Word: lloyds
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AUTHORS: MUSIC BY ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER; BOOK AND LYRICS BY DON BLACK AND CHRISTOPHER HAMPTON...
...stalking the ornate staircase of her pseudo palazzo in murderous rage. The juxtaposition is a miracle of stagecraft -- the weighty rococo mansion thrusts up and over the partygoers with noiseless ease -- and is also the signature moment of London's most anticipated theatrical event this year. In Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical adaptation, the movie classic Sunset Boulevard has much the same theme as his greatest hit, The Phantom of the Opera. Normal life is lived in company, the two shows say, but great passion demands an almost secluded privacy. If leaving reality for fantasy is demented...
...Lloyd Webber's goal in recent years has been to bridge the gap between the musical and the opera, reclaiming the latter as a popular rather than elite form. An operatic reading does no disservice to Billy Wilder's film noir, which has been preserved more than adapted. The climax, when the fallen star Norma Desmond shoots her lover and he tumbles into a swimming pool, has opera's larger-than-life emotion. So does the denouement, as she lapses into madness and announces, to a Cecil B. DeMille visible only to her, that she is ready for her close...
...Even so, Lloyd Webber's creation is probably better than the ponderous London performance. Director Trevor Nunn excels at narrative clarity, which is present in the original, but not at nuancing characters, which is sorely needed with such miscast stars. As Norma, renowned for delicate beauty, Patti LuPone is too tempestuous, too earthy and too coarse of feature, especially her aardvark nose. As her lover, Kevin Anderson looks pudding-faced and pudgy, so long gone to seed that the supposedly vast age difference disappears -- until the finale, when LuPone inexplicably appears 20 years older than she was moments before. While...
...last year since 1983, according to an annual study by the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research. In the rave clubs of Los Angeles, $2 to $5 buys a teenager a 10-to-12-hour LSD high. "LSD may be a prime example of generational forgetting," says Lloyd Johnston, principal investigator for the study. "Today's youngsters don't hear what an earlier generation heard -- that LSD may cause bad trips, flashbacks, schizophrenia, brain damage, chromosomal damage...