THEATRE / He makes 'em like they used to: Lloyd Webber has always harked back to bitter-sweet, old world glamour

FRANZ WAXMAN, who scored the original, would have killed for Lloyd Webber's main title theme - one of those dark, broody, slightly tarnished melodies with Hollywood nostalgia written all over it. The trick about pastiche is always to go one better than your original, make it your own. It isn't true that you can't spot a Lloyd Webber tune, that his melodies are somehow anonymous, even second-hand. The big lyric ballads are of course his stock- in-trade and he delivers an absolute corker within minutes of the opening of Sunset. 'With One Look' is archetypally Lloyd Webber: it's the hymnic quality, the way the melody achieves uplift and surprise with the second four-bar phase (that's the bit you go out humming), it's the urgency of the middle-eight.

The best music in Sunset (and characteristically the really iffy parts of the score are the novelty divertissements) is about nostalgia. That's no surprise. Melodically speaking, Lloyd Webber has always harked back to a bitter-sweet, old- world glamour with its roots in Viennese operetta (nowhere more so than in Phantom of the Opera, his most lavishly endowed score). There's even a sense in which nostalgia operates within his scores as key themes are woven into the underscoring, cross-fertilising, resurfacing as emotional climacterics.

It's no accident that Act 2 of the show is musically (and dramatically) much stronger. The memorability of a melody like 'With One Look' is stunningly re-affirmed when Norma revisits Paramount and the spotlight is fleetingly turned back on her. A great moment, heightened for coming so close upon her big I'm-still-here number 'As If We Never Said Goodbye'.

Other good numbers are more discreet but could prove just as durable: 'Surrender', 'New Ways to Dream' or the wistful 'The Perfect Year', which slips so naturally into Don Black's sentimental lyric. And there's the young lovers' duet 'Too Much in Love to Care', which could be the closest Lloyd Webber has ever come to a Broadway song. Perhaps we can no longer say, 'They don't write them like that any more.' He can, and often does.

'Sunset Boulevard' is at the Adelphi Theatre, London WC2 (071-344 0055)

(Photograph omitted)