Sunset Boulevard - Alexandra Palace / RAH

He looks good with that beard but I could do without the short pony….

Could have been worse.  I got it into my head that Zizzi was playing Norma, when I first heard about it!

Yes I got that e-mail but looking at the new ticket I’ve got exactly the same seat I always had. The only difference is that with the original ticket there were two extra tickets for the social distancing seats between me and whoever but those don’t show up now, was a bit odd to actually be given tickets for the empty space anyway!
They had originally said we’d just use the tickets from the original date so everyone who’s going look out for the new ticket with Sunday’s date on it in your inboxes.

I've finally given up on seeing this and made other plans for Sunday.

it's sold pretty well now and nothing left near the front. I doubt if there will be a discount offer but fingers crossed for anyone still waiting and hoping.

I hate to say it, but I found this a bit disappointing. Not overly...I'm still glad I went, but it wasn't as good as it should have been. Mainly because the sound balance at the matinée was diabolical. I don't know if they had time to do proper sound checks, but Act II in particular was a barrage of sound that became unbearable at certain moments (‘Too Much in Love to Care’ in particular sounded like a shouting match).

I know it might seem overly nitpicky or ungenerous of me to be so critical when this is one of the first things to be put on in a long time, but honestly to have quite so many things go wrong in the same performance is a bit difficult to overlook.

The star of the show should have been the 28-piece orchestra, but they seemed unfamiliar with the score. The entr’acte was the worst I’ve ever heard it played. The flute came in too late, and then when it did it was doing a completely different time signature to everyone else, and then the strings were all over the place leading to a total cacophony. The strings also gave the weirdest interpretation of the countermelody to ‘Too Much in Love to Care’ I’ve ever heard, and just seemed to give up on getting it right. The underscoring of the spoken dialogue didn’t work in multiple places…certain bits of music are supposed to be timed with certain bits of dialogue, and very rarely was it done right. I don’t know if that’s because the performers had their backs to the orchestra and the MD and there was no MD camera.

On multiple occasions the lighting cues were missed. The first half of the mad scene at the end was in darkness, until someone remembered where Mazz Murray was and then hurriedly focused the lights on her. This wouldn’t normally have been an issue if they had just done this as a concert, but there were parts (such as this) where it seemed they wanted to semi-stage it. Because the director doesn’t seem to have made a decision on that, that led to weird inconsistencies (e.g. the company being on stage during ‘With One Look’, but not in other scenes set in the mansion that only feature Joe and Norma). The worst lighting moment was the most crucial in the show: where Hog-Eye is supposed to focus the lights on Norma as the music climaxes when she makes her return to the studio…it was all completely out of time with the music.

Several of Norma’s lines were flubbed. The biggest issue was in the first Act, which Ramin Karimloo managed to save by giving a gentle reminder with an ad-libbed line (Karimloo, to his credit, didn’t use a script unlike most of the other performers). Mazz Murray then came into Act 2 with a script, presumably so as to avoid that happening again. Except it did, crucially in the final mad scene. The speech that closes the show was missing various lines…and it’s a little odd for Murray to forget certain lines in that scene given she’s known she would be playing this part for quite some time.

Hopefully a lot of the above will have been addressed for the evening performance.

Overall, I did like Murray's Norma, particularly vocally (and much prefer her vocals to Ria Jones’s…that’s just a matter of personal taste). Acting-wise she needed more direction as the characterisation didn’t seem particularly complete or nuanced. But she was most of all let down by the sound balance which overamplified her too often. Even though it was ‘As If We Never Said Goodbye’ that got her the standing ovation, for me she was at her best delivering ‘With One Look’, and seemed to be channelling Betty Buckley. I thought, though, that her delivery of some of her spoken lines was a bit odd.

Unlike so many, I’m not generally a fan of Ramin Karimloo’s performances, but I have to admit I was pleasantly surprised by his acting this time, which seems to have improved a fair bit since I last saw him. My biggest criticism of him used to be that he was often too sharp and shouty, and today this only really applied to his delivery of the title song (although he did go completely off pitch in a reprise of ‘Girl Meets Boy’ in the second act). It seemed like he hadn’t quite managed to get dressed in time ready for the big finish in the clothes number, so they had to repeat a few bars at the end of the song, but no matter.

Zizi Strallen was fine, as was Jeremy Secomb as Max…though neither was a standout (and I still think the best Maxes to date have been George Hearn and Fred Johanson).

Two weird decisions: forgetting to find any kind of costume for Cecil B DeMille, who looked like someone’s lost uncle who had just happened upon the stage of Alexandra Palace, and the decision to change the line ‘no-one ever takes a black friend to a restaurant’ to ‘no-one ever takes a bad guy to a restaurant’. I understand that the line is uncomfortable; it always has been for me…but I would prefer it DID make me uncomfortable so as to serve as a reminder of the racism that was endemic in Hollywood in the 1950s, rather than pretend it wasn’t there.

Loved the venue, though, and the social distancing worked fine. Quite a few of the audience members seemed to be other MT performers.

How much time do they need? This has been on the cards for months.

I've never had a great experience with sound at the Albert Hall for any MT production...although I suppose the Phantom 25th was OK sound wise. Worst was Showboat, which was just incomprehensible. 

That's fine...it got a standing O at the end so I could tell there were many who loved it and expect there are many who would disagree with me.

I was just personally really disappointed by the sound balance and the many, many mistakes of the orchestra. I love hearing this score with a large one and loved it at the ENO. But the standard there in terms of what the orchestra was doing was much better than this.

I could have forgiven isolated moments. But the mess-ups were too numerous for me to ignore.

I suspect it's all due to a lack of rehearsal time. If they'd had a couple more rehearsals, I'm sure a lot of this wouldn't have happened.

I really enjoyed it but we were sat in the left hand slips and how/where they chose to stage the final scene meant we couldn't see it. At. All. Sadly this meant it was a bit of an anticlimax!

Thank you scarpia for your in depth review. As Mr B says above, sounds pretty standard for these expensive concerts. I don't go to them any more for the reasons you gave.

Yeah... Why exactly would a character want to take a "bad guy" to a restaurant? If you know they are a bad guy, whatever that may entail, why would you even consider that? Seems very strange.