Sunset Boulevard
Sydney Opera House Joan Sutherland Theatre, August 31
Until November 1
Reviewed by CHANTAL NGUYEN
★★★

Luring the world’s best-selling soprano, Sarah Brightman, from a three-decade musical theatre hiatus was a feat of big-name casting for Opera Australia. But her performance in Sunset Boulevard is now a hydra for the already-troubled company, with its Melbourne run haunted by poor reviews, unsold seats and long absences from the stage due to injury.

Brightman needs no introduction. She is the iconic Andrew Lloyd Webber muse (and, for a time, his wife), immortalised in the role she inspired and originated: the beguiling ingenue Christine in The Phantom of the Opera. All big eyes, big hair (it was the ’80s, after all) and a sweet soprano trill, Brightman describes Christine and Phantom as “art imitating life”.

Brightman’s star rose, and she soon left stage shows for a chart-topping recording career. Her voice, with its uncomplicated sweetness, was perfect for both Lloyd Webber’s style and the technical limits of the recording studio.

But this Sunset Boulevard finally confirms what I’ve long suspected: that Sarah Brightman is spectacularly, extraordinarily successful at being Sarah Brightman … but stray too far left-field of that and the signal starts to get shaky.

Unfortunately, the Brightman-Christine persona is light years apart from unhinged Hollywood has-been Norma Desmond, the grotesque, manipulative and ultimately pitiable star of Sunset Boulevard. There’s a fierce magnetism in Norma’s character and songs, which are best sung with a tormented, complex vocal belt. Powerful actresses capable of danger and madness, like Glenn Close, Nicole Scherzinger and Patti LuPone (the original Norma), all sizzled in the role.

Brightman doesn’t sizzle so much as sweetly simper. There’s little difference in her acting when Norma is happy, suicidal, sane, mad, loving or murderous. Brightman’s “arrested development” interpretation – that Norma is developmentally stuck in being an ingenue – is simply unsuited to carrying the vocal or theatrical weight of this tragic role.

Her voice retains its recognisable Brightman sound. Other commentators question her current singing ability, but in my view the decades have simply made more obvious what she always had: a very sweet voice with less tonal complexity, and a wide vibrato now more audible without youth’s sheen. She sings Norma’s line “Let me kiss his severed head … he fought to his last breath” stylistically like Christine’s “Wishing you were somehow here again”. If you ever, in your wildest dreams, asked what it might be like to see Christine in Norma Desmond’s body, this is it.

Aside from Brightman, the other elements of Sunset Boulevard are solid. Veteran performer Tim Draxl is outstandingly charismatic as jaded scriptwriter (and Norma’s victim) Joe Gillis, with smoothly shining vocals and a confident, cynical stage presence. Ashleigh Rubenach radiates charm as Joe’s love interest Betty Schaefer. The ensemble is polished and unusually age-diverse, and there are top-notch 1950s costumes and a brooding Palazzo mansion from designer Morgan Large.