Gil Hates Everything

Andrew Lloyd Webber, never one to shy from a challenge, here takes on the task of musicalising the famous and critically-acclaimed 1950 Billy Wilder movie – the one which equally famously starts with a voiceover nominally spoken by that guy floating face-down in the pool.

The story is of a wealthy but ghastly former silent-movie actress who wants her self-starring screenplay produced, and ensnares a young and greedy writer to help her; he becomes her kept man, until he finds out that the studio is only interested in her vintage car, not in her… and in the end he makes the mistake of telling her the truth, about the studio’s and his view of her, and she shoots him dead. Along the way he has an affair with another writer, and generally tries to keep his head above water in the shark-eat-shark world of 1940s Hollywood. At the time it was considered a sharp and stunning movie, and remains pretty sharp… I prefer 1951’s “Ace In The Hole”, but Billy Wilder movies are mostly pretty watchable.

As with any adaptation, the question arises: what does the new format add to the experience? Here, the answer is: an unbelievable amount of music, and pretty much nothing else.

The soundtrack seems pretty complete – which I do appreciate in principle, although I also appreciate that historically, many musical soundtracks have been unlikely to find an audience sizeable enough to justify the two-CD package they often need. Hopefully that’ll change as we move to online recordings where exceeding the magic 80 minute limit doesn’t suddenly boost the cost of manufacture and distribution.

But is it worth it? In this case, oh my god, no it isn’t. You have never heard such a literal, direct, uninventive musical as this. Sure, ALW produces two hours of music, but with all that length it lacks any kind of breadth. I do admire him for the simple audacity of his approach, which is to literally set the entire story to music. That’s what happens: there is music playing, and everyone sings everything. There are so many ‘musical scenes’ that when you get a song you’re relieved; I’d say there’s only actually ten or twelve actual songs out of thirty-two tracks. But for 95% of the time there’s no poetry, no subtlety, nothing going on under the surface.

The voices on the cast recording are a bit of a hoot. Between Glenn Close as the aging star and whoever’s playing Max her one-time husband and now manservant you could be forgiven for thinking you’re listening to an episode of The Munsters. On the other hand, Alan Campbell as the writer has a pretty good voice, with the same Hollywood sound as the lead from “City Of Angels”, and he carries off the show’s hit, the title track, with considerable force. I’m now totally convinced that ALW only effects one strong idea in each of his shows, and sometimes – as in Starlight Express – it’s not even one of the songs, but “Sunset Boulevard” the song is a winner, with a self-lacerating lyric set in a pleasingly skew-whiff 5/4 which maintains the power throughout, even if we’ve gotten the point a ways before it ends.

Sadly that track’s out on its own; Don Black’s work as lyricist is pretty weak elsewhere. This is not a huge surprise, given what else I’ve heard of his work (e.g. “Off The Wall”). The only other faint attraction in the score is “With One Look”, where there’s some power and a certain irony – one hopes deliberate but who can tell around here – to the star’s complaining (at great length) that in her day she didn’t need words, she had her face. However, “As If We Never Said Goodbye” is a fine example of the ambient problem: I’ve had to sing this song, and its lyrics were difficult to remember because there’s no structure to them; they just reiterate the point in about six vaguely different ways, while the music repeats the same dull short tune like slow techno music played on violins. You get either no story or entirely too fucking much story in each track here; no inbetweens.

I’m struggling to think of another show that’s this glossily shallow, but I’ve got nothing. I boggle that people can have spent this much money creating and decorating a work which sets a perfectly reasonable movie to music without bothering to check whether that was a useful thing to do. Last week’s “Summer Of ’42” could be charged with the same crime, but it’s a smaller-scale story, it’s not so damn smug about itself, it radiates the sense of having been done on the right kind of budget, and it’s effective, it has heart. It’s all about the tone. “Sunset Boulevard” seems boundlessly pleased with itself for being so large and epiiiiiic, as if being sung-through justifies all else. But what it radiates in the end is a total lack of soul; it’s hollow, hollow, hollow, as hollow as a huge empty singing ringing tree. Where “Phantom” was a romp touched with enjoyable insanity, this show doesn’t even manage to conjure the faintest spirit of the original movie’s enthusiastic unlikeability. It’s just long, boring, and pointless. Get the DVD… just not of the musical.

Random Panda awards this show two out of ten pieces of bamboo, and that’s for the title track. Sorry, ALW avids ;-)

(originally posted 2009)