What do Don Black, Nicole Scherzinger and Michael Ball have in common?
The prolific lyricist has three shows in the West End this year and two of them have big-name stars
Broadway and West End director Hal Prince famously said: “The three most important things in a musical are the book, the book, and the book.” According to lyricist Don Black, this is absolutely true, but it doesn’t mean that just because you’ve got a great book, you’re going to have a hit musical.
Don Black knows a thing or two about hit musicals. He currently has two shows running in town with a third due to open in September. Opening to mixed reviews, Aspects of Love, starring Michael Ball, is seeing its first West End revival since opening in 1989 with a three-year run in 1989. Black’s newest musical, The Third Man, has just premiered at the Menier Chocolate Factory in Southwark and Sunset Boulevard is scheduled to open shortly at the Savoy Theatre with American megastar Nicole Scherzinger playing Norma Desmond, the legendary faded Hollywood diva.
Both The Third Man (1949) and Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) are critically acclaimed movies that hail from the era of ‘film-noir’. Both strongly character-driven with an underlying crime theme, they are filmed in black and white and typically with a smouldering sexual passion too. Speaking to me in London last month, Black told me of his attraction to these stories and of his writing partnership with co-lyricist Christopher Hampton.
“I’ve only taken two movies and transformed them into musicals. Sunset Boulevard was my favourite movie as a kid and it just lends itself to songs. As you watch Billy Wilder’s movie you can imagine: what would Norma sing, and what would Joe Gillis sing? And so back in the day, when Andrew (Lloyd Webber) first mentioned a musical interpretation of the story, it was a no-brainer.
“When Sunset Boulevard opened in the West End in 1993 Billy Wilder and his wife were there and Billy is on record as saying, ‘The best thing they did was leave the script alone’. He said to me separately that Christopher and I were very clever because we didn’t change anything with Sunset Boulevard’s story.
Black says that writing a show is a very complicated process, laughing that Neil Simon’s memoir is called Rewrites for a reason! “Neil says you’re always rewriting and it just takes forever – even more so when you’re working with very busy people. I remember working with Christopher Hampton on Sunset Boulevard back in 1990 and he was so busy, too busy to write! Andrew and I were there, but Chris was never there – so he said we would meet the first week of every month. And that’s what we did, for the first week of several months we would meet at Andrew’s house in Cap Ferrat and with some intensive writing, that is how the show was born.”
The Third Man was a different challenge because, according to Black, it is so many people’s favourite movie. Set in Vienna, with its European aura of post-war intrigue, it is still an important piece of work there today. There’s a Viennese cinema where it’s been playing for 40 years.
“The City of Vienna’s Arts Council were behind it from the outset with development support and we staged a workshop of the musical there six years ago. Trevor Nunn was in the audience – he loved it and that was where its future was born, albeit delayed by the pandemic. We’ve been very faithful to Graham Greene’s story and Carol Reed’s movie – we didn’t just make it singing and dancing, we stayed very true to the plot and we are seeing that the audiences at the Menier are packed and the producers are happy too. It has been great bringing the show to its London opening alongside Christopher and Trevor with George Fenton’s music.”
I ask Black if in his view there are any modern movies that have the strength to stand up to a musical theatre treatment and his reply is sanguine: “I don’t see many movies these days. They’re nearly all about superheroes, and people of a certain generation don’t like these superheroes. Personally, I don’t like to see anything that can’t happen in real life. I take my grandson to Westfield and he sees this one, that one, Spiderman and so on, so honestly, I don’t know.”
The conversation returns to Sunset Boulevard, where Black tells me of his having recently met Jamie Lloyd (who will direct the Savoy production) for the first time. Lloyd is an acclaimed theatre-maker who in 2019 directed a thrilling Evita at the Regents Park Open Air Theatre.
“I was so impressed. And so was Christopher Hampton, because Jamie has done his homework and everything he said made sense. I don’t want to say too much more about it while the show rehearses with Nicole, but you’ll like it!”
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