Word: sunsetting
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...SHOWS HAVE ARRIVED ON Broadway hauling as much excess baggage as Sunset Boulevard, the Andrew Lloyd Webber megamusical based on the Billy Wilder film that opened last week. Having already conquered London and Los Angeles, Sunset has generated enormous expectations -- reflected in a record advance sale of $38 million. There's been backstage drama aplenty, as the mercurial composer sacked not one but two leading ladies, and snubbed New York by opening the $13 million American production in Los Angeles last year. No doubt, legions of Lloyd Webber haters would love to see the infuriatingly successful British interloper have another...
...radiant Sunset may not be Lloyd Webber's best score, but it is his most seamlessly and artfully constructed. There is a resemblance between this show and The Phantom of the Opera -- reclusive mad protagonist conceives passion for young member of opposite sex -- but that is merely plot. Musically, Sunset's real forebear is Evita. The angular, chromatic recitatives for Norma explicitly recall Eva Peron's egocentric ravings. If the music of the new show lacks Aspects' delicious subtleties and Phantom's gothic flamboyance, it still offers two of Lloyd Webber's best songs in With One Look...
...theatre after another, reprising Wilder's opening with the newly deceased hero (Alan Campbell as Joe Gillis) facedown in a swimming pool, and working up to a levitating mansion. This larger-than-larger-than-life approach ; doomed the gentle Aspects, but it suits the more histrionic material of Sunset. Some of the lyrics, though, have got to go. To have Joe sing that L.A. has changed a lot "since those brave gold rush pioneers/ Came in their creaky covered wagons" is ridiculous. L.A. barely existed in 1849; the gold rush took place 400 miles to the north; and the prospectors...
...week after failing to sell her body, Christine tried again. She walked up and down Sunset Strip for four hours without getting a single offer. "I was wearing jeans, which were dirty, and I was carrying my backpack, so I guess I didn't look right," she says. Down to her last $7, she bought a doughnut for dinner and spent the night on a park bench. Unable to afford even a cheap miniskirt, she sat down in an alley and pulled out her spare blue jeans. After carefully marking off a line just below the crotch...
Afternoons are spent panhandling the tourists, especially around Mann's Chinese Theater and the Walk of Fame. When night falls, the tourists disappear and the city becomes hell's Disneyland. Hollywood Boulevard is popular for hanging out, usually at the corner of Cherokee, while Sunset Strip features straight prostitution and Santa Monica Boulevard specializes in the gay sex trade. Abandoned buildings serve as "squats," the makeshift homes inhabited by as many as several dozen youths. Entombed by the thick plywood nailed to the windows and doors, the youths live with drugs, rats and human waste...