STAND BY YOUR MIEN
"SUNSET BLVD.," ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER, AND THE EVER-NEARNESS OF THE KNOWING NARRATIVE THAT DOES NOT REALLY KNOW US
(Above: Arthur Schopenhauer. Daguerreotype. 1852. From his The World as Will and Representation, Volume One: “It is therefore worth noting, and indeed wonderful to see, how man, besides his life in the concrete, always lives a second life in the abstract. In the former he is abandoned to all the storms of reality and to the influence of the present; he must struggle, suffer, and die like the animal. But his life in the abstract, as it stands before his rational consciousness, is the calm reflection of his life in the concrete, and of the world in which he lives; it is precisely that reduced chart or plan previously mentioned. Here in the sphere of calm deliberation, what previously possessed him completely and moved him intensely appears to him cold, colourless, and, for the moment, foreign and strange; he is a mere spectator and observer. In respect of this withdrawal into reflection, he is like an actor who has played his part in one scene, and takes his place in the audience until he must appear again. In the audience he quietly looks on at whatever may happen, even though it be the preparation of his own death (in the play); but then he again goes on the stage, and acts and suffers as he must. From this double life proceeds that composure in man, so very different from the thoughtlessness of the animal.”)
On Monday evenings here in London, West End star Rachel Tucker takes on the role of Norma Desmond in director Jamie Lloyd’s stripped-down reinvention - blended together in cinematic ways yet still bloody theatrical - of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, Sunset Blvd., based on the Billy Wilder movie that spelled it all out. American Nicole Scherzinger, the former lead singer of Pussycat Dolls, has caused a sensation in the role and performs it at all the other scheduled performances during the week. I have so far seen each of the stars twice in the part and they are distinct in their dives into the silent screen diva who does not know how to remain silent. The production is gloriously self-aware, its stark dramatic tensions played out in its black-and-white war with itself as it tries to decide right before our eyes if this is a great musical worthy of all this re-interpretative rigor or a really bad and overwrought one ready to be ripped apart with some added ridicule to match the rigorous reassessment. Indeed, its stirringly soaring orchestrations by Alan Williams - which have become the production’s aural signature - point up how much of the score is tediously stuck in its staccato sprechgesang as the character Max (played by David Thaxton who himself both soars and stirs) would call it.
It is a production filled with a heightened irony, its naughtiness both innate and knowing, which has been built on Scherzinger who is not the actress that Tucker is so that Scherzinger’s performative diva impulses come through more than Desmond’s do. Scherzinger’s own knowing narrative hovers nearby the musical’s own. She is however such a stunning presence and singer that it not only doesn’t matter, but it also gives this layered production yet another layer and even a grounding levity as it does tend to levitate almost precariously along with those orchestrated moments when it soars so often around and within the mise-en-scene-less-ness of it all for Lloyd’s own signature as a director is to dismiss the encumbrances of a set altogether and sculpturally realize a production within its negative space much like a sculptor finding the form by doing away with the clay clump by. Clump. By clump. One can find ways to criticize a Lloyd production, but clumpy is never one of them. This production of Sunset with Scherzinger at its center is a kind of theatrical stunt that is staggeringly realized because of her singular presence in the role. She’s in on the seriousness of the joke, the knowingness of it all. This production can be like a jolt of adrenalin shot into the heart that sometimes, because of its source material, can too often end up jogging in-place. But when it lifts its haunches to prance and to preen along with its star - hell, to maraud with lights and cameras and sound design and sidewalks and backstage crannies and the facial crevices that create the heartbreak of a close-up - it is magnificent.
(Above: Scherzinger as Desmond. Photo by Marc Brenner.)
Lloyd seems to have been keenly aware that he had to pace the production and utilized its expository sing-songy sections to do so because two hours of magnificence just molts into a morass of vulgarity. But here’s where even more of his directorial keenness comes into play for the production still maintains just the right amount of the needed vulgar allure that the Wilder film so, yes, knowingly had at its core but that the original musical was too enamored of - even inured to - its tasteful self to understand. But now that just-the-right-amount of knowing vulgarity is the velvet in the black box into which Lloyd and his cast pack their magnificence - and thus finally the damn damned musical’s as well. It all feels like just that: a gift being unwrapped for us each night to delight in and discuss, discussions that can lead us - hell, even reviews of the show - into digressions which the production allows itself to fall into as it slags in moments its own specific musical theatre source as well as the genre itself of the musical theatre. Lloyd as a director always finds a way into just that: allowance. It can strike some as a bit too transgressive but I find it transcendent even as it remains visceral. I think of him as a theatrical haruspex in the search through the viscera because he assumes there is a soul in there and it is his fucking human search for one that proves there humanly is. It is that divining of the incongruous - this cinematic take that is deeply theatrical, the carnality of the artifice, flesh as flash, the sculpted negative space, the animating animism of giving prose a soul - that is the lens itself though which we are led to look into this stripped-down yet heightened world of his Sunset Blvd. where not a lot, not one, is left in such lot-lived lives. He fills the stage with their emptiness - and ours. Schopenhauer would have tapped a foot to the beat of it all.
(Above: The brilliant Tom Francis as Joe Gillis - his steady daring is what gives the show its needed balance - and Rachel Tucker as Norma Desmond in director Jamie Lloyd’s production of the musical Sunset Blvd. at The Savoy in London. You can order Tucker’s new CD, You’re Already Home, here. Mention must be made as well of Grace Hodgett Young who portrays Joe’s sincere love interest, Betty Schaefer, with just the right amount of altruism and desire, a sensual alchemy that so many ingenues just can’t engender. She does. Photo by Marc Brenner.)
I was even reading some Schopenhauer as I sat in a chair over in a corner of the Savoy Hotel’s lobby last Monday night as I waited to catch Tucker for that second time to revel in her take on Norma which is more embedded in the musical form in which she excels. Tucker, among other credits, has starred as Beverley Bass on the West End in Come From Away as well as defied gravity in Wicked as Elphaba and played the title roles in Annie Get Your Gun at the London Palladium and The Pirate Queen at the London Coliseum. She is more fully Norma Demond because it is a real acting performance that does not need to hop upon the stilts built into the theatrical stunt in order to hover above it all along with an added overlay of narrative. She more deeply immerses herself in the role and the production itself has to adjust to her presence not the other way around. It is an interesting juxtaposition and yet she never juts out even though she only gets to do the role in her slated one-night a week slot. She sure makes the most of it though. And - more irony - she is more shockingly American in her affect than Scherzinger is. The accent she employs - her natural one is Northern Irish, the no-nonsense ebullience of a Belfast native is her innate charm, not that churning need to be affirmed that fuels a diva - is as flat as the midwest American plains. It makes one realize that Norma’s career couldn’t survive the talkies and - yes, ironically - it is when Tucker tucks into the two big anthem-like ballads as Norma that one sees the astonishing dramatic genius of the silent screen legend as her voice soars and stirs along with those orchestrations and the lights become orchestrated as well within the numbers. The sound of her flattened voice flairs into a kind of firmament that has as its parallel the silent planes of a silent-film actress’s extreme closeup, a firmament of their own for the internal sounds of one’s own emotions longing to cry out and be heard in a way that is both deafening and silent, her voice, its noted empathy, what has been sculpted from the negative space of all that emotional silence, the transgressive transference of an artistic moment, the disorientation that a diva can distill in her stage presence but one which Tucker as Desmond understands as the stunt not the deeper performance of becoming the woman herself. “I was thinking of Gaga," she told me afterwards when we met backstage and I commented on the disconcertingly flat American speaking voice she employs, Norma’s R’s as hard as the town that has hardened her heart and its murderous need to be worshipped not loved.
I was having those stream of consciousness thoughts as I took a rest from reading Schopenhauer’s translated sentences which were streaming his thoughts onto the page about the consciousness of human existence within the physical world. And then I remembered Elaine Stritch bellowing on about him in her throaty register in the number “Zip” from Pal Joey, her one number in her one scene as reporter Melba Snyder singing about having interviewed stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. “Zip!” she sang. “I was reading Schopenhauer last night/Zip!/And I think that Schopenhauer was right./Sigmund Freud has often stated/Dreams and drives are all related.” In her one-woman show, Elaine Stritch at Liberty written by Stritch and John Lahr - or, as it was billed, Constructed by John Lahr, Reconstructed by Elaine Stritch - she sings this song while interspersing it with the logistical saga of playing the role of Melba while also being Ethel Merman’s standby in Call Me Madam. Merman - who was always first and foremost Merman - always carried around her own narrative in whatever role she played so that every hit musical that starred her was a kind of theatrical stunt itself - except, I’d think, the fabled Gypsy, which - Zip! - melded Merman with that ur-Stage Mother and was about - everything connects - Gypsy Rose Lee. My mind continued to wander as I sat at the Savoy Hotel with Schopenhauer’s book in my lap: Gloria Swanson who starred in the film Sunset Boulevard was a kind of stand-in herself after Billy Wilder’s other choice for the role of Norma Desmond - Greta Garbo, Mae West, Clara Bow, and Norma Shearer - turned him down. Moreover, Stritch in her show also told stories about being in a summer stock production of The Women with Swanson.
All these narratives were indeed melding - Zip! - into this one: mine. As I sat there readying myself to see Tucker in Sunset and thinking about all this, I also remembered other standbys I’d seen in musicals - Julie Benko in Funny Girl and Donna Murphy in Hello, Dolly! - and realized that they too had more deeply blended into their roles than the stars - Lea Michele and Bette Midler - had who brought their own narratives onto the stage with them in order to give their required star turns as much as true performances. People came to see them being stars not someone becoming Fanny and Dolly. The roles were the negative spaces in which they could be more fully themselves for their fans. So much of my own life, I began to realize before I turned back to Schopenhauer’s persistent highly evolved pessimism and his insistence that happiness is an act of negation - a thing itself sculpted from negative space - has been about being my own stand-in and fitting myself into a role I had never quite created. I wrote two books standing just outside myself. The memoir form is itself a stunt, a literary one, in which a writer can conjure one’s own narrative by living the narrative of being a writer. I have always carried my own narrative around. This column is the latest example. But I am no longer the star of my own show as I have always been. There is no longer - as there never really is in a Jamie Lloyd show - a set in which to define myself. The definitions must come from within. Living a life of negation - donating or selling off almost everything I ever owned and in my 60’s setting forth anew within a different construct - I am not stepping into a role because there is no longer a role to play or a set on which to play it. I am more fully who I really am. It is all I have left: just the me who no longer needs to stand by my mien. My life is no longer a stunt. It stirs. It soars. It jogs in place. I am the viscera. But it is my soul that has envisioned this. Hey, Schopenhauer: zip it.