You get a taste of Norma Desmond’s storied fictional career by seeing the various posters and pictures projected on the walls of the set during Porchlight’s Sunset Boulevard, but it occurred to me while watching Hollis Resnik inhabit the role of Desmond that she was seemingly born to play, that a collage of posters representing Resnik’s real 12 Jefferson Award-winning parts would be even more impressive.
Resnik’s tour de force performance of As If We Never Said Goodbye in the second act could be the impetus for award number 13. The other second act highlight worth mentioning is the bathing suit entrance of Billy Rude, as Joe Gillis, which evoked a bobby soxer reaction from a young lady in the balcony, causing Rude to ever so slightly, and amusingly, break character by giving an almost imperceptible wink to the audience.
Clearly, Mr. DeMille, Rude was ready for his close-up, which leads me to inform that the line made famous by Gloria Swanson in the original screen version came in at number seven on the American Film Institute’s 2005 list of 100 movie quotes. And her “I am big! It’s the pictures that got small” was number 24, which puts Desmond in a very select company of characters with multiple attributions, equaled by the iconic Dorothy Gale, Scarlett O’Hara, James Bond, Harry Callahan and the Terminator, and bested only by the immortal Rick Blaine.
As with other Porchlight productions, I left impressed with creative touches that enhanced the experience. In particular, although there isn’t a lot of dancing in the show, the choreographed movements of a couple of the group scenes have a silent era, controlled Keystone Kops feel that fits perfectly with Norma’s hunger for those past days of movie-making and stardom. She never says it, but she could have inspired the Terminator’s “I’ll be back.”