“Alright, Mr DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up,” says the deranged movie actress Norma Desmond at the end of the film “Sunset Boulevard”. The camera then gets tighter and tighter on her face, with grotesque results. The point is that some things shouldn’t be scrutinised too closely – and it applies to voices as much as faces.Glenn Close stands any amount of visual examination as Norma Desmond in a new semi-staging of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1993 musical “Sunset Boulevard” at the English National Opera, running April 5 through May 7. She looks every inch the wayward diva, and swans around in her turbans and kaftans beautifully. But aurally, it’s another matter. She compensates for the thinness of her sound in the upper register by belting out her hard-edged chest notes like a stevedore. Her vocal support is inconsistent, her tuning questionable, her sound variable. It’s not exactly what you’d call a joined-up voice. In fact in operatic terms, you could hardly call it a voice at all.Maybe it wouldn’t matter elsewhere. But in an opera company, which has stated a desire to produce musicals in order to bring vocal splendour and symphonic lushness to them, it seems almost criminal to put such a suboptimal voice in a leading role. Close’s box-office pulling power has clearly trumped other musical and artistic considerations.Elsewhere, things are mostly more consistent. Michael Xavier looks and sounds great as Joe, the weak young writer who becomes the subject of Desmond’s homicidal infatuation, and Siobhan Dillon demonstrates a true, sweet soprano sound as Joe’s love-interest Betty. Michael Reed conducts the on-stage ENO orchestra with a real feel for the sweep and grandeur of Lloyd Webber’s hit tunes. Lonny Price’s simplified semi-staging – a few props, and a couple of scaffolding walkways – tells the story clearly, but nonetheless seems something of a poor sell for a mis-cast show in which top price tickets are an operatic £150.“Sunset Boulevard” is at the London Coliseum
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