On the 'Boulevard' - Petula Clark brings humor and vulnerability to her role as faded screen star Norma Desmond in Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Sunset Boulevard."

by William Carltone
Fort Wayne News-Sentinel

February 17, 2000

     If you're alone and life is making you lonely, you can always go downtown and spend a few hours on "Sunset Boulevard" with Petula Clark.
      The veteran British songbird stars in the national tour of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, which runs Friday through Sunday at the Embassy Theatre.
      Clark plays Norma Desmond, faded icon of Hollywood's silent-screen era. The crotchety recluse lives in a crumbling gothic mansion, hallucinating about a comeback, seducing and eventually murdering a down-on-his-luck screenwriter who stumbles into her lost world.
      Such a dark, seedy character is about as far from Clark's sunny, wholesome image as a casting director can get. She's famous for a voice as clear as a chapel bell and an outpouring of uplifting pop hits ("Downtown," "I Know a Place," "My Love," "Don't Sleep in the Subway") during the 1960s.
      But behind that air-headed, swinging-'60s stereotype is a bold, multifaceted talent whose life has been a series of creative adventures in pop music as well as movies and the theater.
      Clark recorded 1,000 songs and sold an estimated 68 million records worldwide. She started singing in bomb shelters and army camps as a child star in wartime England, became a big star in England and Europe before conquering America in the mid-'60s, appeared in dozens of movies (including a remake of "Goodbye Mr. Chips" with Peter O'Toole, and "Finian's Rainbow" with Fred Astaire), played Maria in a successful stage revival of "The Sound of Music," and made her dramatic debut on Broadway in 1993 in "Blood Brothers" with David and Shaun Cassidy.
      Clark, 66, clearly loves the artist's life of adventure and grabbed opportunities. Still, she didn't want to head into the sunset of her career as Norma Desmond. In the mid-'90s, British director Trevor Nunn wanted Clark to step in the London production.
      "But Trevor, Norma's a beastly character. I'm no tough cookie. I have a thin veneer," she objected. "I can be hurt easily."
      She wasn't a fan of the "Sunset Boulevard" movie, either. Webber's musical is based on director Billy Wilder's 1950 classic starring Gloria Swanson and William Holden. "I saw it when I was a kid. I didn't understand it. I thought it was spooky and weird."
      And Clark wasn't fond of various productions she saw of Webber's "Sunset Boulevard." She was repelled by the way Norma Desmond's character came across. "I disliked this woman from the moment she came on stage. I thought, who cares what happens to her? She's mad. She's unattractive. I don't like her."
      Clark warmed to Norma Desmond only after realizing she didn't like her because she was played as a monster, not a human being.
      After several hours of discussion, Nunn overcame Clark's objections. He appealed to the actress in her to personalize Norma Desmond as never before. Don't watch the movie, he cautioned, and don't try to be like any of the other actresses who played the part. "I don't want you to be the old Norma," he insisted. "I want your Norma."
      "What is my Norma? Give me a clue," she asked.
      "You will bring to her humor and vulnerability," he predicted.
      "Trevor was absolutely right," she now agrees. "Norma can't be a monster from start to finish. She's a very tragic figure, a once great actress whose career was ruined by the talkies. She just didn't sound very good. It happened to a lot of big stars of the silent-film era.
      "Now she's grasping at straws in a dream world with a desperate young man who's broke, with nowhere to go. They cling to each other like life rafts."
      Desperation, haughtiness, bitterness at Hollywood's disposable myth factory, and even a streak of madness are essential components of Desmond's character, Clark says.
      Clark gives the audience glimpses of what Norma was like when she first went to Hollywood: "Young, beautiful, talented, innocent and vulnerable, someone with a genuine love for her audience. Now she lives in the past, and also in the future. She thinks her audience is still out there, waiting to applaud her comeback."
      It's a harrowing journey Clark takes every night on stage. Two hours before the curtain, Clark begins shedding herself in the dressing room, putting the garments of Norma Desmond on, crawling under her skin. "By the time I go on stage, Norma Desmond has taken over. I'm possessed. I'm her. She's mine." Clark's transcendent commitment to the role has not gone unnoticed by theater critics. They credit her with rescuing a money-losing "musical noir" that was roundly panned as uninspired and cumbersome as the grand staircase on which Norma Desmond descends.
      USA Today, for one, had high praise for Clark's performance in the new touring production. "No other actress has gotten so far under Norma's gold-lame turban, showing her lack of social graces and nasty temper, speaking in a flat, Midwestern-sounding voice that reminds you why her career ended with the invention of sound movies. Norma has never seemed so real. Her (Clark's) singing, of course, is just dandy."
      Susan Schulman directs the cast that includes Lewis Cleale as Norma's boy toy, Joe Gillis. Kathleen Marshall is the choreographer, Derek McLane designed the set, and lighting is by Peter Kaczorowski. Although the set is new, Clark says the lavish costumes she wears are the same ones she wore in the London production.
      By the time the tour ends in May, Clark will have played Norma Desmond more times than anyone else. "When I first started, Glenn Close (who played the role on Broadway) told me I couldn't do this more than eight months. 'You'll go mad.' "
      Clark remains quite sane, at least until the last minute of each show when all the truths of Norma Desmond's life are thrown in her face. When the tour ends, Clark will be able to crawl out of her character's creepy skin at last. "I think I'll go sit on a beach for a month and think about things," Clark says with a sigh.
      Until then, she's Norma Desmond, Hollywood superstar from the time when stars had faces, not voices. Big, beautiful, luminous faces shrouded in silence, ready for their close-up with Mr. DeMille.

"Sunset" rises What: The national tour of Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Sunset Boulevard" musical, starring Petula Clark. When: 8 p.m. Friday; 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday; and 2 and 7:30 p.m. Sunday. Where: Embassy Theatre, 121 W. Jefferson Blvd. Tickets: $16-$39; call 424-1811.