeing both pairings.  “Hellman’s incisive storytelling, her razor-etched insights into women’s limited options in a patriarchal society, are largely good enough to withstand the scrutiny.”

David Cote of Time Out New York called Little Foxes a “potboiler” directed “with a crisp vigor that smooths over its melodramatic bumps.”  The man from TONY deemed, “The cast is uniformly strong, and outstanding work comes from the leading ladies.”  Though it “may not command as high a prospect in the pantheon of American drama as more poetic work by Tennessee Williams or Eugene O’Neill, . . . it’s cunningly built and packs a punch.”  Cote noted that he hadn’t been able to see both the two actresses in both roles, but admitted, “This is such a richly satisfying revival, I’m going back for seconds.”  In Variety, Marilyn Stasio described the play as a “brilliant, blistering indictment of a rapacious southern family in post-Civil War America” on which Sullivan “has done brilliant work.”  Stasio continued: “His casting is flawless, his team of designers couldn’t be better chosen, and the technical detail that has gone into the production is amazing.” 

David Rooney’s “Bottom Line” in the Hollywood Reporter was “A class act X 2” and the HR reviewer noted, “Daniel Sullivan's impeccable production for Manhattan Theatre Club never overstates that modern-day relevance; he simply lets the play's rock-solid construction and lucid themes speak for themselves via a first-rate cast and exemplary design team.”  Because the play wears its message on its sleeve, perceived Rooney, it doesn’t bear “stripped-down surgical re-examination” of the kind wielded by Ivo van Hove (who staged the recent NYTW revival) or Sam Gold, but “served straight, with the right actors, it's a crackling good yarn.”  In addition to his analysis to the various strengths and surprises of the double casting of Nixon and Linney, Rooney asserted, “This is a superbly cast production with incisive character work” from the supporting actors.  “This is a production as classy as it is smart,” declared Hollywood journalist, “shining a spotlight on a playwright who . . . is too seldom revived on Broadway.”  In Entertainment Weekly, Isabella Biedenharn declared, “It’s . . . a treat to watch these masters [Nixon and Linney] at play” in the MTC Little Foxes, “along with the rest of the vibrant cast.”  Scott Pask’s set “is a sight to behold” with “Justin Townsend’s disconcertingly naturalistic lighting.”

Michael Dale called Little Foxes a “backstabbing family drama” on Broadway World and Sullivan’s staging a “classically mounted revival, designed with stately beauty.”  With compliments for all the cast, Dale commented on the double casting, saying that “personal taste” will determine which pairing “audience members prefer.”  He concluded, “Fortunately, The Little Foxes is a fascinating play and Sullivan's superb production is easily worth a second visit.”  On TheaterMania, Zachary Stewart declared, “Under the scrupulous direction of Daniel Sullivan, Linney and Nixon prove that there is more than one way to skin a fox, with two highly contrasting interpretations that change the way we look at the play.”  Stewart, however, felt, “The Little Foxes is guilty of romanticizing the slaveholding gentry of yore in its condemnation of the greedy bourgeoisie that has taken its place.”  Still, he acknowledged, “at least this revival points out the absurdity of that contention.”  Stewart wondered in the end, “[A]re the Hubbards really worse than the self-styled lords and ladies of Dixie?  Why is inherited wealth somehow purer than wealth attained by scratching and clawing like little foxes around a vineyard in bloom?  Those questions remain with us, no matter who is playing what role in this must-see revival.”

On New York Theater, Jonathan Mandell labeled the MTC revival of Little Foxes “engrossing” and even deemed the double casting of Nixon and Linney “ a smart, appealing gimmick.”  Linney and Nixon “shine . . . brightly” at the head of “a supporting cast full of stand-out performances” in this “fierce” production enhanced by the “elegant set and the sumptuous costumes.”  Matthew Murray on Talkin’ Broadway asserted that “the guiding force behind Daniel Sullivan’s . . . production of The Little Foxes” is: “Certain distances may seem large, but can in fact be very small: between wealth and poverty, for example, or between importance and meaninglessness, or between being somebody and being nobody.”  Director Sullivan “pays careful attention to mores and appearances with his staging,” but “the physical production lacks that dedication to detail.”  Murray praised, especially, Linney as Regina and Nixon as Birdie—he was less pleased with the alternate combination—and affirmed, “The other actors are no less than satisfying.”  Though the TB reviewer found “Sullivan’s spin might be on the weighty side; . . . the action is definitely more slow burn than all-consuming crackle,” he concluded, “Either way, this is a fiery play that’s a definite hot spot for the season.”

Declaring Manhattan Theatre Club’s Little Foxes a “riveting revival of” Hellman’s “powerful psychological melodrama” on Theatre’s Leiter Side, Samuel L. Leiter described the play as “an example of old-fashioned but still magnetic playwriting: a tightly constructed play with crystal-clear exposition . . ., sharply defined characters, a theatrically colorful time and place . . ., and a powerful, anticapitalistic theme, as resonant today as during the Depression.”  Leiter cautioned, “One can sometimes hear the creaking of the dramatic wheels,” but found that the production is “a theatrical humdinger” nonetheless “when given the kind of solidly believable performances such as it mostly gets here under Daniel Sullivan’s shrewd direction.”  He found no fault with any of the cast, but singled out Thomas and McKean for special praise, concluding, “This is one skulk of foxes that still has its bite.”  Theater Pizzazz’s Michael Bracken dubbed the play a “paean to avarice thicker than blood” and labeled the production “a thrilling revival . . . under the expert direction of Daniel Sullivan.”  He called the alternating casting “Gimmicky,” adding “but it works.”  Bracken concluded that “Daniel Sullivan’s direction brings it all together, with meticulous attention paid to detail for a very satisfying whole.”

Elyse Sommer characterized Little Foxes as “an old-fashioned, smartly scripted and structured melodrama” and an “uber-dysfunctional family drama” on CurtainUp.  Sommer affirmed that “Daniel Sullivan has assembled a fine group of actors” and that “Scott Pask’s opulent set is . . . something of a character in its own right.”  On Stage Buddy, Emily Gawlak characterized Little Foxes as “a play that marries the stylized drama of southern gothic with the wit of a comedy-of-manners.”  She asserted that “it’s easy to sink into the play, which, though two and a half hours long, passes swiftly over sharp dialogue and growing intrigue” and that director Sullivan “commands a fluid ensemble performance, stretching great drama out of heated arguments and pregnant pauses alike.”  Gawlak complained, however, that “it feels like a stretch to call show timely.  On the contrary, it feels a bit antiquated.”  Our stage buddy summed up with: “In 2017, The Little Foxes feels a little bit like elderberry wine and tea cakes in the afternoon—a superfluous indulgence, but an intoxicating, transportive treat, nonetheless.” 

New York Theatre Guide’s Tulis McCall dubbed the MTC revival a “delicious production” in which “intrigue is presented like so many layers of a French pastry.”  Director Sullivan had staged the production “with style and precision” resulting in “a crisp evening of deceit and calculation.”  The cast is a company of “very fine” actors, and the “result is an ensemble that is having a devilishly good time.”   The NYTG reviewer reported, “Everyone is up to something, and you don’t want to take your eyes off any of them for a second,” concluding that there are “more than a few reasons to catch this show.”  On Broadway News, a new site I’m adding because the reviewer is a familiar name whose voice has been absent from the critical scene for some months, Christopher Isherwood (late of the New York Times) called the MTC production of Little Foxes a “succulent new Broadway revival” that “cannot erase its tints of both moralizing and melodrama.”  He added, though, that “it proves once again that Hellman’s 1939 drama is also redoubtably enduring entertainment, a theatrically effective indictment of human greed and its destructive power.”  With the double casting, Isherwood asserted, “both actors give rewarding performances in both roles,” and furthermore, “Sullivan’s production has been cast in such depth that even the formidable leading ladies, each worth watching in pretty much anything, are by no means the whole show.”  This “crackerjack production shines with professional polish and acting of sharp intelligence and theatrical acuity.”  The Broadway Newsman observed that Little Foxes “probably does not rank among the greatest of American plays.  But with its vivid portrait of a family trampling all over good manners and upright morals in order to maximize their, er, net worth, it might be seen as a play peculiarly suited to the current national moment.”  (I wonder whom he’s thinking about . . . .) 

On WNYC radio, Jennifer Vanasco pronounced Daniel Sullivan’s production of Little Foxes “thrilling” and said she was “struck . . . hardest [by] how rounded these characters are.”  Vanasco characterized the Little Foxes as “a compelling play about power and its abuses” and concluded, “This is one you shouldn’t miss.”  Robert Kahn and Dave Quinn of WNBC, the television network outlet in New York City, labeled the MTC revival as a “powerful and chilling interpretation” of Hellman’s “Southern family drama” in “Sullivan’s exciting staging.”  The reviewers felt, “Both [actresses] prove to be equally effective in either role—a sign of each actress’ talent and the production’s overall perfection.”  They reserved praise, too, for the rest of the ensemble.  (I usually include the cable news station NY1 in my survey, but David Cote is a stringer for the channel and his television review is essentially the same as his TONY notice, cited above.)

(I didn’t report all the comments of the reviewers concerning the double casting of Linney and Nixon.  Nearly all the writers agreed that it’s an interesting gambit, and most in my survey found that the better pairing is Linney as Regina and Nixon as Birdie—but the difference is small and all the reviewers acknowledged that if a theatergoer can’t see both variations, seeing either one would be more than satisfying.)

'Sunset Boulevard'

Almost 23 years ago, Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber’s movical Sunset Boulevard opened at Broadway’s Minskoff Theatre.  Based on the 1950 Billy Wilder film for Paramount Pictures, it took Tonys in 1995 for best musical, best actress in a musical, and best featured actor, among other awards and ran for 977 regular performances and 17 previews.  It’s back now, with Glenn Close reprising her award-winning (she also got a Drama Desk Award) performance, so, having missed the first go-round, my theater companion Diana and I decided to see what all the buzz had been about, especially the highly-touted performance of Close as faded silent-movie luminary, Norma Desmond, the role made indelible in the movie by former silent star, Gloria Swanson.  As Matt Windman of am New York wrote:

Two decades since its splashy Broadway premiere, the plot and the production history of “Sunset Boulevard” . . . have become one and the same.

At the end of “Sunset Boulevard,” Norma Desmond, . . . who has spent two decades in lonely obscurity, determinedly thrusts herself back into the spotlight, ready for either a close-up or the madhouse.

In sync with Norma’s intentions, the musical has returned to Broadway two decades later, bringing Glenn Close . . . back to the stage . . . .

After a couple of workshop productions, with different lyric- and book-writers, at Lloyd Webber’s Sydmonton Festival in Hampshire, England, in 1991 and ’92, the world première of Sunset Boulevard, with music by Lloyd Webber and book and lyrics by Christopher Hampton and Don Black, opened on 12 July 1993 at London’s Adelphi Theatre under the direction of Trevor Nunn, running for 1,530 performances.  It starred Patti LuPone as Norma and Kevin Anderson as Joe Gillis, with Meredith Braun as Betty Schaeffer and Daniel Benzali as Max von Mayerling.  The musical came to the U.S. in December ’93, having its American première at the Shubert Theatre in Los Angeles, directed by Nunn, now starring Glenn Close as Norma and Alan Campbell as Joe, with Judy Kuhn as Betty and George Hearn as Max.  The Broadway première opened at the Minskoff Theatre on 17 November 1994 with the same company as the L.A. production.  There have since been scores of productions around the Western world and across the U.S.

The show was revived in London for a five-week ‘semi-staged’ run from 1 April to 7 May 2016 (43 performances) by the English National Opera at the London Coliseum, directed this time by Lonny Price  with Close as Norma again, Michael Xavier as Joe, Siobhan Dillon as Betty, and Fred Johanson as Max.  The production moved to New York City for a limited run at the Palace Theatre, 47th Street and 7th Avenue, that opened for previews on 2 February 2017, had its official (press) opening on 9 February, and will close on 25 June (after a four-week extension from 28 May); Diana and I saw the 8 p.m. performance on Friday, 28 April (at which Britney Coleman stepped in for Dillon as Betty).

(The film was directed by Wilder from a script by Wilder, Charles Brackett, and D. M. Marshman, Jr.  The cast included Swanson, William Holden as Joe, Nancy Olson as Betty, and Erich von Stroheim as Max.  Photographed in black and white, it won Oscars for the screenplay, score, and art direction-set decoration.  “Sunset Boulevard is a great motion picture,” wrote Thomas L. Pryor in the New York Times of 11 August 1950.  It’s considered a classic of American film noir.  A film version of the musical has been reported—though no cast or director is attached—since 2005; the studio for the project—can you guess?—is Paramount.) 

The musical’s plot (and some of its lines) almost exactly parallels that of the movie, starting with a version of the opening scene of Joe Gillis (Xavier) looking down at his own body (represented by a mannequin that rises from the former orchestra pit to overhead, where it remains all evening) floating face down in a swimming pool as he explains, in song now, that this is the end of the story and he’s going to take us back to the beginning that led to this bleak scene.  (In the film, of course, Joe speaks in voice-over—Holden’s not on screen staring at Joe’s body as Xavier is on stage.)  It’s late-’40s Hollywood (from clues embedded in the script, I peg it as between October 1948, when Cecil B. DeMille was filming Samson and Delilah at Paramount, which figures in the play’s plot, and January 1949—there are New Year’s celebrations near the end of the play—or a little later) and Joe, a hack screenwriter, is not only out of work, but on the lam from collection agents who want to repossess his car.  A man without a car in L.A. might as well have his legs cut off, so Joe races to the Paramount studios to beg for work—he’ll take anything, he tells anyone who’ll listen; he just needs a paycheck to get out of hock.  No one’s buying, but in the offices of Sheldrake (Andy Taylor), a Paramount producer, Joe meets Betty Schaeffer (Coleman), Sheldrake’s script reader and an aspiring screenwriter.  She read one of Joe’s published stories, “Blind Windows,” and thinks it’d make a good film script, a quality movie rather that the fluff he’s been shopping.  He’s not interested in developing the story but when Betty presses the idea, he gives her the story to adapt herself.  Just as Joe’s about to leave, he spots the two repo thugs (Graham Rowat and Drew Foster) and importunes Betty to run interference for him as he escapes. 

Speeding through the Hollywood Hills trying to evade the collectors—there’s a very clever, low-tech staging of a car chase which I won’t spoil by describing here (though some reviewers found it “silly”)—Joe looks for a place to hide his car and himself.  He happens on an old mansion at 10086 Sunset Boulevard whose entrance and garage is open, and he darts in and pulls the car out of sight in the garage.  Wandering into the mansion, mesmerized by the bric-a-brac and tchotchkes with which the house is furnished, Joe runs into Max von Mayerling (Johanson), the butler, who mistakes Joe for someone from a funeral home who’s come to see to his employer’s recently-deceased . . . pet chimpanzee.  (Yup!  And that’s straight from the flick, too.)  When the writer meets the mistress of the house, he quickly recognizes her as “someone,” and soon comes up with the name: Norma Desmond (Close).  “You used to be big,” he almost asks in a line taken from the screenplay.  “I am big,” she bristles. “It’s the pictures that got small.”  She still thinks Joe’s the man for whom she’s been waiting, but when he explains that he’s a screenwriter, she decides he’s just the person she’s been looking for to revise the screenplay she’s been writing for her return—she hates the word ‘comeback’—to film.  Her tale of Salome is, of course, a silent fllm . . . because she doesn’t need words to make people feel her emotions and understand her thoughts.  She has her face.  That’s all it takes.  She persuades—well, cows Joe into reading the script, which, of course, is not only voluminous in length, but terrible.  Norma’s so devoted to the project, though, that Joe (who has a backbone problem) can’t tell her what he really thinks.

Besides, he needs a place to hide out from the repo men, and when Norma tells him he’ll be well paid . . . well, why not?  He needs the money, he has no other work, and he can hide the car in her garage while he works for her.  The first sign that things aren’t quite normal in the Desmond manse is when Norma explains that he’ll be expected to live in the house—there’s a room over the garage that’s all ready for him.  (Max has been busy while Joe’s been occupied reading the script!  Later, the majordomo will go to Joe’s apartment and pack up his clothes and personal items without asking the writer.)  Resistant at first, Joe convinces himself to go along with this idea since his apartment isn’t so great anyway and Norma’s mansion is weird, but sumptuous (and Joe’s something of a whore at bottom anyway).  Besides, it’s not as if he’s being held prisoner . . . right?

Little by little, without Joe putting up much resistance, Norma entangles him in her delusional life in the mansion, controlling him with expensive gifts, luxury, neediness, and, finally, suicide threats.  He starts off as her ghost writer, evolves into her pet, and ends up her kept lover—though he’s ashamed enough of all of this that he hides it from Betty and others on the outside.  (Joe’s not the only ”ghost” in the decrepit old mausoleum: a specter of the young Norma, in the form of Stephanie Martignetti, makes occasional speechless appearances, all dressed in black and white—a bit that didn’t appear in the ’90s stagings.)  On New Year’s Eve, he flees a party for two at the mansion to seek out people his own age, and comes upon Betty and her fiancée, Artie Green (Preston Truman Boyd), who’s Joe’s best friend, but he’s called back to the Desmond house when Max calls to tell him Norma’s attempted to shoot herself.  Of course, he rushes back, more caught in Norma’s web than ever.

The Salome screenplay is finally finished and Max personally delivers it to DeMille (Paul Schoeffler) at Paramount.  Norma waits to hear back from the great director (played in the movie by C. B. himself), but when Max tells her a studio assistant had called her, she refuses to call back.  If C. B. wants to see her, he can call her himself!  After weeks have passed without a call from DeMille, Norma has Max drive her and Joe to the studio to call on her old friend and director and her arrival on the lot causes a general stir as all the movie pros stand in awe of the legend; all her old friends at the studio from the gate guard (Drew Foster) to the lighting technician (Jim Walton) remember her with fondness.  Norma’s briefly back in the spotlight—literally as the light man shines a spot on her face and she responds like an exotic flower in the sunlight.  But we discover that it wasn’t DeMille who wanted to reach Norma, but Sheldrake when he tells Max that he’s not interested in her awful script, but in her old car, the Bugatti limo in which the liveried Max—complete with jodhpurs and riding boots—drove her to the studio. 

When Max reveals this to Joe, the writer asks how he’ll tell Norma.  He won’t, explains Max.  It’s his job to keep reality away from Norma and protect her fantasy world.  He tells Joe that it was he who discovered Norma when she was 16, beautiful, and immensely talented.  He was her first director and the first of her three husbands and he still sees the young girl he loved all those years ago. 

Joe becomes more and more involved with Betty as they collaborate on the screen adaptation of his story.  She makes an obvious pass at him after one writing session, but he rebuffs her.  Not only is she engaged to his friend, but he can’t extricate himself from Norma’s trap and he won’t reveal what it is he runs back to from their work sessions.  He speeds back to the mansion to find Norma’s called Betty, whose name and phone number she’s found while snooping among Joe’s things.  Joe takes the phone from Norma and invites Betty to come see how he lives, and she does, ending up confused and frightened.  Betty leaves the house and Joe packs his things to leave, to go back to his own life, but Norma pleads with him and threatens him.  He turns to leave the house and Norma shoots him in the back and he falls into the pool, setting up the scene that opened the play. 

The police arrive and are ready to storm the house to arrest Norma, but Max intervenes and coaxes her out of her room and down the stairs by making her believe that the news cameras are movie cameras and that this is all a sound stage for her movie.  Norma descends the stairs regally, decked out in her most elaborate outfit, to address the cameras and her fans.  “And now, Mr.  DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up,” Norma famously says as the police lead her off, believing she’s reclaimed her stardom.  .

Sunset Boulevard was a huge disappointment.  It’s been so oversold and Close’s performance so over-praised (Ben Brantley declared, “Ms. Close is even better than when I first saw her,” in the New York Times) that it couldn’t possibly measure up.  (I didn’t see the Broadway original, but if Brantley’s right that Close is better now than she was the first time, she never should have won a Tony in ’95!)

I copped before that I’m not a fan of Lloyd Webber’s (see my report on School of Rock, 22 September 2016).  After I saw Evita in 1981, I said I’d never pay to see another Andrew Lloyd Webber play ever again.  However, 30-some years later, I’ve bought tix for School of Rock and now Sunset Boulevard (at a pretty penny, too!), and I see nothing to make me change my mind about Lloyd Webber.  Except that I broke my vow, damn me.  (The producer-composer has four shows currently running on the Great White Way; the other two are The Phantom of the Opera, the longest-running musical on Broadway, and Cats.)  

I had reservations when Diana suggested seeing Sunset Boulevard, but I read Brantley’s review and one or two others, and they all raved about Close’s performance so much, I decided that that made it worth seeing the show, even if everything else was pale in comparison—except that didn’t happen.  The show is two hours and 40 minutes long and the tickets cost us over two C’s each.  I don’t usually regret seeing any show (Perfect Crime is an exception; see 5 February 2011), but I have to say, this was not worth that kind of money.  (What I may be most miffed at is Brantley’s review.  He can’t have been paying attention—or he’s got a thing for Close.)

Among my complaints about Lloyd Webber’s work is that his plays have no core—they’re hollow.  They don’t say anything.  (The movie had a gut, but Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musicalization eviscerated the story.)  That means they fail one of my two tests for good theater: they don’t do more than tell a story.   They may generate an emotion, but it’s momentary and empty.  Occasionally, they may inadvertently say something, but it’s something I’d call inappropriate—like the sympathy, even admiration, Evita generates for Eva Perón, a right-wing tyrant (what, a woman can’t be a tyrant?) who carried on her husband’s authoritarian policies.  School of Rock does the same sort of thing (as I wrote in my report), essentially promoting deceit and misbehavior—as long as it’s in service of rock ’n’ roll.  That’s bullshit, of course—but since it’s talented little kids doing it, that makes it acceptable.  Sunset Boulevard doesn’t have even that much point, but it does try to manipulate our emotions for no reason except to do it.

The problem is that no one in the play deserves our sympathies or concerns.  Norma Desmond’s delusional and controlling; Betty Schaeffer is less deliberately manipulative, but she still is, emotionally blackmailing Joe into working with her and then making a play for him (even though she’s engaged to his friend); and Joe basically just lets these maneuvers happen with the least resistance.  He’s a dishrag.  Where are we supposed to put our sympathies?  No one’s worthy.  Max is the closest to deserving some sympathy, but he’s not a major character—and he’s an enabler.

I suspect Lloyd Webber expects us to think of the movie.  He probably figured it can’t be helped, so he might as well let it happen.  But what I don’t expect he wants us to think about is Carol Burnett and Harvey Korman’s “Nora Desmond” sketches—and that’s what I kept flashing on.  The movie, like the musical’s supposed to be, is a melodrama, a film noir.  But “Nora Desmond” was farce and travesty, which is not what the creators of the musical should hope we’re thinking of.  Ooops!

Another complaint I have about Lloyd Webber’s musicals is that the scores are both derivative—they sound like something I’ve heard before, many times, like musical déjà vu—and repetitive—all the music sounds alike.  School of Rock avoids the second fault a little, though not the first (except the songs Lloyd Webber took from the movie), but Sunset Boulevard has both deficiencies from opening number to finale.  Even the show’s two biggest numbers, “With One Look” and “As If We Never Said Goodbye,” weren’t melodically distinguishable to my ear.

None of the performances overcomes the problems.  Michael Xavier (who’s work I don’t know—most of it’s been in the U.K.) is just like the character—gutless and uninteresting.  (Brantley of the Times called him “a lightweight,” which I think is accurate.)  I suppose it took a William Holden to make Joe Gillis a character worth following, but Xavier doesn’t come close; though Xavier is six years older than Holden was when he made the movie, Holden was a man, however tortured, but Xavier comes off as a callow boy.  He’s got a nice enough voice, though it’s hard to be sure since the songs are so unengaging.  Close is a near caricature—I wonder if her original performance was like that.  Of course, she’s now 70, playing a 50-year-old, so maybe that’s part of the problem here.  (Michael Xavier is 39, by the way.)  Her singing isn’t all that good (Brantley noted that her voice is “reedy and at times off-key,” once again, true)—again, I wonder if it was weak in ‘93, too.  She does a lot of voguing in those elaborate costumes.  (That’s one of the things that called Carol Burnett to mind.)  

Close, who was 47 when she first played Norma Desmond, also made me recall reports of Carol Channing, who performed Dolly Levi first at 42, returning to Hello, Dolly! at the age of 74, a kind of mummy made up to look like a middle-aged woman.  (Bette Midler, just nominated for a Tony for the role, is 71, but has apparently carried it off with style; see Kirk Woodward’s article “Two Greats,” posted on 3 May.)  I also remember reading in William Goldman’s The Season (his 1969 book about the Broadway season of 1967-68) a description by a fan of Marlene Dietrich who’d seen her special appearance at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre in 1967 and 1968, when she was 65 or 66:  Goldman reported his informant had said that “what she looked like was some female impersonator up there doing his Dietrich turn.”  Now, Close didn’t give anywhere near that impression, but I kept remembering that description, along with Burnett’s parody, whenever she came on stage.

None of this was helped by the fact that a gaggle of people in the audience liked to shriek after each of Close’s numbers.  (The house was full, too.)  One was a (very) young woman right behind us and when Diana finally turned around and asked her to pull it back, she said, “No.  That’s what happens.”  She evidently thought she was at a rock concert—though she wasn’t a girl; she was in her early 20’s, I’d say.

I should say a few words about the physical production.  This mounting of Sunset Boulevard was conceived as little more than a concert version, with minimal staging.  Several reviewers compared this Sunset Boulevard to the Encores! presentations at New York City Center, which isn’t far wrong—with the significant distinction that these actors aren’t carrying scripts for the dialogue scenes.  (By all accounts, the book also hasn’t been trimmed as they are for Encores!)  Instead of what amNY’s Matt Windman called the “lavish set design including Norma’s mansion and Hollywood backlots” of the ’90s original, James Noone conceived an assemblage of steel catwalks, scaffolding, and metal staircases that forms a sort of claustrophobic world—Hollywood as a kind of ominous jungle-gym.  The 40-piece orchestra (reportedly the largest on Broadway in eight decades), under the direction of Kristen Blodgette, plays beneath the rear part of the construction, the second level of which serves as Norma’s bedroom and the stairway down which she makes her frequent grand entrances comes down from the upper platform in a dogleg at stage right. 

There are video projections and representative touches to suggest elegance (a distorted chandelier over La Desmond’s foyer—Samuel L. Leiter said on the Broadway Blog that it suggested “a series of drooping teardrops”—a scaled-down model of La Desmond’s Bugatti) or the exoticism  and fantasy of the movie world (bits of set decoration left from  past productions)—the detritus of a reality which was never very real to start with.  The problem this scenic concept incurs, however, is that the large orchestra, placed on stage, plus the erector-set assemblage and the scattered set decorations leave precious little room for acting—especially when there are more than two characters on stage at one time.  The stage feels cluttered and claustrophobic, and the closeness of the orchestra on an open stage (instead of in a pit) often means that the singers can’t be heard clearly over the music.  (Even the miking didn’t help—and while we’re on that subject, let me say that I really dislike head mikes—they make everyone look like itinerant telephone receptionists.)

Mark Henderson’s noirish lighting, which generally keeps most of the set in shadow, illuminates each area as needed to isolate it and set the appropriate mood for the scene.  Tracy Christensen’s costumes evoke the period (except the movie costumes in the Paramount scenes) but are otherwise mostly unremarkable.  Close, however, had her own designer, Anthony Powell (who designed the costumes for the 1990s productions), who created outlandish outfits that look more like costumes from Norma’s movies than clothes anyone would actually wear.  The way Close swans about in them, they almost become a character in themselves—or an element in Close’s.  If the actress’s clothes and gestures seem drawn directly from the silent screen, so does her make-up, with a paste-white foundation and dark accents around the eyes and mouth that give Norma’s face the appearance of a death mask, is also clearly modeled by Dave Bova and J. Jared Janas on the techniques of the silent-movie set.  It’s all part of creating the impression that Norma not only lives in the world of the past, back in the 1920s when she was a huge celebrity, but the unreal world of the silent-film soundstage where she was queen and everything existed just for her.

As of 4 May, Show-Score based its review tally on a sampling of 74 notices, but that included both out-of-town outlets and reviews of the London performance, neither of which I customarily cover.  So I’ve used their scores and readjusted the averages for 35 notices, coming up with an overall score of 73.  The highest score in Show-Score’s survey, limited to local reviews of the Broadway production, was a single 95 (Theatre in the Now) with six 90’s; the lowest score was one 20 (New York magazine) followed by a single 25.  Positive reviews make up 71% of the total, 20% are mixed, and 9% are negative.  I’ll be surveying 30 reviews in my round-up.

In am New York, Matt Windman noted that Sunset Boulevard’s première “received mixed reviews,” but went on to assert that “the revival makes a strong case for Lloyd Webber’s music (an uneven but bold mix of sweeping romantic melodies, jazz and underscoring) and Don Black and Christopher Hampton’s book . . ., if not their prosaic lyrics.”  The star “eschews the exaggeration and all-out insanity of Gloria Swanson . . . and portrays Norma in a soft light as a wounded, vulnerable creature.” wrote the amNY reviewer, adding, “Despite some obvious vocal difficulties, Close once again gives a fully invested, psychologically revealing performance.”  Xavier “has a strapping presence and a pleasing rock tenor voice, but he gives a shallow performance that downplays Gillis’ self-loathing.” 

“Less grandiose revival, very touching Close” is Linda Winer’s “Bottom Line” in Long Island’s Newsday and the review-writer quipped, “She is big.  It’s the production that got small.”  (For those who don’t recognize it, that a paraphrase of a line from both the movie and the movical’s libretto.)  Winer described the revival as “a far less grandiose version than the extravaganza” of 1995. “In fact,” said the ND reviewer, “there is something fitting, even satisfying about this less elaborate, modest incarnation” which, “surprisingly, feels less like a hokey entertainment straining for artistic importance than did the original.”  Winer continues that the star  “is just as daring but less campy and even more touching as” Norma.  Though “more of an actress than a singer, Close has a voice that now lets us feel the hollow depth of a desperately, grotesquely, undeniably poignant woman.”  Xavier, asserted Winer, is “the first Joe Gillis I’ve seen to capture William Holden’s attractive, increasingly corrupted nonchalance of Norma’s boy toy,” but he “flirts too much with the audience when he emerges dripping from the pool.”  [In fact, he puts on a beefcake show than edges into soft porn!]  Nevertheless, Winer found that “the actor has a leading man’s charm and a voice to match.”  She concluded her assessment with the observation that the musical “still turns Wilder’s acidic movie classic about the Hollywood dream machine into a sort of theme park operetta noir.”  She ends her review by reporting that “the souvenir table sells the Norma Desmond Limited Collection of jewelry,” and noting ironically, “Like the merchandise, the show is a limited edition selling paste and glitter as treasures.  As long as we know what we’re getting, however, costume jewelry—especially packaged with the very real Glenn Close—can be fun.”

The Times’ Brantley wrote that the “pared-down revival” of Sunset Boulevard “exists almost entirely to let its star blaze to her heart’s content,” but the Timesman affirmed, “The light she casts is so dazzling, this seems an entirely sufficient reason to be.”  Of Close’s portrayal of Norma Desmond, Brantley exulted that “what was one of the great stage performances of the 20th century has been reinvented, in terms both larger and more intimate, that may well guarantee its status as one the great stage performances of this century, too.”  Indeed, he added, Close “is even better than when I first saw her—more fragile and more frightening, more seriously comic and tragic.”  Though Brantley found that the “relative minimalism” of the revival “allows us to see Norma and ‘Sunset Boulevard’ plain,” “Norma has never looked bigger,” but otherwise, the show “seems and sounds thin.”  Lloyd Webber’s score, said Brantley, “often inhabits a . . . zone of singsong insistence, with certain melody lines repeated so often you fear surgery may be necessary to have them removed from your memory” and Black and Hampton’s “lyrics have a way of turning Wilder-esque cynicism into taunting schoolyard jingles, with rhymes that land as emphatically as children on hopscotch squares.”  The ensemble is merely “serviceable” but in reality, “we’re just marking time until Norma’s back.  Whenever she makes an entrance,” Brantley declared, “the adrenaline that surges through the house is palpable.” 

Remember I said it sounded like this reviewer has a crush on Close?  These are the comments that turned my doubts about seeing this show into a decision to go:

Ms. Close deploys the declarative physical vocabulary of silent-movie acting to convey a genuine grandeur of spirit and an equally outsize force of will. . . .

The audacity of this performance is matched by its veracity.  This is grand-gesture acting of a singularly sophisticated and disciplined order, one of those rare instances in which more is truly more.

. . . . [H]er delivery, her stance, her very presence are operatic in the richest sense of the word.  I won’t even try to describe the brilliant spiderlike dance—superhuman and pathetically human—with which Ms. Close concludes the show.  You have to (and I mean have to) see it in person.

Her interpretation of the show’s one great song, “As If We Never Said Goodbye,” in which Norma visits her old studio lot, is a heart-stopper.  Watching it from its beginning (when a set worker trains a spotlight on Norma’s face) to its end (when she steps to the edge of the stage to absorb the applause like an unquenchable sponge) is to understand with all your senses the addictiveness of stardom.

“Feel the magic in the making,” sings Norma.  You can only nod your head in awe-struck agreement.

In point of fact, I felt very little of what Brantley depicted here, and neither did my companion, Diana.  When we left the theater, Diana wondered why the reviews, particularly of Glenn Close’s performance, were so strong.  I asked if she’d ever read Goldman’s The Season; she hadn’t.  (Kirk Woodward wrote an article on this book, which he called “the best book on Broadway ever written”; see “William Goldman’s The Season,” 30 April 2013.)  One of the chapters is “Critics’ Darling,” about certain actresses (critics’ darlings, insists Goldman, “are all women”) whom

critics’ love . . . .  All the time.  Critics’ darlings are always praised, overpoweringly, regardless of the caliber of their work. . . .  They are also freaks.  All of them.  All the time.  Mr. Webster says a freak is “oddly different from what is usual or normal.”  That is certainly true of the people under discussion, but I would like to push the definition a good deal further: these are people that never breathed on this or any other planet. . . .  Critics’  darlings all share this in common: extravagance of gesture.  They gesticulate; they overdo.  They are, in all ways, enormous.

If that doesn’t sound like Glenn Close, particularly as Norma Desmond, I don’t know whom it fits.

Following in the same vein (if less hyperbolically), Joe Dziemianowicz in the New York Daily News declared, “Glenn Close is ready for her close-up in ‘Sunset Boulevard’—and then some.”  Calling the play a “sumptuous, if uneven, musical,” Dziemianowicz affirmed that “Norma’s got the same turban, same neuroses and the same pipe dreams” as the movie, but that Close “goes heavy on the fragility, vulnerability and dark humor . . . .  If a few vocals are strained,” he continued, “Close commands the stage ”  Of the rendition of “As If We Never Said Goodbye,” Norma’s signature song, the Newsman asserted, “The song is beautiful.  The visual is stirring.  The 40-piece on-stage orchestra soars, as does Close.  The moment is as good as musical-theater gets.”  Director Price “has assembled a fine cast,” Dziemianowicz reports, even if  “the musical is a mixed bag with choppy tonal shifts,” which Price “can’t fix.” 

In the Wall Street Journal, Terry Teachout pronounced the Sunset Boulevard revival “unworthy of the classic picture on which it is based.”  Close’s performance, on the other hand, “is as memorable in its own way as was that of Gloria Swanson in the movie,” and “her greater age makes Norma’s plight all the more pitiable, and Ms. Close’s performance, by turns adamantine and childishly needy.”  The problem, as Teachout sees it, with musicalizing Sunset Boulevard “is that it is perfect”; “‘Sunset Boulevard’ doesn’t need songs, or anything else that it doesn’t already have in abundance.  Saving Ms. Close’s presence, to change anything at all is necessarily to diminish the film’s overwhelming effect.”  The Journalist complained that Black and Hampton’s “lyrics are sing-songy and ill-crafted,” and “that the singers are sometimes drowned out by the instrumentalists.”  In addition, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s score “softens and sentimentalizes Wilder’s brutal satire of golden-age Hollywood.”  Teachout felt that “‘Sunset Boulevard’ needs to be mounted on an operatic scale in order to be effective.  Shorn of the blank-check spectacle of Trevor Nunn’s original production, it has nothing to offer but its gooey score” which “is a tensionless mélange of recycled Rachmaninoff and ersatz jazz that never succeeds in heightening the impact of the words.”  As for the rest of the ensemble, the Journal reviewer asserted, “They’re all just fine, but when you’re sharing a stage with Glenn Close, good enough isn’t good enough.”

For the Star-Ledger of Newark, New Jersey, Christopher Kelly, calling the production “ravishingly beautiful,” characterized Sunset Boulevard as “one of those shows that sends audiences into ecstatic fits of applause, more for the idea of what they’re watching than the actual experience of watching it.”  The review-writer contended, “Director Lonny Price and his lead actress seem determined to force you out of the moment, overloading the production with so many ‘Major Theatrical Event’ moments and signposts that it all starts to sag beneath the weight of its own self-importance.”  Kelly added, “Methinks this musical . . . would have been better served by a little more humility and a lot more humanity.”  He complained that “none of the show's ideas—about the cruelty of aging, or the desperation that results from failure—have been allowed to breathe in this version.”  Of the central performance, Kelly affirmed, “Instead of resisting the camp and Gothic elements of Gloria Swanson's Norma . . . Close fully embraces them.”  (He dubbed Xavier “the best thing about this revival.”)  Kelly’s final remarks are telling:

I’m just not sure why the producers went to such bother.  Lloyd Webber’s score is less brash, more elegantly poignant than his other work—but it’s hardly at the level of, say, Bernstein’s “West Side Story” or Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “South Pacific,” in terms of demanding this near-symphonic treatment.  And—unlike most actors returning to iconic parts—Close seems less interested in discovering new nuances in her character than going full-blown, epic-scale diva on us and soaking up the adulation during her multiple curtain calls.

Robert Feldberg, writing for the Record of suburban Bergen County, New Jersey, quipping, “There hasn’t been such diva devotion at the Palace since the last time Liza Minnelli played the theater,” reported that “the roar of the audience at [Close’s] first entrance suggested that whatever else it might be, the evening would be a celebration of the 69-year-old actress.”  Feldberg added that the actress “fully earns her acclaim with her first big number, a fiercely delivered ‘With One Look,’ Norma’s remembrance of her silent-screen days, made more emotional by the rough edges of Close’s singing voice.”  He reported that “taken as a whole, it’s an assured, commanding performance,” even if occasionally she “skirts the edge of parody.”  In general, the play’s “been given a dynamic, imaginatively rethought presentation” by director Price, and calling the large orchectra “the other star of the evening,” lavished praise on “Lloyd Webber’s sweeping, romantic score.”  Feldberg does cavil, though, that the Black-Hampton book is “pedestrian,” but he concluded, “Close’s panache and Lloyd Webber’s music are more than enough to carry the evening.”

Jason Fitzgerald of the Village Voice declared, “I'm willing to bet there isn't a more heart-shattering five minutes on Broadway today than Glenn Close in Sunset Boulevard playing faded film star Norma Desmond as she takes in what she believes to be her return to Hollywood.”  Close is “a capable but not impressive singer . . ., but few actors can so commit to a character's monomania.”  Fitzgerald, though,  found, “It's a shame the production reaches this height only once.”  The star is “overly mannered,” but she’s “captivating whenever and wherever she is onstage—to the detriment of co-star Xavier, who sings well but lacks any degree of Close's presence.”  The Voice reviewer concluded that the production “is at times suffocating, but there are also moments that scorch like film caught in a projector.”

The New York Observer’s Rex Reed described Price’s revival of the Lloyd Webber movical as “trimmed, scaled down and economically revitalized” with “the old opulence stripped of its glamour.”  It’s “clear . . . who owns the stage,” but the supporting cast, imported from London, never quite “achieves the power, irony or caustic vision of Old Hollywood make believe” of the Wilder film, affirmed Reed.  “The applause for every song is polite, but when [Close] belts them out, she stops the show cold.”  Observed the Observer, “Her experience, knowledge and craft prove that Sunset Boulevard is an old warhorse that can still finish the race in first place.”

In New York magazine (the review with Show-Score’s lowest rating, 20 out of 100), Jesse Green called the current production “a train wreck of a revival” in which “very little happen[s] outside its central quartet of characters.”  What in the movie was Joe’s narrations, Green noted, “are rendered in Lloyd Webber’s score as unrelieved arioso” with “poorly scanned lyrics.”  He contended, “Lloyd Webber and his collaborators . . . have made choices that seem deliberately designed to coarsen the tone and invert Wilder’s point.”  He pointed out that “Wilder conceived of Desmond as a warning, not a role model”: in Lloyd Webber’s vision, “her ‘philosophy,’ if you can call it that. ‘We gave the world new ways to dream,’ she sings over and over, turning a delusional watchcry into a message.  ‘Everyone needs new ways to dream.’  Wilder was being ironic,” avowed Green; “did no one notice?”  (Not only that, but Norma actually wants to return audiences to an old way to dream.  It’s a mendacious philosophy: she, herself has been dreaming the same dream for 20 years!)  The man from New York reported that Close’s “second outing as Norma is no triumph.”

Leave aside that she cannot sing the role, if she ever could.  Her head voice is now pitchy and hooty; her chest voice raw and unregulated. . . .  Great acting was meant to compensate, but her new interpretation of Norma—a mite more playful and less otherworldly—actually makes things worse.  The climactic final scenes in which she goes completely bonkers seem underprepared, and her insanity thus laughable instead of pitiable.  To say that it’s a real Norma Desmond of a performance is not to say it’s good.  It’s just big.

“Nothing else (save that luxury orchestra) is,” Green added.  Xavier “comes off as a juvenile: lighthearted, squeaky clean, and impressively pneumatic”; the other featured actors “make little impression.”  In the end, Green declared that “it will be difficult to forget or forgive the reverse alchemy the authors have achieved.”  As a parting shot, he advised, “I encourage anyone who’s interested in the material to stick with the movie.”  (So do I.)

After a disquisition on drag performances in today’s culture and theater, Hilton Als specified in the New Yorker, “Glenn Close is an actual woman, but Norma Desmond . . . is a construct composed, sometimes deliberately, sometimes not, from drag, or drag impulses.”  Admitting that he never “warmed to the musical,” Als went on, “Webber doesn’t write music that one can sing without ‘soaring,’ and Close does what’s required to put the song over, while the orchestra does the rest”—and the rest of the main cast belts “handily” as well,” though you have to keep reminding yourself what they’re singing about with such urgency,” the New Yorker review-writer reminded us, quipping, “In any case, the audience is more interested in the musical’s camp factor than in the seriousness of the score, if it has any.”  (This notice received a negative Show-Score rating of 40, by the way.  It’s interesting—at least to me—to note that Als also thought about “Carol Burnett’s classic spoof” of La Desmond.)  Als gave this overall assessment of the play:

its atmosphere is at once messy and banal; its relentless pop façade and the constant drama of its music preclude intimacy and distance us from feeling, while encouraging a kind of aggressive contempt.  None of the characters are truly big, let alone human, even as they play big. 

He asserted that “the only instance of heart in the show” is the scene in which Norma phones Betty out of jealousy and anger, “and Close plays it to the hilt, but not hysterically, because she has something to hold on to as an actress, a reprieve from the endless mugging and grandstanding.”   

                                             

Leah Greenblatt of Entertainment Weekly reported that director Price “does indulge in a few witty visual flourishes” in the Sunset Boulevard revival; however, “there’s only one true star allowed on these boards, and her name is Norma.“  Greenblatt wrote that “even as [Close] plays [Norma] for laughs, she digs for the pathos too.”  The EW reviewer declared that Close’s “masterful portrayal also delivers the one thing poor nutty Norma most craves: An adoring, utterly captivated audience, and applause that echoes long after the curtain falls.”  In  the Hollywood Reporter, Frank Scheck found that in the revival, “Close delivers a more subtle, nuanced performance well suited to a production dramatically scaled down from the original.”  The HR review-writer reported, “The lush orchestrations do ample justice to the beauty of Lloyd Webber’s score” and found that the Hampton-Black libretto “is largely faithful to the film, although its lack of nuance sometimes gives the musical an excessively campy feel that thankfully is now lessened.”  Close “reveals some vocal strain in the soaring numbers,” he felt.  “But she nonetheless puts them over in stirring fashion, using her impeccable dramatic skill”; “her Norma seems more fragile, more vulnerable.”  With praise for the three other principal actors, Scheck affirmed that the director “does an effective job” depite “some touches” such as the low-tech car chase and the floating body mannequin, which the reviewer found “slightly cheesy.”  In the end, though, Scheck asserted that it’s the return of Close that’s “this revival’s reason for being.”

In Variety, Marilyn Stasio pronounced Close’s return as Norma “triumphant”; “she’s positively regal,” claiming “diva status this time around,” added the reviewer.  Stasio labeled the music “luscious” and “romantically melodic,” but the lyrics “clunky” and the choreography’s “feeble.”  Of the other main characters, Johanson’s Max is “genuinely moving—if deeply creepy,” but Stasio dubs Xavier “pallid.” She sums up by stating that “if you want to see grown men weeping in the aisles, this is your moment.”  Time Out New York’s Adam Feldman declared, “Those who go to see Close reprise her celebrated turn . . . will not be disappointed,” though he saw “a risk of Norma-like pathos in the prospect of the actress, now nearly 70, returning to a role she played more than 20 years ago.”  The reviewer assured us, “Close holds the stage with a feverish intensity that transcends camp.”  He reported, however, that “the rest of Sunset Boulevard . . . is mostly a languorous slog.”  Calling the show “second-rate Lloyd Webber,” he complained of “filler songs that loop and repeat exhaustingly, set to lyrics that often clunk.” 

The broadcast media were mostly in the same vein.  On WFUV, Fordham University’s public radio station, John Platt confessed that, like me, he’s “not a huge fan of Andrew Lloyd Webber.”  Aside from a couple of songs in Sunset Boulevard (“As If We Said Goodbye” and “With One Look”), “I’m afraid . . . there’s nothing very memorable.”  Close milks [“As If”] for all it’s worth, and the audience responds, as expected, with an ovation,” reported Platt, explaining, “She’s fills it with grand gestures, appropriate for a delusional diva, but her voice is surprisingly thin.”  The Fordham reviewer affirmed, “She commits herself completely to the role, unafraid to appear grotesque, but it all seems stylized, like Japanese Noh theater.  In the end, I admired her craft yet left unmoved.”  As for Price’s stripped-down production, “What you get is something streamlined, in contrast to Close’s over-the-top performance.”  On NY1, the all-news channel for Spectrum cable subscribers, Roma Torre dubbed Close’s Norma Desmond “a bonafide, pull-out-the-stops star performance” and declared that the production is “guaranteed to make you surrender!” (the exclamation point is Torre’s).  The NY1 reviewer reported that Close’s “voice is huskier now, but every bit as powerful as the first time she sang those glorious notes” and that the orchestra “sounds so gorgeously lush, your ears will bow down in gratitude.”  Torre continued, “The minimalist staging allows for a sharper focus.  And what always struck me as a grotesque characterization of a woman on the verge of madness is now more nuanced and emotionally engaging.”  She acknowledged that “so much of the show’s success is owed to Close’s performance, which has truly deepened since her first outing,” but added that the other principals “are equally winning.”  Torre concluded by proclaiming, “Glenn Close is delivering one of those "must see" performances that come around every decade or so.” 

On WNYC radio, Jennifer Vanasco lamented that Price’s minimalist production “only emphasizes the repetitive music and the leaden book and lyrics.”  The “bright spot,” Venasco asserted, is Close’s performance, even though she’s “certainly not a vocal powerhouse”—“but she’s a precise actor, and . . . emphasizes” Norma’s fear and desperation.  “[A]side from the enormous orchestra,” Robert Kahn said on WNBC, the network’s television outlet in New York City, “there’s little here to distract from Close’s mesmerizing Norma, or Lloyd Webber’s pop friendly score.”  Asserted Kahn, “Close’s Desmond, alive in her own alternate reality, is both candescent and incisive.”  For the actress, Kahn insisted that “this can only be deemed a triumphant return.”  He praised the rest of the cast as well, and observed that “Price . . . .  keeps the camp factor set to ‘stun.’” 

Elyse Sommer on CurtainUp unabashedly declared of Close’s performance, “If they gave out Tonys for reprising a previously played part, she’d be a front runner.”  Sommer asserted that the “orchestra never drowns out the singers” (which both Diana and I found not to be the case, and most other reviewers reported this as well), and explained, “This is especially important vis-a-vis Close who’s always relied on her acting virtuosity to deliver the songs.  Her nuanced acting more than a big belting voice serves her well to this day.”  She also wrote that this is Lloyd Webber’s “best and richest score,” with “several show-stoppers.”  Nonetheless, “All this is not to say that [Sunset Boulevard] doesn’t make for a story that’s overly melodramatic, incredible and old-fashioned.”  On Stage Buddy, Jose Solis reported that the cut-down production “restores the essence of the story” of the film while Close “easily morphs into whatever the situation calls for”; “she is able to communicate a myriad of emotions without the aid of closeups, her singing . . .[,] her body language, and the larger than life expressions force us to zoom into her, as if we almost didn’t have a choice.”  

Michael Bracken of Theater Pizzazz quipped, “There are two reasons to see the current Broadway revival of Sunset Boulevard: Glenn Close and Glenn Close’s costumes.”  (The TP reviewer demurred briefly: “While there’s more to Sunset Boulevard than Glenn Close and her costumes, there’s not, nor does there need to be, a whole lot more.”)  Bracken declared, “Close is iconic,” contending, “Norma is a caricature of herself, and Close plays her to the rafters, but at the same time makes her frighteningly real.”  The review-writer acknowledged, “The score is not Lloyd Webber’s best,” and Close’s “singing voice may flatten occasionally, very occasionally, on a high note, but her presence, and oh what a presence, never fails to mesmerize.”  On New York Theater, Jonathan Mandell had a very serious issue with Lloyd Webber’s adaptation of the Wilder movie, “what I consider a fatal flaw”:

In the movie, Norma Desmond is delusional.  But the Lloyd Webber musical shares much of her delusion.  Rather than the film’s grim and ironic satire of Hollywood, the stage “Sunset Boulevard” is really an homage to (and embodiment of) big, empty commercial entertainment.

In contrast to many of his critical colleagues, Mandell disparaged the musical ensemble to some degree: “The large orchestra certainly makes Lloyd Webber’s score sound better than it would have if played by 40 kazoos, but, as tuneful as some of it is, all the violins in the world can’t turn it into Puccini.”  His conclusion?  “‘Sunset Boulevard’ is ersatz opera of the outsized and mostly overwrought kind that Broadway audiences have been eating up, on and off, since the 1980s.”

On the Broadway Blog, Samuel L. Leiter (who usually reviews for his own Theatre’s Leiter Side) reported that Close gives “a fine, if overripe, performance” in a show that “is, while generally entertaining, simply not that great.”  Though “well-performed,” the Lloyd Webber score “is not particularly memorable”; the “huge” orchestra “makes even the more mediocre numbers sound their best.”  The physical production is “visually sumptuous,” but while the film was “darkly cynical,” Price’s stage revival, “in a fatal mistake, fails to capture the darkness, being surprisingly upbeat, paced at machine-gun speed, and with only scattered moments of the needed gothic anxiety demanded by the story.”  Close’s “pitchy singing voice is not Broadway’s best, but her acting is strong enough, even within the deliberately broad, almost grotesque, theatricality she adopts . . . to jerk tears when she launches into ‘With One Look,’” Leiter felt.  “But the emphasis on her exaggerations takes the show too far from its deeper implications.”  The reviewer concluded, “This revival of Sunset Boulevard is smart to have pared down its visual excesses.  The darkness it evokes, though, is more in its lighting than in the world it creates.  Which is not so smart.”

Matthew Murray reported on Talkin’ Broadway that through Close’s performance of Norma Desmond, “a union of theatrical inevitability” that happens “so arrestingly and so frequently, . . . you’ll be transported to a world and psychology that are once terrifying, rapturous, and seemingly impossible.”  Murray found, “Before long, the ‘real world’ . . . comes to be as incorporeal to you as it is to her.  There's only one way to see things. Norma’s way.”  He explained, “Instinctively, you know that Norma is descending more into madness with each passing scene, but when it’s this reasonable, you don’t notice until it’s too late.”  (Actually, no, I didn’t fall for that parallel delusion.  Maybe I couldn’t suspend my disbelief willingly enough.)  “It doesn’t matter for a millisecond that Close, who was never a spectacular singer, has a more ragged edge to her vocals than she used to,” argued the TB review-writer, “or that there’s a wider gap between her head and chest voices than once was the case.”  (Yes, it does.)  “This is everything a Broadway musical performance is supposed to be, and then some.”  (No, it isn’t.  And I’ve seen Mary Martin, Julie Andrews, Virginia Capers, Chita Rivera, Gwen Verdon, Pat Suzuki, and Bernadette Peters on stage—so I know musical theater the way it’s supposed to be.)  Then Murray wondered, “Whether Sunset Boulevard is everything a musical is supposed to be is another matter.”  He admitted that Sunset Boulevard “plays very well,” but “it doesn’t add much to its source,” Wilder’s “edgier and brighter, and more incisive” movie.  The TB reviewer felt that Price’s “attempts at taming this beast are valiant and largely successful.”  He finished by admonishing, “Not that you’ll worry about that—or anything else—when Close is around.”  (It ain’t necessarily so!)

On Theater Scene, Darryl Reilly declared, “Glenn Close triumphs again in this inventively scaled down and hugely entertaining revival of” Sunset Boulevard in which “Close is still sleek, fearless and riveting.”  Reilly found, “Her singing of the modern standard show tunes . . . is sensational.  There is occasional wavering in her top register that is understandable with the passage of time, but that never deters from her stunning characterization” as she “fuses her own stardom with that of the character.”  He labeled the star’s portrayal “one of those monumental performances of musical theater history.”  The TS reviewer had high praise for Xavier, calling him “youthful but mature and charismatic” and :”just as hard-edged as William Holden” (not a chance!).  Reilly also judged, “Most crucially, Xavier is an equal to Close and their chemistry is prevalent” (nope).  He lauded the other principal players as well, and said Price “has strikingly reclaimed the material from memories of its initial, overblown incarnation.” 

Stan Friedman’s review on New York Theatre Guide applauded Price’s “clever direction” of the revival, but proclaimed Close “is smaller than life.”  Among the harshest criticism of the actress among the Sunset Boulevard notices, Friedman’s said:

She might think of herself as huge, but her many costumes (beautiful and crazy, as designed by Tracy Christensen [actually, Close’s costumes were by Anthony Powell]) overwhelm her, as does the towering proscenium of the ornate Palace Theater.  With her petite, 5’5” frame, Ms. Close waddles more than she struts.  Her Norma is not a crazed monster, she’s a wilted Blanche DuBois bereft of the kindness of strangers.

Friedman had praise for Johanson’s Max and the actress who usually plays Betty, but called Xavier “the show’s weakest link . . ., lacking the necessary stage presence.” 

On NY Theatre Guide (not to be confused with New York Theatre Guide, above), Marc Miller deemed that the current Sunset Boulevard revival “isn’t as grand as the venue or as lavish as the 1994 original,” finding that it “rises and falls more than ever on the strengths of the material.”  Miller found, “The material, it turns out, is pretty sturdy,” especially “with a more seasoned Glenn Close bringing new nuance to her interpretation of Norma.”  Lloyd Webber “really did himself proud with this one. Whatever you think of the rest of his oeuvre, this score pours out the melody,” wrote Miller, and Close “plays these big moments, and all of Norma’s many others, with an intelligence and imagination rare among divas.”  Xavier, however, is a “cipher, though a handsome one, with solid high notes.”  He also doesn’t have much complimentary to say about the other supporting actors, perhaps because, the NY Theatre Guide writer felt, Price “is so focused on Norma, he doesn’t seem to be paying much attention to anyone else up there.”  Miller concluded, “In an era where so many new musicals seem to want to tell stories of life-size people . . .[,] it’s a treat to have such an outsize personality, backed by that outsize orchestra, dominating the Palace.”

“Anyone lucky enough to see Glenn Close as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard . . . will have bragging rights for the rest of their lives,” proclaimed TheaterMania’s David Gordon.  Gordon had quibbles, though, including Stephen Mear’s choreography “with little pizzazz” and actors who “use highly expressive, broad gestures that never really mesh with the witty cynicism of” the lyrics.  He also complained of Price’s “discombobulating staging, which often features his actors running up and down the [M.  C.] Escher stairs to nowhere.”  Still, the TM reviewer affirmed, “All bets are off when Close hits the stage.”  In Gordon’s view, “Close simply plays Norma as a person, albeit a larger-than-life one.”  Though “her singing voice occasionally falters,. . . Close provides a master class in song delivery.”  In all, Gordon believes, “We’re privileged to witness theater history in the making.”  On Broadway World, Michael Dale asserted that “watching Glenn Close completely enthrall and mesmerize an audience . . . is a reminder that musical theatre is at its most thrilling when musical moments are enhanced by incisive acting.”  Dale was complimentary about Lloyd Webber’s music, but he complained that Black and Hampton’s lyrics “rarely rise above perfunctory images and rhyming, getting downright clunky during some of the dialogue-driven recitative.”  The BWW reviewer had good things to say about the supporting cast, but in the end, Close “is the reason to rush to the Palace these days.”  He concluded that “her intelligent and skillful performance is luminous.”

[In addition to her query about Close’s reviews, Diana also asked on whom Norma Desmond was modeled, so I looked it up to see what the common wisdom is.  The character’s believed to be a composite of silent-film stars Mary Pickford (1893-1979), who lived as a recluse after her retirement from movies, and  Mae Murray (1885-1965) and Clara Bow (1905-1965), both of whom struggled with mental illness.  The name of the character is presumed to be a pastiche of actresses Norma Talmadge (1894-1957) and Mabel Normand (1892-1930), and director William Desmond Taylor (1872-1922).  (Taylor was the victim of a famous and mysterious Hollywood murder.  He was found shot in the back in his bungalow but no suspect was ever identified and the crime is still unsolved.)]