It's all deliriously dark and nightmarish, its only shortcoming being its cynical lack of faith in humanity: only von Stroheim, superb as Swanson's devotedly watchful butler Max, manages to make us feel the tragedy on view. Runs April 27-May, Manatee Performing Arts Center. Directed and choreographed by Rick Kerby.

The performances are suitably sordid, the direction precise, the camerawork appropriately noir, and the memorably sour script sounds bitter-sweet echoes of the Golden Age of Tinseltown (with has-beens Keaton, HB Warner and Anna Q Nilsson appearing in a brief card-game scene). ‘Sunset Boulevard’ Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, book and lyrics by Don Black and Christopher Hampton. What follows in flashback is a tale of humiliation, exploitation, and dashed dreams, as a feckless, bankrupt screenwriter (Holden) pulls into a crumbling mansion in search of refuge from his creditors, and becomes inextricably entangled in the possessive web woven by a faded star of the silents (Swanson), who is high on hopes of a comeback and heading for outright insanity. Billy Wilders 'Sunset Boulevard is the portrait of a forgotten silent star, living in exile in her grotesque mansion, screening her old films, dreaming of a comeback. Billy Wilder, Gloria Swanson, and Erich von Stroheim on the set of ‘Sunset Boulevard’ (1950) The exteriors of Norma Desmond’s home on Sunset Boulevard were filmed at 641 South Irving Boulevard. Wilder directed and co-wrote the screenplay for Sunset Boulevard (1950), a film noir about a reclusive silent film actress starring Gloria Swanson and William Holden. One of Wilder's finest, and certainly the blackest of all Hollywood's scab-scratching accounts of itself, this establishes its relentless acidity in the opening scene by having the story related by a corpse floating face-down in a Hollywood swimming-pool.

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