Drag is as old as Xenophon’s fear of women, but in our transgender, anti-binary age transvestism onstage can seem quaint, a relic from a shameful past when gay people adhered to certain patriarchal assumptions about what made a man and what made a woman. Although the work of such sui-generis theatre artists as Charles Ludlam—who was inspired, in part, by Hollywood archetypes and penny dreadfuls, stories in which sexuality was performed with ridiculous, automatic vigor—was hugely important in the nineteen-sixties, it doesn’t necessarily play well anymore. Gender politics has moved on from that kind of arch radicalism. As the options for drag performance have dwindled—and I’m referring here not to the kind of sleek crossover machinery you see on the TV program “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” say, but to the funky, crooked-wig, runs-in-the-stockings aesthetic that made Jackie Curtis such an unforgettable star—current drag luminaries, including Murray Hill and Lady Bunny, have fought back with work that emphasizes the anarchism of drag, how it confuses the line between what’s “natural” in show business and what’s too loud or “wrong.” (Last year, Lady Bunny wrote and staged “Trans-Jester,” a funny, rude, and smart piece about the trivialization of drag by the gender thought police.)
And yet there must be room onstage for drag and its off-center presentation, or else we’ll end up with a theatre of conformity—the kind, for instance, that didn’t question the cross-dressing in two Shakespeare productions staged by the Globe’s troupe of all-male players, starring Mark Rylance, on Broadway in 2013. Why was that? First, the shows were “high end” and thus immune, as Kabuki stars often are, to the criticism that usually greets drag: those actors were making art, not sending it up. But it’s the mistakes and the imperfections that make drag interesting, because they reveal the performers’ authenticity and vulnerability: if the drag star can’t put the pieces together without effort, why not let the effort show through the pancake makeup and the feathers?
Glenn Close is an actual woman, but Norma Desmond, the character she plays in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1993 musical adaptation of the 1950 film “Sunset Boulevard” (at the Palace, directed by Lonny Price, with book and lyrics by Don Black and Christopher Hampton, respectively), is a construct composed, sometimes deliberately, sometimes not, from drag, or drag impulses. (Though this is, of course, commercial show business—the production’s bid for respectability is built into the clocklike precision with which it has been put together.) When we meet Norma, she is fifty, a creature from another age: she’s a former movie star who made it in the silent-film era, when audiences fell for a star’s face, not her voice. After someone remarks, early in the show, that Norma used to be big, she draws herself up to her full height and, digging deep vocally, says, “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.”
Now—it’s the nineteen-fifties—she lives in a kind of mausoleum on Sunset Boulevard, in the part of Los Angeles where grand, gloomy homes with palm trees and wide lawns are the norm. But in this twilight world “normal” is a specious concept. And that’s just one of the lessons that Joe Gillis (Michael Xavier) learns pretty quickly after he arrives on Norma’s property. Sunset Boulevard wasn’t Joe’s intended destination—he’s on the run from creditors who want to repossess his car—but when he pulls into Norma’s drive she and her manservant, Max (Fred Johanson), assume that he was sent by the funeral home to cart away Norma’s late great love. The fact that her love was a chimpanzee does nothing to diminish the solemnity or the grief she feels as she approaches the catafalque where the ape is laid out and sings her first big number, “No More Wars”:
Webber doesn’t write music that one can sing without “soaring,” and Close does what’s required to put the song over, while the orchestra does the rest. The violins and horns swell to heighten the dramatic effect, but the sound of it doesn’t stay in your head; it’s just a din that requires the artist to belt—which Close, Xavier, and Johanson do handily, though you have to keep reminding yourself what they’re singing about with such urgency. (In any case, the audience is more interested in the musical’s camp factor than in the seriousness of the score, if it has any.) And would Norma really use war metaphors to express her grief? The chimp was no doughboy, and one doubts very much that Norma ever opens a newspaper unless someone has told her she’s mentioned in it.
After Joe reveals that he’s not an undertaker but a writer, Norma, who is still wise to the ways of Hollywood, hires him to rewrite a script about Salome that she’s been working on. (Norma is rich, and she knows that writers can be had on the cheap.) No matter that the Salome Norma wants to play is sixteen years old: Norma believes in herself, even if Hollywood doesn’t.
Wearing a turban, scarves, and florid gowns in black, white, and shades of gold, her eyes obscured by sunglasses, and her lips painted a murderous red (the costuming is by Tracy Christensen), Close looks the way Charles Ludlam may have looked when he played Norma Desmond, in Ronald Tavel’s “Screen Test.” Indeed, twenty or thirty minutes into the show, you find yourself thinking less about Close’s genuine commitment to the part—this is her second go-round as Norma on Broadway; the first was in 1994—than about all the variations of Norma Desmond you’ve seen over the years, from Carol Burnett’s classic spoof to those drag parties downtown decades ago.
I never really warmed to the movie that the musical is based on, just as I haven’t warmed to the musical: its atmosphere is at once messy and banal; its relentless pop façade and the constant drama of its music preclude intimacy and distance us from feeling, while encouraging a kind of aggressive contempt. None of the characters are truly big, let alone human, even as they play big. Billy Wilder, the movie’s director and co-screenwriter, intended to skewer Hollywood and its disposable culture, but there’s something else at work in the film, too: the pride that Wilder felt about his position in the industry’s hierarchy, in that closed world that coddled its own madness. If Wilder had been a true moralist, he would have turned the camera away from the overreaching drag queen that Norma becomes as she falls in love with Joe and attempts to buy his love by making him over in a way that has to do not with who he is but with her idealized vision of a man of the nineteen-twenties. Instead, Wilder could have shown us how male ideas of beauty and youth have driven Norma crazy, how she is catering to the only thing she knows—what a man likes, or is supposed to like. But the men in her life, including the one who could really see her and thus validate her existence, her beloved director Cecil B. DeMille, have moved on, thus breaking her spirit, if not her dreams.
Onstage, it takes a long time for Norma to express her masculine rage—which, in this tale, takes the form of murder. She turns against Joe’s female friend first. (It’s much easier to hate your own kind than it is to dismantle the system that makes you hate your own kind.) Sitting by the phone, Norma calls Betty Schaefer (Siobhan Dillon), a young woman who believes in Joe as a writer. Desperate and greedy for information, Norma over-enunciates, her words taut with sarcasm and hauteur. (You can hear how her voice would have sounded “old” to audiences who had adjusted, by then, to the Actors Studio’s mumbling naturalism.) Betty, of course, is Norma’s foil: her innocent earnestness springs from a well of purity that has yet to be corrupted. This is the only instance of heart in the show, a scene of real physical pain and confusion, and Close plays it to the hilt, but not hysterically, because she has something to hold on to as an actress, a reprieve from the endless mugging and grandstanding, which we know is just another form of self-loathing, dressed up in drag and played to the balcony, where the “boys” sit worshipping every man-generated blow to the heart, every mascara-stained moment. ♦
