In sheer tonnage, not to mention tone, "Sunset Boulevard" has lightened up. The touring edition at the Civic Theatre is positively jolly compared to the lugubrious Los Angeles production that starred Glenn Close and moved on to Broadway in 1994.
      Credit Petula Clark with finding the macabre wit in Norma Desmond, the faded silent-film star (from Billy Wilder's 1950 movie) who inspired Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical epic. Clark lacks the Close charisma, but she has a sweetly feminine charm, and she can sing, of course, which Close couldn't.
      Lloyd Webber's music tends to a bland and oily sameness, with its endlessly repeating, swelling phrases. But Clark varies her vocal delivery in ways that make even such awful ballads as "New Ways to Dream" at least listenable.
      The British pop star takes a campy approach to Desmond, never missing a chance to embellish a gesture or twirl a metaphorical mustache as she snares young Joe Gillis (Lewis Cleale), the down-and-out screenwriter who becomes, against his weak will, her gigolo.
      She's a generous performer who shares her fun with the part without upstaging everyone else. All that's a plus, given the material.
      Gone, too, since 1994 is John Napier's massive set, a Gothic staircase that lifted hydraulically like a big, ugly truck to reveal contrasting scenes occurring beneath it. The sheer weight and complexity of that machine injured a few performers and jinxed an attempted 1997 tour of the show, which had won seven Tony awards during a lackluster 1995 Broadway season.
      For this tour, Derek McLane's new design uses scrims and set pieces to get much the same dramatic effect with about half the let's-bolt-at-intermission sense of oppression. Gone, too, are Anthony Lane's zillion-dollar costumes, which made Close's every glitzy entrance (and there were a score of them) a fashion nightmare. Clark's duds are ridiculously dramatic, too? turbans and red sashes and silver lamé? but their bad taste seems Norma's, not Lloyd Webber's.
      Director Susan H. Schulman has replaced Trevor Nunn's pompous, almost ceremonial staging with quicker, jauntier rhythms more in keeping with Clark's artistic character. It's an approach that better suits the tart dialogue cribbed from the Wilder movie.
      Clark gets the right laughs from the best jokes, many of them lobbed at Hollywood. The most famous, of course, is in her first scene. "I am big," she tells Cleale's Gillis. "It's the pictures that got small." And she has moments of real pathos when her rapacious vamping truly does seem born of desperation.
      There's more dancing in this new staging, as well, though not all of it fits the period nor the campy spirit of show. Choreographer Kathleen Marshall turns the buoyant scene in Schwab's Drug Store into a kids-night-out from "Footloose" or "Fame." New Year's Eve at actor Artie's apartment never gets past its slow mambo accompaniment, a bogus Latin number of the sort Lloyd Webber reveled in creating.
      Cleale is the best Joe Gillis I've seen in the part, excepting William Holden in the movie. He's a tad young. But he's attractive without being a pretty boy. And he makes Joe's cynicism ? he needs a car more than a conscience ? real. He and Clark make one scene by her pool ? he in a black bathing suit, she in a big caftan - the sort of unsavory foreplay that made the movie so perversely delightful.
      When Cleale's Joe says he actually does love the old tease because she's a fool, you believe him.
      Vocally, he shines in his romantic "Too Much in Love to Care," with Sarah Uriarte Berry as his screen-writing partner, Betty. The song trades in the swooning artificial emotion that is a Lloyd Webber trademark, but both young performers bring such musical assurance and emotional conviction to the scene it comes as a relief.
      Cleale has been here before, starring in worse material - the Burt Bacharach debacle "What the World Needs Now," staged by Gillian Lynne last year at the Old Globe. Here's hoping someone brings this likable and gifted performer back to San Diego in something worthy of his talents.
      Also a strong presence: Allen Fitzpatrick as Desmond's former director and lover, Max von Mayerling. Fitzpatrick has the right sullen dignity in the part, and an elegant baritone voice edged by menace.
      Lawrence Goldberg conducted the 20-piece orchestra that, as usual with Lloyd Webber, is heavy on lush strings and woodwinds. Like a reminiscence from the original production, they deliver a much darker sound than Clark's peppy voice.

Music: Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Book and lyrics: Don Black and Christopher Hampton.
Director: Susan H. Schulman.
Choreography: Kathleen Marshall.
Set: Derek McLane. Costumes: Anthony Powell.
Lighting: Peter Kaczorowski.
Sound: Tony Meola.
Projections: Wendall K. Harrington.
Orchestrations: David Cullen and Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Music director: Michael Rafter.
Featured cast: Petula Clark, Lewis Cleale, Sarah Uriarte Berry, Allen Fitzpatrick, Michael Berry, George Merner.