That ‘Sunset Boulevard’ Close-Up, Finely Focused
Ben BrantleyFebruary 9, 2017: The scenery may have shrunk, but that face — oh, that face — looms larger than ever. So does the ego that animates it, both indomitable and irreparably broken. “With one look,” indeed, to borrow a song lyric that describes such unsettling presence. That outrageous, over-the-top, desperate old lady shedding sanity on the stage of the Palace Theater still has the poetry in her gaze to break every heart. Yes, Hollywood’s most fatally narcissistic glamour girl, Norma Desmond, is back in town, in the pared-down revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Sunset Boulevard” that opened on Thursday night. It is a show that exists almost entirely to let its star blaze to her heart’s content. The light she casts is so dazzling, this seems an entirely sufficient reason to be.
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