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[0:06] Blake Ross: Welcome back to another Burnt Bonus episode where we deep dive into other scandals and true crimes from the stage.

[0:18] Blake Ross: Today we are going to tackle the closest that Broadway has ever come to a real life soap opera.

[0:28] Blake Ross: And that is, of course, the making and the remaking of Sunset Boulevard.

[0:36] Blake Ross: With me today to talk about the gossip, the epic cat fights that surrounded the shows, the lawsuits, all of the fabulous goings-on for the world of Sunset Boulevard, is the man who dedicated an entire podcast series to Sunset Boulevard. It's called the Sunset Project. It's the one and only Broadway Bob.

[0:54] Broadway Bob: Hello.

[1:01] Broadway Bob: Thanks for having me.

[1:03] Blake Ross: Well, thank you for joining me. As I was explaining to you earlier, your voice has been in my ears because I devoured the Sunset Project over I think the course of two days. It's a fascinating look at Sunset Boulevard.

[1:15] Broadway Bob: Well, thank you.

[1:19] Broadway Bob: Yeah, it's one of those things that I had been planning, I think since I was 16 years old, like the story, you know. And it's a story that a lot of us theater people know. If you love theater, you know the story, but a lot of people don't. And I had been thinking about it for a long time, and I thought, you know, I have some time on my hands during winter break earlier this year, and I'm like, why don't I just—I had been making a podcast with my friend, and I kind of knew how a podcast worked. And I just sat down and did it in the course of two weeks and made it all happen. I didn't expect anything to come from it. It was mainly just for my own entertainment. And then people started listening, and I started getting a lot of letters and people saying this is my story. I love this. This is exactly how I felt because it mixes my love of the show as a teenager with the drama behind the show. So a lot of people connected, which was a really nice surprise for me.

[2:13] Blake Ross: It really is such a love letter to the theater, besides the craziness that is the story of bringing Sunset Boulevard to the stage. It marries so beautifully what all of us theater geeks go through when we find our show.

[2:29] Broadway Bob: Yes.

[2:30] Broadway Bob: My show was Rent. I think that was my Sunset Boulevard, where you just devour and you go through and you just have to be a part of it. And yours was Sunset Boulevard. And I wrote to you and I said, I don't think I really truly appreciated Sunset Boulevard until I saw it or listened to it through your voice.

[2:50] Blake Ross: So for anyone who hasn't taken the journey through Sunset Boulevard with the Sunset Project, I highly recommend it. It's a great, great binge listen.

[3:03] Broadway Bob: Thank you. I had a few friends who don't even like musical theater or knew nothing about Sunset Boulevard, didn't even know what the movie was. And they just said, I heard you had this podcast, I listened to it, and I got into it. And they went in completely cold. And I think just the drama behind the creation of making a thing as big as a mega musical is its own story in and of itself.

[3:23] Blake Ross: As you know from the Rebecca musical, right?

[3:27] Broadway Bob: Oh, yes, and of course, I mean, there is some—it's so interesting when you bring theater people together because they are such a specific breed, right? You have to have a little bit of that craziness to want to launch a musical, a huge mega musical, and then, and of course, there's all the trappings that come with that. And a lot of it is really fun, gossipy fodder, gotta say. For people looking from the outside.

[3:53] Broadway Bob: So, and there are, you know what, I thought before we get into our little touchdown on it, give us a quick primer for the uninitiated. Now, I can't imagine anybody would have found this specific podcast without knowing what Sunset Boulevard is. But should there be one stray person who happened to have found this podcast and doesn't know what Sunset Boulevard is, give us the quick primer on the story of Sunset Boulevard.

[4:19] Broadway Bob: Yes. Well, um, the musical is based on a Billy Wilder film. I believe it's 1950. I should know that date. Um, but I don't know off the top of my head.

[4:28] Broadway Bob: It is the 50. Yep, 50.

[4:30] Broadway Bob: And it's a classic movie about the deconstruction of Hollywood and about how Hollywood had cast aside this fictional, but based on a real caricature of a silent screen actress, Norma Desmond. And she used to be a silent film queen, and then talkies came in and she became irrelevant. And but she still believed that she was going to have her return. Not a comeback, it's a return. And I hate that word. I hate that word. And through the course of this, Joe Gillis, who was kind of our narrator of this show, and Billy Wilder, he created the genre of film noir. It's told in flashback. We know that Joe Gillis is dead at the beginning of the film, but we figure out how. And we learn that he's a down-on-his-luck writer who, through a course of a series of events of trying to evade people trying to get him to pay for his car because he has no money, he finds himself stranded at Norma Desmond's mansion.

He recognizes her, and then they start a relationship, primarily because he knows that he can get something from her because she's rich and has connections, and she wants something from him because he's a screenwriter and she's penning her return, which is Salome. They fall in love, and questionable if he falls in love with her, but I think there is some love. There's some love-ish there. There's a B plot with a young woman named Betty Schaefer. Things don't go well, Joe Gillis dies, Norma Desmond has a breakdown, and it's really talking about how Hollywood has turned its back on its own kind. And at the time in the 50s, in 1950, this was a very—this was a touchy topic to poke at the machine that was creating the thing that it was actually showing.

It was poking at itself, which was a big deal to do back then. And then someplace in the early 90s, late 80s, Andrew Lloyd Webber made it into a musical, one of the last mega musicals of the era, before Rent came along, your show, and upturned everything.

[6:29] Blake Ross: Yes.

[6:30] Blake Ross: Well, we're gonna touch down, Bob and I are gonna touch down on Sunset Boulevard through the eyes of its Normas. It's many, many different types of Normas.

[6:41] Broadway Bob: The first, of course, was Gloria Swanson, which we talked about this a little bit yesterday offline. Norma—Gloria Swanson was 50 years old when she was cast as the husband, the dried up, the old bitty, the recluse.

[7:01] Broadway Bob: 50. She was 50 years old, and she was playing Norma Desmond, and that is what Hollywood thinks of its older ladies at 50 years old. You're just dried up and send you to the glue factory.

[7:13] Blake Ross: Yeah.

[7:14] Broadway Bob: But she's 50 years old. She did that the Billy Wilder, which is now a classic. And Sunset was her return to this. She was a—so she was sort of in the vein of Norma Desmond. She was a silent film star. She was this big glamorous fashion plate. And Sunset was, I think, after like a 16-year absence from the stage. And she—I think this kind of was like her ending too. It was both—it was very on par with her Norma Desmond.

[7:52] Broadway Bob: It was very much so. I think the thing to give her a little bit of credit is that she was very much aware of who she was in her career at that time, and she was offered the role of Norma Desmond. She had moved on to New York and was doing theater and TV work, and TV wasn't like it is today. It was, you know, second-tier work for actors. And when she was asked to be in the show, she really did it because she wanted the paycheck. She knew that Hollywood paycheck was exactly what she was missing. And she was asked to do a screen test for the show, for the movie. And what she said, "Watch any of my 50 movies, I made it Paramount," which was a very Norma Desmond thing to say. But kudos to her to have Norma Desmond—to have Gloria Swanson do a screen test.

But there were many other actresses that they went to first that turned it down because they thought the role of Norma Desmond was so abhorrent for an actress to play. But Gloria Swanson said, "Sure, I'll do it," and she did it. And then what came—and then so I think that she kind of went into it with like some sense of perspective. But when she came out of it, as we know, she had her own attempt at trying to create her own musical version of Sunset Boulevard.

[8:59] Broadway Bob: So Gloria Swanson very presciently took the first stab at Sunset Boulevard decades before Andrew Lloyd Webber would ever come into it. She decided that she wanted to do a musical version of Sunset Boulevard. She brought together these two—a young lyricist and composer named Dixon Hughes and Richard Stapley, and they worked on it for like four years, with the blessing initially of Paramount Studios. And she worked on it. They came up with all of the songs, and eventually Paramount just killed it. They were like, just kidding, we don't want you to do it, and all that work down the drain.

[9:41] Blake Ross: Yeah, yeah.

[9:41] Broadway Bob: And you mentioned to me yesterday that there's that documentary, which I tried to find and I can't find anywhere that's called Boulevard, a Hollywood story.

[9:51] Broadway Bob: Yes, and it's just started to make it—it's a documentary about the making, Gloria Swanson's making of this musical and how she falls—she develops feel—it's Stapley and Hughes were a gay couple, of course, in the 50s when that was completely hush-hush and taboo. But she falls—she falls for Stapley. She develops feelings for Stapley, and she kind of becomes a little Norma Desmond-ish in and of herself, while making this musical, which then after four years, Paramount put a stop to.

[10:24] Blake Ross: Yeah, yeah.

[10:25] Broadway Bob: Dixon Hughes and Richard Stapley, and she worked with them. And the funny thing about that adaptation is that she tried to give so much humanity to Norma Desmond. She made Norma Desmond actually poor so that she was—she had no money and she was selling her stuff off to support Joe Gillis to kind of give her some people could have some empathy for her. And I believe, and I've never seen this musical, but what I've read about it is at the ending of it, she lets Joe go with Betty Schaefer. He lives. So there is—so I think that's part of the reason why Paramount was like, you've really just kind of changed the point of what this all is, and they pulled the rights from her to produce it further. I think that's what happened. But then there's also the whole thing where she fell in love with her collaborator, much like Norma Desmond did with Joe Gillis, and that took away.

[11:12] Blake Ross: Well, fascinating to actually have a woman create for that role, the story of Norma Desmond told to an actual woman.

[11:22] Broadway Bob: That's a very good point.

[11:24] Broadway Bob: That's a very good point. And I think that's a thing that I try to talk about in my podcast, is one of the things about this. It is a story about women in Hollywood, but all of the iterations of the show from the movie to the musical version were all told by men. And so there's a little bit of—there's a little bit of like the missing piece here. One thing that—Amy Powers was the original lyricist for Sunset Boulevard, the musical jumping there, and she was canned very early for no reason. And it would have been interesting to have a female identifying voice give some input into this creation of the show.

[12:00] Blake Ross: Agreed.

[12:01] Broadway Bob: But the Gloria Swanson, maybe this new documentary, which is making the rounds in the festival circuit. I don't know what the plans are after that in terms of just wider distribution, but I'm gonna try and hunt it down. It sounds fascinating, but that was Gloria Swanson and Sunset Boulevard. She died before Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical ever made it.

[12:21] Broadway Bob: She died in her 80s.

[12:23] Blake Ross: Yeah.

[12:23] Broadway Bob: In the 80s, I think, too.

[12:25] Broadway Bob: She did. Before Andrew Lloyd Webber's, so she never got to see it on stage, but that was Gloria Swanson.

[12:31] Blake Ross: Yeah.

[12:32] Broadway Bob: Maybe I have a funny little story about Gloria Swanson because I mentioned it in my podcast, but it was one of those things that before the pandemic, I went to Columbia University because Patti LuPone, original Norma Desmond, had donated all of her scripts to and all of her books and mementos and letters from fans to Columbia University Rare Books and Manuscripts Library. And I went there and looked at the entire Sunset Boulevard collection, which is like four volumes of stuff. And there was all sorts of stuff. Articles, she saved everything. One of the most interesting things I found beyond like the gaslighty letters from Andrew Lloyd Webber and everything. Um was a letter from Gloria Swanson to Patti.

[13:13] Broadway Bob: And I was like, how did this—that doesn't make sense timeline-wise? Because she died in the 80s and Sunset Boulevard was in the 90s.

[13:20] Broadway Bob: But what had happened was I think that Gloria had seen Patti and Evita. And um, and the letter that Gloria wrote was very chaotic. It was clearly there was some dementia or something going on there. She was accusing Patti of like of giving her like doing something wrong to her and having Patti's dresser, I think, come out and greet Gloria, which she thought was in her fun. It's a very weird letter, but it's an interesting letter because it's written much like a Norma Desmond would write it to Patti, and she calls her Patti Lupino. How dare you, Gloria Swanson? And after this like railing of Patti for some weird thing that I don't quite understand, at the end, it says, give all my best to your mother. So it's uh how odd. A little odd connection between the original Gloria Swanson in the movie and the original um the original Norma Desmond in the movie, the original Norma Desmond in the stage show. Fascinating.

[14:15] Blake Ross: Well, then we get to, of course, the Andrew Lloyd Webber. The reason for the season, Andrew Lloyd Webber. Now he's not the let's touch down on Lloyd Webber for a moment. He's he's not a Norma, of course, but he is he is a diva of this of epic proportions. Um you you enlighten the audience with a little bit of insider Broadway baseball with the introduction of the Really Useful Group as its own character.

[14:47] Broadway Bob: Now the Really Useful Group, most people have heard of this name. It's Andrew Lloyd Webber's humongous corporation that turns out Broadway shows or turns out shows. And it's a multi, multi-million dollar operation with thousands of employees. It is the essence, besides like Disney Theatrical, Really Useful is probably the closest to a Broadway corporation that we have.

[15:14] Blake Ross: Yeah.

[15:14] Broadway Bob: And they become sort of this nemesis of the story of Sunset Boulevard and the way that it treated its leading ladies.

[15:24] Blake Ross: Yeah. Touch a little bit on Andrew and how Really Useful sort of became a character in all of this and and would leak stories to the press and touch down a little bit on Rug, if you will.

[15:42] Broadway Bob: Yeah. Where do I begin? So as you mentioned, Rug is this powerful entity. And at the time, if we like those of us who are old enough to remember, like Andrew Lloyd Webber was running Broadway for a long time. It was Cats, it was Phantom, it was Starlight Express, it was all of these hits one after another. And Rug was this machine. And it's very rare, I think, um, today, most especially to have the production team also the team that creates the material. So it was you had if you were an independent artist negotiating with Rug, you found yourself at the whim of Rug. Rug was not only a production entity, they were also a press company. They were, they were the group creating and creating the buzz around a show.

And um, they were hitting all sorts of highs until they started kind of showing some fractures around um aspects of Love, which didn't do very well on Broadway, and Starlight Express, which didn't do well on Broadway. So there was some kind of I think panic happening within Rug at that point that they were seeing their they were seeing things kind of that they needed to do something. And Sunset Boulevard was the show that they really rallied around, I believe, based on everything I've read, to really make their show. It was gonna be the female Phantom of the Opera, it was the thing that was gonna get them back on track, it was the thing that was gonna have the star. Um, so they put all of their muscle behind it to make it this event, which as we know in PR, you manufacture an event, but they manufactured it to such a degree that they started pitting their own stars and their own creatives against each other to create news to be able to sell the show, and what that ended up doing is creating a lot of a lot of strife trauma for mainly the leading ladies of the show.

But Rug was the entity, it was the company that was doing a lot of the behind the scenes meddling, and also causing a lot of the drama costumes, and like the other thing was it was so I mean, I said this a few times in the podcast, but this is the same company that was putting out blind press items, allegedly, of like so-and-so was going to be cast as Norma Desmond in Broadway. And we need to get to the rift between Glenn and Patti for those two people listening that don't know it. But they were the ones creating the rift for when the actresses were negotiating for the contract. But they're the ones who also owned the contract. So it just seems so, you know. It was right out of the Rug playbook.

They loved a great story leak with like the Page Six, Liz Smith, Michael Riedel. Like that was their go-to script, if you will, for launching a show, is to create as much buzz uh around in drama, if you will.

[18:25] Broadway Bob: But I will say before we move on to Patti. Andrew and Really Useful Group sort of loom large in the Sunset Project as this force for not always good. Not the villain, but sort of meddling and pitting its leading ladies against each other and planting stories and gaslighting a lot of its leading ladies. For me, um, this past year though, has been so redemptive for Andrew Lloyd Webber because he's really been one of the only towering figures of the theater to not run and hide to his, you know, um, probably millions of mansions throughout the world and just hold tight and wait for COVID to pass over him. He really has stuck his neck out and really you know clamored for the return of theater and been a great champion, even getting the COVID vaccine, like shot into his arm, yeah, very famously in front of a camera, of course, as only Andrew Lloyd Webber would do. Um, but so uh how did you reconcile all of that? You know, having done this big podcast and and but watching Andrew kind of had this big redemptive story and it's as a big hero of the shutdown.

[19:48] Blake Ross: Um, it's a really good question. And I think uh like if we zoom out even further, just how we've been looking at our hero, our theatrical heroes over the past year and a half, how they've reacted, it's been very sobering in a lot of ways, and a way an eye-opening. And I do think that Andrew has done a lot of great things during this time. I do think a lot of it is motivational for his own company and for his own products. I think that I my sense, this is my take, is that he was panicking with his with his show Phantom potentially closing. Um, there was a lot of hubbub, if you recall, between him and and uh Cameron Mackintosh around what was happening with that production. So there was a lot of like videos of Andrew playing the piano, sadly, and the empty Her Majesty's like stuff like that.

Like, we will be back. Um, but I to answer your question, I think that people have all facets to them. I don't think he's evil. I don't think he's I I think he just has a lot of pieces to him, like all of us do. And um, I think part of it, like he did good stuff. I think, like I said, I think some of it was just to kind of enable an image of of how he wants to present himself. But I mean, I mean, credit to where credit's due in terms of the good stuff that he's done.

[21:00] Broadway Bob: But going back to the 90s and why we're really here, Andrew Lloyd Webber was was a little different in the 90s. As you mentioned, he was sort of the kingmaker on Broadway and in the West End, and he was a multi multi-multimillionaire. And he decided that he got this story of Sunset Boulevard stuck in his craw, not like not unlike you, Broadway Bob. And he decided to put together a workshop that ended up being almost a production in and of itself at his Sidmonton Festival.

[21:33] Blake Ross: Yes.

[21:34] Broadway Bob: And cast again at 44 years old. Patti LuPone.

[21:41] Blake Ross: In the role of Norma Desmond.

[21:46] Broadway Bob: Yes. Well, we should say that before that there was the 30-minute production with Rhea Jones that was done the year before at Sidmonton. That um there's some clips of that. Um, but she was also younger. I think she was in her early 30s. So my god, Andrew Lloyd Webber, for fuck's sake, man.

[22:04] Blake Ross: I know.

[22:05] Broadway Bob: But I think the challenge was um the challenge was because the question, I and I I don't know if you're going with this, but like why Patti, when it was a star show and he was looking for a Hollywood piece of someone to lead the show who was Hollywood royalty. And uh, and I've thought a lot about this in terms of because I have nothing else to do with my time. Uh why would he choose Patti LuPone? Of all the various people out there in the world, including like Barbra Streisand, who was interested in recording the songs from the show, all these people. And I think there's a few things in that the show at the time was written in such a high key that only a few select ladies could sing at eight shows a week.

And I don't think that Andrew was ready to sacrifice the fidelity of his score to lower the keys to cast a star. I think that's what it is. And he knew that Patti could deliver, and um, she was ready. She was really ready to come back and do a show. She had been really um sitting on her butt doing nothing in the TV show Life Goes On, playing an underwritten house mom, um, housewife, and she wanted to come back and do a show. But she was not stupid, and she knew that the Sidmonton tryout was a glorified audition for her. So she really put herself full into it. And it's thrilling to see the clips on YouTube if you can find them.

[23:20] Blake Ross: Yes, and and we're both publicly admitted Patti LuPone stans.

[23:26] Broadway Bob: Absolutely.

[23:27] Blake Ross: We will not hear of anyone talking crap about Patti LuPone.

[23:32] Broadway Bob: It is not to be had on either the Sunset Project or Burnt. Don't come to our parties talking shit about LuPone. We won't hear of it.

[23:42] Broadway Bob: So this comes with the next section of this interview comes with great one-sidedness as we will always stand for LuPone no matter what, people. But Patti was really, I mean, I didn't, you know, Patti has this reputation as all great women do, unfortunately, in this world, that because she is forthright and she is honest and she is exacting in her love for the craft, that she's this grand diva.

[24:19] Blake Ross: And I didn't really think about the amount of gaslighting that Andrew Lloyd Webber did to Miss Patti LuPone at the age of 44.

[24:32] Broadway Bob: Yeah.

[24:32] Blake Ross: When she played this and him pitting her against Glenn and just the way he really treated her like shit.

[24:39] Broadway Bob: Yeah. And tell me a little bit about the Patti LuPone. Your take of Patti's Norma and the drama that ensued.

[24:51] Blake Ross: Because there was drama. There was a, I mean, it was of epic proportions.

[24:55] Broadway Bob: Well, I could go on for the next hour, but I won't, um, in terms of this, because this is this is the topic. But it's uh, it's like you said, it is just really sad when you look at it. Like at the time, if you read it in the papers, it's like this dramatic story of like a diva being dethroned by Andrew Lloyd Webber and and whatever, and she threw a lamp out the window when she found out she was fired. But if you dig into the surface of it, it's the story of a human being who was just trying to do a job, and she was hired for this job, and she found herself immediately regretting it, but she knew that she had to do it because something in her was compelling her to. She says in the book, as she looks back and all this, I don't know why I did this.

All the signs were there that I should not have, I should have walked away. But she kept doing it. And I think it's because she knew this was these roles for women of her age, which is it's really sad to say at the age of like what, 43, for women who are established stage actors, and she was primarily a stage actress, to get a starring role in a new musical doesn't come along often. So she she leapt into it. And I think that her desire to do this the Really Useful Group smelled that desire and used it to um to basically deflate her. And on top of this, uh, I I so I think that she was just someone who was trying to do a job. And she found herself in a really, really shitty situation pretty quickly and wasn't sure how to get out of it because of contracts.

So the basic story is she was after Sidmonton Festival, Andrew's like, there's my Norma. They cast it for London first, and then simultaneously kind of throw this Los Angeles production out of nowhere, take it from there.

[26:46] Broadway Bob: Yeah, absolutely. So she was cast in the Sidminton workshop and then went swimmingly, and Andrew Lloyd Webber basically offered her the role on the spot in the following night or that evening's performance. Um, and then when she, so then she, she after right after that performance, that was the last time she had a positive experience with Sunset Boulevard. After that, it became contract negotiations. And those are very boring to talk about. But what it meant is that she found herself negotiating for every little piece of this role, including salary, including some of her standard requirements as a woman of her status. And then as part of the negotiation, she discovered that there was this mysterious LA production opening, this like, uh, like six months after London, I believe.

And she was like, wait, what's this about? Because she knew she's not a dumb lady, that this would automatically mean that there would be a competing actress playing the role in the States. And she tried to find a way to get out of the London production because she would want to be a part of the LA production if that was the case. Because she knew there would be a competition right away. She smelled it right away. And they said, no, no, no. Of course. You're like, you are our Norma. They kept saying this, you're our Norma. And um, immediately after she signed her contract, which contractually obligated her to play Norma Desmond on Broadway following London, um, when she was literally waiting to take the flight to go to London for rehearsals, a news item came out that Glenn Close was cast for the LA production.

[28:20] Broadway Bob: And she, Liz Smith, it's so of its time. R.I.P. Liz Smith, but shit, but it was so of its time. It's like I read it and Liz, my agent, read it to me from Liz Smith, and she takes goes to quote unquote batting practice in her dressing room in London and just takes the whole fucking thing back. Well, that was yeah, that was after she got fired. Right. But she when she, yeah, when she uh, when she found out that Glenn Close was cast, she basically handed her plane tickets back to um, the driver and said, take these back to Rug and tell them I am not stepping on that plane to begin rehearsals until we get this figured out. And from there it became a whole debacle of her, of them having um, then Rug started churning out press materials around whether or not Glenn Close was taking the role to Broadway, allegedly they were churning up less materials, and she was just trying to figure out how to play the role on top of all of this noise in the background about whether or not she would be fired from a performance she hadn't even started yet.

Um, and at that point she joked that and joke, but that Glenn Close was getting better reviews for a role she hadn't even played yet. And um, and then um, after I think about nine months into the run when when things started getting more heated up and the production in LA started getting rehearsed and got stood up, opening night of the LA production, Glenn Close gets rave reviews.

[29:42] Broadway Bob: Um, and she finds out uh shortly after that, that through Liz Smith's column that she was fired, and that's when she goes to batting practice. And there was so much that happened between that point and the batting practice in the dressing room that's a little bit more. Well, you'll have to listen to Sunset Practice. Yes, Bob does a glorious job of the nitty-gritty of the drama that was Patti LuPone in Sunset Boulevard. And you know what? And I Patti LuPone is nothing if not brutally honest in her memoir, in every interview she does. She does not mess around. She doesn't miss words, and she's not of the Hollywood Broadway sort of like, oh, everything's wonderful and fabulous and roses. She brings it throughout the city. So she's asked a question, she will tell you what she thinks.

[30:32] Broadway Bob: Yeah. I think sometimes to her detriment, where she just doesn't care. She doesn't care and she's honest. So she very famously has gone on to say not so great things about what she experienced with Andrew Lloyd Webber and with Sunset Boulevard. She said at the time, I have nothing nice to say about the man, so I choose to say nothing at all.

[30:53] Blake Ross: Yeah. Um, after this whole thing went down. And then she went on to have lots to say. Um, she also had a lot of, she also lost her voice for almost a year. She broke a blood vessel burst because of the stress of it that she relates it to that. She says that her marriage almost broke up. Like really serious stuff happened to her after this, just dealing with the trauma of being through a crisis, a professional crisis that became very personal very quickly.

[31:22] Broadway Bob: Yes. And so she goes on, she's done many interviews about this, including writing about it extensively in her memoir. Have you listened to the audiobook?

[31:31] Blake Ross: It's yeah, of course. There's no other way to re quote a quote read that book than to have Patti LuPone in your ear.

[31:39] Broadway Bob: It's fantastic. Um, it is fantastic. Uh, sh but she's she vacillates between, you know, sort of like, okay, it's all water under the bridge, and Andrew really ruined my life for a long time, but at least I got a pool out of it. Um, but that famously, there's two sort of makeups that happen in all of this. One is with Glenn Close, which we'll talk about, uh, which she, you know, says sort of flippantly says, like, oh, we made up at the Kennedy Center uh honors of Barbara Cook in 2011, and she happened to have sat next to me, and we all kind of were like, it's water under the bridge.

[32:16] Broadway Bob: But with LuPone, I mean, sorry, with uh Lloyd Webber, she years like a couple of years ago, the Grammy Awards was doing a uh an honoring of Andrew Lloyd Webber, and she comes back to sing Evita, Don't Cry for Me Argentina, in the original key, of course. Yes, Patti LuPone does not fuck around in the original key, and as she tells the story in rehearsal, the first day of rehearsal for that monumentous performance, it was just so good. She says, hello, Andrew, and then she says, uh, this is a detente. This is a detente, and everybody just cracks up.

[33:03] Blake Ross: I mean, yeah, she is. Well, it's funny because I saw her do a um with Seth Brodetsky at um Steppenwolf around 2017. She did one of her concerts, and it was right after that Grammy performance. And he asked her about it. Like, what's the story behind that? And she said basically, when she was asked to sing this in the show, she thought two things. One, does Andrew know? And two, uh, do I really want to sing this song in the Grammys? Because it's gonna be like a low point. Like she knew like this like singing Don't Cry from the Argentina's in the Grammys was gonna be like, it's gonna be a hard sell for this type of audience. So she's like, that's tough for me.

[33:42] Broadway Bob: And um, she she turned it down because she really thought, I don't want to do it because I don't want to, I don't want to revisit that again. And they said, Well, if you don't, we're gonna get Lady Gaga, basically is what they said. And she's like, All right, I'm gonna do it.

[33:56] Blake Ross: So let's move on to Miss Glenn Close.

[34:01] Broadway Bob: Yes. Uh, who has also much like Gloria Swanson has sort of claimed this Norma Desmond throne in many iterations. Uh, tell me a bit about Glenn's coming to the fun parts about Glenn coming to the role.

[34:17] Broadway Bob: Yeah. Well, I will say that I love Glenn Close's Norma Desmond. She was my first Norma Desmond. She's the one I discovered on cast recording as a 16-year-old. So she, her line readings on that cast recording are emblazoned on my soul. So I discovered her recording before I discovered Patti's. So, like the shift between those two was so different because what we haven't talked about is Patti's performance was so different. It was very naturalistic, where Glenn's is very much um characterized. Um, still grounded in reality, but very much its own creation.

[34:51] Broadway Bob: And um, so I'm a fan of Glenn Close's uh Norma Desmond in different ways. Um, and she, yes, she was the one who opened it in LA, um, got it on Broadway, won the Tony because there were only one other category nominated that year against the late great Rebecca Luker. And uh, and she uh she had a career high from it. It was one of those things where she really, really made that show a success. I mean, she's the one who made that, and she knew that. And there was a whole thing that happened, part of the debacle, uh, because you think with Glenn Close, nothing really badly happened with her because she's been working with Andrew and revived it on Broadway a couple of seasons ago. But there was a point where she went on vacation and they cooked the books and made it look like that she was that that that her her missing from the show wasn't impacting box office numbers, but it was and she was a few.

[35:54] Broadway Bob: Nothing to see here, folks. Sunset Boulevard is still a triumph. And Glenn Close played them like a fiddle.

[36:02] Blake Ross: She did.

[36:03] Broadway Bob: And she played them at their own game. It was fabulous. Yeah, she had a wonderful note that she wrote to really useful group that got leaked to the press. Leaked, of course. Allegedly leaked, allegedly.

[36:14] Blake Ross: Allegedly leaked, where she she sticks up for herself. And I'm like, kudos to you, Glenn Close. Um, and the thing I will say, like we are pro-Patti. The one thing that I take issue with Patti about is that she I still think, and you alluded to this, I still think that she hasn't forgiven Glenn Close for doing whatever that she did. In my mind, Glenn Close is a working actor, much like Patti is. She took a role, she played it completely differently. She got the role. And um, Patti's main issue from what I can understand is that she was upset that Glenn Close didn't call her to wish her well.

[36:46] Broadway Bob: And if I were Glenn Close, I wouldn't call Patti either. Apparently, she said that Glenn Close couldn't be anywhere near like opening night of Patti's performance or couldn't be in rehearsals. Like she cut Glenn off. And I would think, well, I'm just not gonna add fuel to that fire. I'll let that be. I'm here to do a job, and my job is to perform this role, which she did. Um, and I think Glenn, I think Patti's still fired up about that.

[37:08] Blake Ross: And I don't know.

[37:09] Broadway Bob: She does. She doesn't she doesn't mince words about it. There was she was she went on uh watch what happens live a couple of months ago, uh, or about a year ago, I guess at this point, because everything just time has morphed into nothing right now. But yeah, she went on, I think it was last year at the beginning of the shutdown, and Andy Cohen asked her about having drinks, like apparent another press story leak was that she was having drinks at Bar Central with Glenn Close, and then she she quickly did we didn't have drinks, she crashed my table.

[37:42] Blake Ross: It was her.

[37:43] Broadway Bob: I mean, what I wouldn't have I would give my right arm to have been at this table with Jon Hamm, Andrew Rannells, Patti LuPone, and Glenn Close comes up and crashes the table, and Patti LuPone, per Patti LuPone goes to Jon Hamm. If you go home with her and fuck her, I'll never speak to you again. It's it's such a moment, it's it's a it's a cultural touchstone in all of our lives, I think that moment.

[38:12] Blake Ross: Oh my god, Bob. I think we're gonna have to get like matching tattoos that say if you if you go home and fuck her, I'll never talk to you again.

[38:21] Broadway Bob: It's so great. It's so great. And I mean, I mean, it's just that's just I think emblematic of all of this. It's it's just it's just insanity. I mean, there's very real people behind the story, but that that story was just crazy when she told that. But yeah, I mean, and kudos, and again, kudos to Glenn. She's like, I'm gonna get up here and say hi. I I don't think Glenn sees she has an issue with Patti.

[38:42] Blake Ross: It's all on Patti's side, I think.

[38:44] Broadway Bob: One day they're gonna do like uh one day, some some enterprising producer is going to offer like millions and millions of dollars to Patti LuPone, Glenn Close, Bernadette Peters, Betty Buckley, just grab them all and shove them on a stage and let them have at it. Somebody's gotta do it.

[39:03] Blake Ross: Let's see what happens.

[39:06] Broadway Bob: Yeah, it's it's wild. And I and then and then as you alluded to, now Glenn Close, she did that revival a couple seasons ago. So she had a great run on Broadway. She didn't have a few. Delani Price revival, which was kind of teared down without the crazy, like which is another character in your which is kind of a character in my podcast too, all about the set of it all being just a complete set design. I mean, we haven't touched on that, was just immaculate. And I don't think we'll ever see a show like this on Broadway again. Um, with that set design. Um, but yeah, it was it was wild. And that that concert version, I call it a concert version because that's really what it was to me. It was lovely to see, but I always forget that I saw it. It's one of those things like, did you see that revival of Sunset Boulevard with Glenn? I'm like, Yeah, I guess I did.

[39:53] Broadway Bob: But she was then it was 22 years after she was actually a proper age to play Norma Desmond when she did it in 2010.

[40:02] Blake Ross: Yeah, I think she did it. She she from what I understand, she toned it back. I didn't see her in the original run, but I feel she made it, she took out kind of the I guess the the bigger parts of her performance and toned it back. And it was a very real performance from what I saw on stage. I was surprised how subtle it was in a lot of ways.

[40:18] Broadway Bob: Well, her and Andrew Lloyd Webber have been trying to make this film for years, trying to now make the musical film version of it with, of course, Glenn as Norma.

[40:27] Blake Ross: Yeah, which is well, let's think about this. It's it's a movie based on the movie industry. Then they made a musical based on the movie about the movie industry. Now they're gonna make a musical based on the musical about the movie industry based on a movie based about the music. This is like there's like this it this it's insane if this gets made because it's very through the looking wires.

[40:46] Broadway Bob: Well, if it ever happens, Bob, you've got a date.

[40:51] Blake Ross: Well, you saw the yes, I would love to go, but you've seen the the announcement that came out a couple, I think last week there was an interview with Angela Weber, and he said that Paramount has put the put the pause on it.

[41:01] Broadway Bob: Yeah, well, if anybody's listening and they wanna they want to bring it back, try and throw a couple millions of dollars at it. I would love to see it. I mean, I would just out of some curiosity, I would love to see what they could do, but I just don't know how they could do it.

[41:15] Blake Ross: Well much like the Follies musical. I don't know how that could work on film. It's such a stage piece, but yeah.

[41:24] Broadway Bob: Well, that might never be, but if you listen to Sunset Project, and we don't have time here, but if you listen to Sunset Project, Bob touches down on all the great Normas. Betty Buckley, Elaine Page, and there's drama in each of them. Like Betty Buckley had appendicitis or something, and then she was out, and Elaine Page was in, and Elaine was supposed like supposed to go to Broadway with it, and then she did like there's just Rita Moreno took over for Patula Clark. Like, there's just so many different Normas and all of their different styles.

[41:58] Blake Ross: Who I you mentioned in the podcast, but tell me about your favorite, because I discovered a new star from your favorite Norma.

[42:05] Broadway Bob: Well, thank you. My my favorite, which is surprising to some. I I certainly love all of them, and I love Betty Buckley. But um, I I love the original German Norma Desmond, Helen Schneider, who not many people know, but if you do do discover her, it's a real treat. She is a got her star as in Brooklyn as a punk rock singer. And then she uh she had a hit called um called I'm blanking on the hit. Called Something Very Rock and Roll. It's something very rock and roll. She has crazy rock and roll hair. Anyways, it's wild. Then she got um, then she got enlisted by German record producer to be kind of like the German pop star in Germany. And so she flew to Germany and became like a pop star over there in a band called The Kicks.

And then she somehow, and it's very unclear, but she segued into musical theater like in that point in her life where she played a lot of Pat of the Plown roles. She played Reno Sweeney in the Berlin production of Anything Goes on the Lincoln Center sets. It was very bizarre. Um, and then she and then she became a grand dame of the stage as a rock and roll punk singer, um, to where she found herself as Norma Desmond. And so I love her performance in that. She's also was very young, a very young Norma Desmond, but she she portrays a sense of like of regalness. And she has this rock and infused tone to her voice. It's kind of like Liza Minnelli meets Pat Benatar. Very Pat Benatar playing Norma Desmond.

It's very, it's very cool. I didn't I didn't know about her before listening to your podcast, and she's she's she it really blew my thoughts. She's fantastic. But I also love Diane Carroll. She was my first Norma Desmond when I was 16 in Toronto.

[43:42] Blake Ross: Yes.

[43:42] Broadway Bob: So she's she's also one of my favorites. So let's quickly talk about the almost Normas. Because as you mentioned, there were so many people who almost did it. Now, from my understanding, Meryl Streep, who watched Patty in that Cidminton Festival reading, was also considered. Is that true?

[44:04] Blake Ross: It's it's unknown. I think she was there and she congratulated Patty after the Sidminton performance, and they were contemporaries. They both went to Juilliard. Oh no, she went to Yale, but they were contemporaries. They were in the theater scene together. And um, after Patty, the way Patty explains it in her memoir is that when Patty landed, all the rumors sort of coming out that Meryl Streep said, Get me Norma. Get me sunset, was the headline. And Patty, to her credit, says she does not believe that Meryl ever wanted Norma Desmond. It was purely just rug nonsense spinning this up. And um, there's actually a video of Angela Weber quite recently talking it's at a Cidminton estate. Um, and he's talking about the the impetus for the song with one look, how it was originally written for a version of the Little Mermaid that he was working on at some point.

[44:54] Broadway Bob: What?

[44:54] Blake Ross: Anyways, yeah, it with one yeah, I don't know. He recycles songs all the time, but that was one of them. And he um, as he was getting ready to go to his piano to play, he says offhanded, like one time when we performed this, Meryl Streep is sitting in the audience. I wonder what she could have made of that role. Anyways, we'll never know. And he sits down and plays so I don't know who she actually was, but she would be great. But in Michael Riedel's book, he talks about how um when Glenn Close was playing in LA Um and the previews, Glenn Close like snuck in during tech to watch Glenn, uh Meryl Streep snuck in to watch Glenn Close play it. She was just really intrigued about what was happening. So we never who knows. We never got a Meryl Norma.

[45:31] Broadway Bob: We also never got another lawsuit debacle, was Faye Dunaway.

[45:37] Blake Ross: Oh god, yeah.

[45:38] Broadway Bob: So wasn't that a wild one? So for those who don't know, she was set to replace Glenn Close in LA. Um, and she was auditioned multiple times because she was not a singer. She approached the producers and said, I think I'd be good for this role. And she probably could have been really fascinating. She understood the character, she came from the star system. She understood that side of Hollywood. Um, and they told her that she probably could sing it well enough. They paired her up with a with a vocal coach, and they had they had nerves that they weren't ready to perform it. And uh they went to Angela Weber and again re-auditioned her, and he said, You're great, you know, lovely. It's more about the acting than the vocal performance.

And then I think three maybe a week, I don't know. It was very soon before the first preview of Faye Dunaway, they decided to not only take her off the show, but to close the entire LA production and then ship the sets to Garth Drabinsky, I think.

[46:35] Blake Ross: Yeah.

[46:35] Broadway Bob: So then Faye Dunaway got to her credit, as crazy as she is she comes across, she got in front of the rug machine and did her own press conference the very next day, basically protecting herself and her credibility as an actress before Andalog Weber could um and his team could get in front of her. And he said she'd like threatened to sue, right? And then they just were like, here's the money, go away.

[46:57] Blake Ross: Yeah, and as the lore goes, she called Patty and said, What do I do? And she said, Sue up.

[47:02] Broadway Bob: Yeah. So and finally, you mentioned the great Barbra Streisand. There was talks of a movie version with Streisand and Tom Cruise.

[47:14] Blake Ross: I never knew this.

[47:15] Broadway Bob: Yeah. I did not know this. Yes, in like '94, Rug Again had leaked some gossip about Barbra Streisand and Tom Cruise being in talks to do a movie version of it. And of course, could you imagine? Andrew was then very coy about it and said, Oh, no, no, I don't know. We don't know. We'll see what happens. But it never ended up happening. But there was an actual press report about that, and we'll never know.

[47:42] Blake Ross: We'll never know. I mean, I mean, we could imagine what that could look like. And I think it would be fascinating.

[47:47] Broadway Bob: Fascinating. It would be absolutely fascinating. I mean, there we go with Barbra Streisand again with her product her movie adaptation of Gypsy. So I'd rather see her as Nor. I mean, I I mean I would love to see her as Mama Rose, but like let's be honest. I would love to see her in anything, right? But yeah, I it would be fascinating. It would be, it's too bad that she has never taken it upon herself to play a musical theater role, really, since her heyday on the stage.

[48:11] Blake Ross: I mean, yeah, on stage, I mean.

[48:14] Broadway Bob: I would love to see that. And in the movies.

[48:17] Blake Ross: So speaking of who you'd like to see, let's let's end on the note of the Normas now. If they were going to remake Sunset Boulevard, Stage Screen, what have you? Who would you want to cast as the Norma Desmond of today?

[48:38] Broadway Bob: Oh goodness. Um, I mean, we have to look at our divas we have today. I think Audra McDonald would be a great Norma Desmond, though I think it's probably beneath her, maybe in some way. Um, I would love to see uh I would love to see Tony Collette be back on stage again at some point.

[48:56] Blake Ross: Wow, that's interesting.

[48:57] Broadway Bob: I think she could be interesting. Um and Julia Murney, I think would be a fascinating Norma Desmond.

[49:03] Blake Ross: That would be interesting. I was thinking. What about you?

[49:06] Broadway Bob: I I also thought of Audra. Um I also was thinking of Donna Murphy and Christine Ebersole. Like the two of them would just crush that.

[49:18] Blake Ross: Um Yeah, I would I agree. Donna Murphy would can crush anything.

[49:21] Broadway Bob: Of course, yeah. And also, I thought Heather Hedley.

[49:27] Blake Ross: Heather Hadley would be fantastic.

[49:29] Broadway Bob: She would just out of the park. I would love to see, you know, nobody's Lonnie did that sort of concert version show version of it in 2017 with Glenn. But nobody sort of like pulled, as far as I can recall, nobody's kind of like pulled Sunset Boulevard down into its essence and done that kind of like black box or like broken down version of Sunset. Um and I would love to see that. Like, you know, can the public do an immersive Sunset Boulevard? Could you imagine with Heather Hedley coming out of the shadows and killing Joe and all this? I mean fascinating. There was a wild production in London that I didn't see, but it was an actor musician production that was done.

[50:13] Blake Ross: Fascinating. Well, if any Yeah, so I I would I would love to see up to your point, I would love to see more actresses of color play Norma Desmond. And also actresses of a certain age, my goodness. Like stop casting 40-year-olds in this role.

[50:28] Broadway Bob: I know, I know, right? I mean, I would love to like Barbra Streisand could really, I mean uh whether or not she could do eight shows a week at this point, or if she would even dare to, like, wouldn't even want to, because why would she want to? But like to see Barbra Streisand, she's of the age. Christine Ebersole, she's of that age. I could sort of pass. I mean, don't stop 30 year olds as Norma Desmond. Like, give me a break. There is some, it's kind of like that old joke that um Elaine Stritch made about the song I'm Still Here. And she's like, how these actresses singing it, where have they been?

[51:01] Blake Ross: They've been exactly.

[51:03] Broadway Bob: Exactly. Well, maybe, Bob, if we pray to the Broadway gods enough, maybe one day we'll get another version of Sunset Boulevard with either Heather Hedley or Audra, or who knows, some other big stage.

[51:18] Blake Ross: Who stage star, who knows?

[51:21] Broadway Bob: Who knows what's to come? I mean, I would love to see another generation experience Sunset Boulevard. I think it will be a while before we see that, but I would love to see it in my lifetime. And I would love to see it with the original sets. I wonder where those sets are. I mean, I like the staircase needs to is just as integral to the show as Norma Desmond in my mind.

[51:43] Blake Ross: Amazing. Well, Bob, thank you for joining me. Thank you for putting the Sunset Project out into the world and showing us plebes the wonder that is Sunset Boulevard, because it is such an amazing overview of your love of musical theater, a boy's coming of age story, and also a coming of age of a real moment in time for musicals. Like the 90s, the was it really was a great, great uh podcast. I loved it. And thanks for chatting with me and gossiping about it on Bird.

[52:23] Broadway Bob: Well, I appreciate you inviting me and just uh and and entertaining all of my whims because I have a leap of the chance. I mean, as I said, this podcast was something that I created because um as a kid, as a even in my 20s, I had no one to talk to about this because no one really cared. And now I through this, I'm finding all sorts of people. So many theater nerds out there who are like, I'll talk with you about it. Of course I would.

[52:45] Blake Ross: I know.

[52:46] Broadway Bob: So it's it's been a super fun time. Thank you so much for inviting me.

[52:49] Blake Ross: Thanks for joining.

[52:54] Blake Ross: For sources and more information on the Rebecca scandal, visit bpn.fm slash bert.