Sunset Boulevard

As many of you might recall, Billy Wilder’s Hollywood classic Sunset Boulevard tells the tragic tale of a crazy, faded silent-movie star who imagines she can make a final comeback. Art isn’t quite imitating life in this ‘semi-staged’ revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical of the film, but there’s something irresistibly perfect about the great movie star Glenn Close – 23 years after playing the part in Los Angeles in the original staging – returning to the role of the Hollywood star who has lost the plot.

Of course, Close is anything but faded. A radiant 69 years old, she’s ripe for the part of the dangerously deluded and yet bewitching Norma Desmond. Dressed like Cleopatra, in costumes of spun gold, dripping with crystals, a glamorous, glimmering Close exudes an imperious power and intensity. Which explains why the screenwriter, Joe Gillis (dropdead- gorgeous Michael Xavier), who appears on her doorstep, fleeing from debt collectors and offered the chance to help her write a screenplay putting her back in the big-screen picture, becomes first enthralled and then ensnared as her toy-boy lover.

Jealous that she might not be the only one (she isn’t – Siobhan Dillon’s stunning Betty Schaefer, another aspiring screenwriter, is hot competition), Desmond attempts suicide. The interval curtain falls with her bandaged hands pulling him down on top of her.

If those words ‘semi-staged’ make your heart sink, worry not. Director Lonny Price has a fabulous cast digging more than usually deep beneath the skins of their characters. Moreover, Lloyd Webber’s lushly romantic belter of a score gets the glorious operatic grandeur it deserves from the English National Opera’s 48-strong orchestra.

Indeed, the semi-staging works powerfully in the show’s favour, making proper demands on the audience’s imagination. The cars slinking down the dark boulevards are suggested by actors holding headlamps. The ghostly figure of an exquisitely sexy young Norma Desmond appears from the shadows, a ghostly reminder of the woman she was, and tormenting the waistless, wasted, wrinkled woman she has become.

Sturdy staircases perfectly support a piece depending on dramatic highs and lows, extravagant entrances and humiliating exits. One deftly conjures Norma Desmond’s mansion on Sunset Boulevard to which she has retreated, her delusions sustained by Fred Johanson’s magnificent baritone butler, Max, and his endless supply of fabricated fan mail.

A more functional set of steps suggests the ladder to success at Paramount Studios, on which choreographer Stephen Mear has thrusting young actors, writers and producers racing up and down, singing, ‘Let’s have lunch, we should talk, I’ve godda run.’ Price creates a boulevard of broken dreams, right up my theatrical street.

Until 7 May at the London Coliseum, St Martin’s Lane, London WC2: 020-7845 9300, www.eno.org