Review: With One Look, You Might Love Showtunes’ Concert Staging Of “Sunset Boulevard

Sunset Boulevard
Showtunes Theatre Company
(at Cornish Playhouse)
Through February 11, 2024

Below, you’ll see that I was intrigued enough about the musical that I did some Wikipedia-ing about both the movie, Sunset Boulevard, and the musical’s history. But I first want to encourage you to hurry and get tickets for the last two performances of this concert before you lose this unique opportunity!

Showtunes Theatre Company, if you have not had the immense pleasure of attending their concerts, yet, allows us to see top-level local musical theater performers tackle musicals that may well never have “full” productions in Seattle. They perform “concerts” where there is no set, not much significant costuming or lights, and the performers generally use scripts-in-hand, so the audience has to bring a lot of imagination along.

However, in recent years, the concerts have gotten more and more complex, with choreography, a few key costumes, and fewer music stands between the audience and performers. This concert is more technically sophisticated than most concerts I’ve seen! There are absolutely gorgeous costumes for Norma’s glamourous lifestyle (by Chelsea Cook), and some crucial projections (by Jake Burleigh) that provide the old-timey feel of vintage motion pictures.

Then there is a 20-person on-stage orchestra led by artistic director Nathan Young! That means that the musician-ship, the lush sound of the score, couldn’t be better at a large theater with a full production! The atmosphere and quality of the production is top-notch!

The ensemble of performers is superb! Glorious Billie Wildrick plays Norma Desmond and trembles with silent-screen-star emotions. She nails every big number, expressing (sometimes crazy) feelings with conviction. Matthew Kacergis, as Joe Gillis, has great vocal range and power and whose down-at-heart screenwriter is by turns driven and defeated. Jeff Church, as Max the taciturn butler, has a beautiful bass voice. Karin Terry, as Betty Schaefer, the 22 year old (!) literary assistant determined to write a movie, enchants. The rest of the cast is full of huge talents, as well.

Kelly Kitchens directs what feels like a full-on production. The cast swirls around the stage (books in hand that you forget are there), Wildrick has multiple costume changes (!), and creates wonder out of what is known as a “29 Hour” show – one that is rehearsed per the union contract for only 29 hours before opening.
 
The Movie
The 1950 movie, Sunset Boulevard, is considered one of Billy Wilder’s most celebrated movies of all time. While there never was a real silent screen actor named Norma Desmond, Wilder heard a lot of lore about silent screen stars and their sudden halt to their earning capacity when the “talkies” began. I feel certain that some developed intense mental health issues from being famous to being forgotten.

Per Wikipedia, “The most common analysis of the character’s name is that it is a combination of the names of silent film actress Mabel Normand and director William Desmond Taylor, a close friend of Normand’s who was murdered in 1922 in a never-solved case sensationalized by the press.”
 
The Musical
There was a lot of run-up regarding who was going to adapt the movie to a musical. Several people and several iterations preceded the April 1994 Broadway three-week opening, but even then it got rewritten. The creators are listed as music Andrew Lloyd Webber, lyrics by Don Black & Christopher Hampton, and book by Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder & D. M. Marshman Jr.
 
Webber had already written Phantom of the Opera (and Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita and Cats and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat). Many of his musicals already had a sort of signature where a main motif or several motifs replayed with different lyrics throughout a musical. Sunset Boulevard is very similar. There are around five melodies that keep swirling back over again until they become very familiar.
 
Personally, this “signature” is very much why I am not a huge Webber fan, but he definitely has been able to write power ballads for musicals that are singable outside the confines of a musical, and I honor that about his work. I am very happy that Seattle had this opportunity to hear the musical the lush way it should sound, and I hope you are, too.

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