The tour of Sunset Boulevard with Linda Balgord

The story centers around faded silent fim star Norma Desmond and Joe Gillis, a down-on-his luck screenwriter whose flight from repo men lands him in Norma's decaying mansion, where she lives with her memories, her chauffeur Max, and her delusions of a comeback in a film of her own creation. Gillis offers to help with the screenplay and ends up a kept man, trapped by his own veniality and Norma's desperate need for companionship and an audience. When Gillis tries to break away, events lead to Norma's descent into madness and his death.

If this is going to work, of course, it requires a Norma Desmond with spectacular presence and the ability to make us feel at least some sympathy for the character. Gloria Swanson did it in the film, Betty Buckley did it when I saw her on Broadway in 1995, and Glenn Close certainly does it on the American cast recording, but in this tour Linda Balgord doesn't even come close. Instead of acting she indicates, illustrating Norma's madness vocally with an irritatingly wide vibrato and physically with an exaggerated collection of mannerisms that makes her look like a victim of Parkinson's Disease. It's a performance so wildly off the rails that the tragic aspects of the character are lost and the drama irrevocably damaged.

This is a pity, given the fine performances from the rest of the cast. Ron Bohmer is a solid Joe Gillis, Ed Dixon handles Max's demanding songs with ease, and Linda Kennedy is appropriately winning as Betty Schafer, the young screenwriter with whom Gillis falls in love. The supporting cast is uniformly strong and technically the show is nearly flawless. Even the amplified sound was as clear as I've heard in some time. And, of course, there's the fact that the interior of Norma's baroque mansion is almost an exact reflection of the interior of the Fox itself.

Unfortunately, Norma Desmond is at the center of Sunset Boulevard and in this production (to quote Yeats) "the centre cannot hold". I'm a fan of this show; the lush, chromatic score is filled with memorable melodies ("The Greatest Star of All", "With One Look", and "Surrender", to name just a few), and I enjoy its unashamed homage to the great film composers of the 1940s. But I can't recommend this tour. It plays the Fox through March 22nd and you can get tickets at Metrotix at 314-534-111, but in my view your money would be better spent renting the original movie - in its own way its one of the best horror films of the century - or buying a copy of the cast recording. I listened to Glenn Close sing "With One Look" again when I got home from the theater, just to remind myself of how it should be done.