Amy Powers, Sunset Boulevard's Original Lyricist, Speaks: 'It Changed the Entire Course of My Life'

In miniscule type, buried in the credits in the theater program for the current Broadway revival of Sunset Boulevard, a brief note appears: “The producers gratefully acknowledge the role of Amy Powers in the lyric development of Sunset Boulevard.”

For Powers, it would have been nice to see her name in closer proximity with that of Andrew Lloyd Webber and co-lyricist Don Black—her old collaborators. “But,” she said, without malice, in a recent phone conversation, “It is what it is.”

Not wanting to open old wounds, I hesitated before reaching out to Powers to discuss her Sunset Boulevard experience. But then I saw the pictures that Powers shared of herself on social media, smiling in front of a poster for the new production—to which her husband had affixed a cheeky note: "additional lyrics by Amy Powers." I also learned she'd seen the show and enjoyed herself. “I can't say there are any wounds,” Powers said, “because if they're not scars by now, something's wrong.”

At the tail-end of the 1980s, Powers was a 28-year-old Harvard-trained lawyer and Columbia M.B.A. with what seemed like a promising legal career ahead of her. But after just a few months of practicing law, she wrote her first song. She was hooked. “Suddenly I'm obsessed with writing songs,” she said. “I wanted to just ditch everything.”

While still a lawyer at the international law firm White & Case, Powers signed up to study at the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop. At BMI, she was exhilarated by the company of creatives and the excitement of collaboration, developing her abilities as a lyricist as well as crafter of melodies. 

Powers’ aunt happened to move in the same circles as Shubert Organization chairman Gerald Schoenfeld. “My aunt told Gerry, ‘My niece has started writing lyrics, and she's somehow convinced that she should be a musical theater lyricist. Would you meet with her and tell her to keep her day job?’”

“Keep your day job” was indeed one of the first things Schoenfeld said to Powers. “And then he said, ‘Well, since you're here at the office, why don't you show me what you've got?’”

For the next six months, Schoenfeld set Powers a series of lyric-writing assignments. “He would ask me to write on particular subjects. I was handing in lyrics all the time.”

Around the same time, Andrew Lloyd Webber was preparing to embark on the creation of Sunset Boulevard. All he needed was a lyricist—a planned partnership with Howard Ashman never got off the ground due to Ashman's deteriorating health. (Ashman later died from complications of AIDS in 1991.) Schoenfeld had a recommendation.

Out of the blue, Powers answered the phone to hear a decidedly aristocratic British voice on the line: “This is Andrew Lloyd Webber. I’d like you to come meet me next week at my house in the South of France. I want to talk about writing a show with you.”

Powers was understandably shocked. “It’s like saying to somebody, ‘We like how you look on the bunny slope. So guess what: the Olympics are next week!’” It was also, she thought, impossible to turn down.

Shouldn't Lloyd Webber have tried to get to know her first? “Well, that was his way of getting to know me,” said Powers.

Schoenfeld offered some sage advice. “It’s going to be like a bucking bronco. Just hold on as long as you can.”

The following week, Powers met Lloyd Webber at his Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat property, overlooking the Mediterranean, to commence work on Sunset Boulevard.

From the outset, the collaboration was not what Powers had expected. In stark contrast to the dynamic collaboration and exchange of ideas at BMI, Lloyd Webber’s tunes were readymade—many were several years old—and set in stone. “He liked to have [lyricists] write to music that was already done,” she said. “It was less of a back and forth.”

Powers was struck by Lloyd Webber’s commercial instincts, his insistence on songcraft with the pop charts in mind. “What does this song need to get on the radio?” he would ask her.

Lloyd Webber was pleased enough with the fruits of their partnership that, when he married his third wife, Madeleine Gurdon, in early 1991, Elaine Paige performed one of the new songs at the wedding: “One Small Glance”—which, after a rewrite, would eventually become “With One Look."

Six months into the project, which by now had relocated to London, Lloyd Webber brought on the lyricist Don Black. Lloyd Webber and Black had worked together previously on Tell Me On a Sunday; Lloyd Webber appreciated Black’s sensitivity to female characters. For Powers, it was actually a happy development. “My sense of play and joy just skyrocketed—here was somebody I could go back and forth with. We had similar senses of humor.”

Powers and Black took long walks around Hyde Park together discussing the project. Powers fondly remembers the excitement of the moment when Black came up with the song title (and key lyrical phrase) “As If We Never Said Goodbye.”

Maybe she was naive, she admits, but it didn’t occur to her at the time that Lloyd Webber was potentially lining up her replacement.

Act One of Sunset Boulevard was unveiled at Sydmonton, Lloyd Webber's 5,000-acre country estate, in the summer of 1991. According to Singular Sensation by Michael Riedel, Paige leaned over to Black during “One Small Glance” to say, “You’ve got to do something about those lyrics.” (She would eventually sing the rewritten song in the West End.)

After the presentation, Powers went back home to New York, expecting to resume working with Lloyd Webber and Black in a couple of weeks. Instead, on September 20, she picked up a copy of the New York Times and read Alex Witchel’s theater column. Powers read that her lyrics—which she had, remember, co-written with Black—had met with a “lukewarm response” at Sydmonton and were the “dark spot” of an otherwise successful presentation. She also read that Lloyd Webber had decided to end the collaboration with her.

In a daze, Powers walked to Central Park and threw up. “It was devastating. I didn't know if I'd ever recover.” A lawyer friend advised her that, if she wanted to work in musical theater again, she'd best not to pursue legal action. “Musical theater,” said Powers, “is a lot like politics.”

Powers would end up with an “additional lyrics” credit for the show’s four tentpole songs—"With One Look," "The Greatest Star of All," "As If We Never Said Goodbye” and the title song—along with an undisclosed sum from Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Group. “You’d need a microscope to see it.” She never heard directly from Lloyd Webber or Black again.

The decades-long saga of trying to bring Sunset Boulevard to the stage features a few Norma Desmond-like figures. Powers’ role in the story is more like that of Betty Schaefer: “I was the young, fresh-faced, unjaded writer who gets cast aside."

The hardest part was feeling like she was "shut out of all the joy." In 1994, she purchased nosebleed seats to see Barbra Streisand perform “As If We Never Said Goodbye" in concert—an experience that felt less than celebratory. (Black, by contrast, spent a magical day with Streisand in her Beverly Hills mansion, tweaking the lyrics to said song.)

Patti LuPone, the original Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard in London, held a decades-long grudge when her time with the show was cut short. By contrast, Powers allowed herself a period of despair and depression and then moved on. Cling to hard feelings, she said, and “the person you hurt most is yourself.”

LuPone used her $1 million breach-of-contract payout from Really Useful towards installing a pool in her 85-acre property in Connecticut, naming it the Andrew Lloyd Webber Memorial Swimming Pool. Reminded of this during our phone call, Powers eyed her own swimming pool. “That tile over there, the one that needs to be replaced—I would say that is the Andrew Lloyd Webber Memorial Tile.”

Ultimately, though, Powers is grateful. She attributes her growth as a lyricist to her brief partnership with Lloyd Webber and the opportunity to witness his pop instincts firsthand. “My deciding to become a pop songwriter, I credit to Andrew,” she said. “That changed the entire course of my life in a great way.”

Powers went on to write songs for television and film, including the title song for the film When We Were Kings, songs for the animated Barbie movies and several other family entertainment projects. There were other musicals, too: Dr. Zhivago, Lizzie Borden and The Game. Today, she is an author, entrepreneur and, jointly with her husband, a theater producer.

Powers did not attend the original Broadway production of Sunset Boulevard in 1994. She did, however, enjoy the more recent opening-night festivities for the current revival. “It was stunning,” she said. “There's finally an appropriate postmodern way of looking at what is essentially this opera, this melodrama—I thought it was terrific and pretty electrifying.” Though she had the opportunity, Powers did not feel compelled to say hello to Lloyd Webber. “I could have,” she admits. “But it's water under a very lengthy bridge.”

Looking back, Powers recognizes that her experience working on Sunset Boulevard was the realization—however imperfect—of a crazy dream. “When I first became a writer, I was so excited about discovering my gift and my purpose that all I wanted was for people to hear my words all around the world. That is exactly what I said to the universe: 'Let my words be heard throughout the world.'”

As Powers notes, she quite promptly got her wish.

“But," she added, "this being my first job, unfortunately I did not also tell the universe, ‘And let me be fairly compensated and credited.’”