Sunset Boulevard, Twisting Boulevard: The Long Road to the 2024 Broadway Revival

Although this did not happen, Prince was interested in the idea, if not the Stapely/Hughes/Swanson adaptation. A very preliminary budget agreement dated August 2, 1960 in the Harold Prince papers (box 187.17) lays out royalty terms for an adaptation by Burt Shevelove and Stephen Sondheim. There is also an undated piece of paper, likely from the same era, with only the words “Sunset / 1) [Burt] Shevelove 2) [likely James] Goldman 3) John Kander.” Perhaps Sondheim has demurred by that point based on the feedback he reportedly received from director Billy Wilder that the show could only be an opera (and not a musical).

Prince continued to consider collaborators, though, and in a letter dated October 2, 1962 in the Comden and Green papers (box 19, folder 29), Prince tells the writing team that he saw the film with “George” (presumably collaborator and potential director George Abbott) who “didn’t like it” and “thought it was a very bad picture.” Prince writes, “I’m going to take one last try and see if Jerry [Robbins] has any interest. I mentioned it to him two years ago and then he was intrigued. Now, with FANNY [i.e. Funny Girl] put off possibly he would be more interested.” Whether Robbins was more interested or not is unclear, but this version obviously never happened. Comden and Green had also approached actor Rosalind Russell to consider starring as Norma Desmond (likely a strategic move as she was married to one of Prince’s co-producers, Frederick Brisson). In a letter postmarked September 16, 1962, she responded that “I know the work involved and I know you can do it but I honestly would not be happy playing the character.”

Prince still did not let the idea go. In fact, plans for an adaptation seemed to get very serious again in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The Library preserves a draft of a few scenes and a plot outline with a title page that credits Hugh Wheeler with the “opera libretto” and Andrew Lloyd Webber with the music. In his memoir, Unmasked, Webber remembers his concern over Prince’s “concept” for the piece (to update it to be about the real-life actor Doris Day, who had withdrawn from the public eye), and also wondered, “Hal, Hugh, and Stephen Sondheim had been collaborators on two definitive musicals and Hal and Steve on so many more. Why was Hal talking to me?” 

King writes “after Prince finally let the rights lapse in 1982, Lloyd Webber quietly snapped them up.” A chain of other successful shows (Cats, Phantom of the Opera, Starlight Express) kept Webber busy until the early 1990s. According to King, Webber considered a range of lyricists for the project, including his frequent collaborator Tim Rice (not interested) and Little Mermaid lyricist Howard Ashman (too sick), before initially hiring an emerging American lyricist, Amy Powers, who had impressed invited audiences at the famous BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop (an incubator for musical theater writers). Powers wrote several songs and is credited for her work in programs for the musical, but Webber ultimately decided she wasn’t right for the project. Webber again considered other emerging lyricists, including Michael John LaChiusa, who in 1989 had written the musical Buzzsaw Berkeley for the WPA Theater (where Ashman had been an artistic director). In the fall of 1991 (most of the digital files were last modified in October of that year), composer and lyricist LaChiusa wrote draft lyrics for Webber’s score. These are preserved both as digital files and as paper print-outs in his collection. LaChiusa told me in an email interview for a 2022 blog post, “I had several good meetings with Andrew and he couldn't have been more gracious and fun. But… ultimately he thought that I was writing lyrics with music in my head, which, of course, I was—just not his music. Fair enough!”

Even more drastic changes were made in the 2023 London version that transferred to Broadway in 2024. In addition to dropping two songs with the same melody (“The Lady’s Paying” and “Eternal Youth Is Worth A Little Suffering”), the new libretto included many smaller lyric changes. The song now titled “Let’s Do Lunch” originally used the more historically accurate lyric, “Let’s Have Lunch” (George Perry explains the choice to avoid the anachronism in his chronicle of the London production). The new production, which is far less concerned with period accuracy in general, changes the word to the more colloquial modern verb. The title of the screenplay Joe agrees to work on with Betty has been restored from “Blind Windows” to the title it had in the Wilder film, “Dark Windows.” This may be because almost all discussion of the plot of the screenplay has been cut, so there is no longer a possible mismatch between a title like “Dark Windows” and the earlier “meet cute” scenarios.

Other edits feel like a clean-up of awkward lyrics that may have bugged the writers enough to fix. For instance:

JOANNA: They shot my screenplay 

MYRON: Isn't that great? 

JOANNA: No, they shot the thing dead.

Is now:

JOANNA: They shot my screenplay.

MYRON: How did it go? 

JOANNA: Well, I wish I was dead.

The new version isn’t perfect, but “they shot the thing dead” feels like an unfunny joke that gets less funny with every listen.