Fortunately for PCS season ticketholders, the spectacle is pretty impressive. G.W. Mercier’s set, a constantly moving contraption of stairways and panels and gates and couches, becomes a shimmering, surreal dream of mid-century Hollywood under Robert Wierzel’s alternately starry and watery lights. The costumes, drawn from Anthony Powell’s designs for the 1993 premiere, fall somewhere between the first season of Mad Men and actual madness. Norma Desmond’s songs aren’t particularly interesting, but Linda Mugleston delivers them powerfully. Local favorite Leif Norby gets a nice comedic turn as the menswear salesman. Some of the book, regurgitated verbatim from Wilder’s screenplay, is unintentionally hilarious. If you aren’t looking for emotional depth, good music or fun, you might leave happy.

But shouldn’t we ask for more from the theater than flash? Sunset Boulevard is a horrible mess of nostalgia, a musical composed of one decent hook and two hours of filler. I think I understand why Chris Coleman wanted to direct it—costume parties are fun, and all theater people love larger-than-life characters—and I assume there are enough movie buffs in Portland to make the show pay off. But I can’t imagine why Webber wrote the thing in the first place. I guess, after his success with musicals about cats and trains, he figured he could make a smash hit out of anything. Poor Sir Andrew—he used to be big.

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While Wilder’s film is a certifiable noir classic, its musical adaptation has plenty of problems. For starters, its score is built around about a half-dozen melodies that are used repetitiously, and there are only a couple of songs that rise to the level of the composer’s best work. Then there’s the problem of taking an intimate story about pathos and murder and putting it on a big stage.

On Broadway, producers made up for the show’s shortcomings by throwing millions of dollars into the stage design and casting big names like Glenn Close and Elaine Page in the title role. All the smoke and mirrors seemed to work: “Sunset Boulevard” won a slew of Tony Awards and ran for nearly 1,000 performances. But when it closed after just 2-1/2 years, it became thought of as a flop. After all, Andrew Lloyd Webber shows like “Cats” and “Phantom of the Opera” are supposed to run for decades, not years.

But when the show slips into Norma’s mansion, it runs into trouble. Linda Mugleston has a lot of fun with the facial contortions and florid gestures needed to make the one-time star come alive, and she provides some captivating moments, particularly in the second act with a beautifully sung “As If We Never Said Goodbye,” which she delivers with the right mix of hope and fear. But there’s never the sense that her Norma ever had the “it factor” that catapults a starlet into the stratosphere. Even with a dozen or so costume changes – and these are dresses that would make a drag queen envious – there’s no aura of faded glamour.

“Sunset Boulevard’s” other central character, struggling screenwriter Joe Gillis, is miscast. Kevin Reed has the right look, but he never projects sufficient hunger and desperation to make you believe that he could be pulled into Norma’s spider web. And on opening night, he struggled to hit the high notes on the title song.

There are some saving graces. Veteran Broadway character actor Larry Daggett is terrific as Max, Norma’s chauffer, servant and keeper of the flame. He takes command of all the campiness, and in the show’s finale offers the clearest glimpse into how Norma’s cyclone of insanity has been nurtured and enabled. And Sarah Stevens sufficiently bubbles in a small role as a studio script doctor trying to help Joe get a gig.

Because “Sunset Boulevard” is about big Hollywood movies, it needs a big sound to convey cinematic grandeur. Unfortunately, the nine-piece orchestra sounds tinny and thin. It also doesn’t help that the musicians are piped in from somewhere else in the building, giving the show a canned feeling.

And that’s the last thing you want with a show about the greatest star of all. “Sunset Boulevard” should leave audiences feeling the despair of Norma’s meteoric crash, but here it’s hard to muster much more than indifference.

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The fact that it exists, though… it’s kind of a sticking point.

Billy Wilder’s 1950 film is a movie about movies, about the corrosive effects of fame and the contrast between the magic of movies and the tawdry realities of Hollywood. It is a film that is perfect as a film. Period. Its story cannot be effectively told in any other medium, and why should it be? Why represent a close-up with anything other than a close-up? Sunset Boulevard does not need to exist in theatrical form, and it certainly doesn’t need to be a musical. Joe Gillis (Kevin Reed) jazz-handsing his way across stage, singing “Sunset Boule-vard, lethal boule-vard”—not only has it been stuck in my head for four days, but it’s flat-out goofy.

PCS’ staging is uncharacteristically modest for a season opener—there’s no turntable set, no mansion in miniature. There is a grandiose staircase, of course, for aging movie star Norma Desmond (Linda Mugleston) to make dramatic entrances, and a video screen on which pre-recorded footage fills in some of the difficult-to-stage bits in the tale of Norma’s love affair with opportunistic screenwriter Joe Gillis. A close-up image of a woman’s face serves as a backdrop—static and lifeless, it too misses the point, though Robert Wierzel’s lighting design makes a valiant bid for dynamism.

It’s possible that a truly virtuosic performance from Mugleston could’ve saved this production—reportedly, Glenn Close’s turn as Norma Desmond on Broadway was outstanding. Mugleston doesn’t pull it off, but it’s unfair to pin the failures of this production on anyone other than composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and writers Don Black and Christopher Hampton. If I hadn’t been familiar with the movie, the musical would’ve made no sense whatsoever. The relationship between Joe and the fetching screenwriter Betty Shaefer (Sarah Stevens) is completely unearned—a slavish attention to narrative exactitude ignores the fact that some scenes don’t work without a close-up. And seriously, Portland, what was with the collective gasp of surprise when Norma shot Joe? (Oh: Spoiler!) Did you really not know that was coming? Stay home. Rent a movie. Here’s a thought: Rent Sunset Boulevard.

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