It has a car chase, a swimming pool and a crazy silver screen legend as its lead character. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical based on the classic 1950 Billy Wilder film feels like a lot of show for the Watermill Theatre’s little stage. This revival by Craig Revel Horwood (of Strictly Come Dancing fame) has to encompass the work’s grandiosity without the gargantuan ornate sets that furnished Trevor Nunn’s original 1993 West End production. Often, it successfully makes a virtue of intimacy and simplicity, bringing wit and humanity to a work susceptible to hollow spectacle, but the immediacy that makes it feel fresh also exposes the threadbare patches in the show’s fabric.

The opening musical motif - a swelling, minor-key theme that swirls around Norma Desmond’s crumbling mansion - is charged with anticipation. Strutting, percussive company numbers, buzzing with the babble of the cross-cutting voices of Hollywood moneymen and would-be go-getters, are thrillingly energised. They sound terrific in Sarah Travis’s stripped-down new arrangements performed by a cast of actor-musicians. The brass is sassy, the strings are lush and most of the singing is equally ravishing.

Even the furniture dances on a set, by Diego Pitarch, in which Norma’s spiral staircase revolves, a chaise longue spins over to become the sign of Schwab’s drugstore, a producer sucks on a fat cigar while playing the double bass and a piano keyboard stands in for the typewriter of Joe Gillis, the show’s screenwriting antihero. But with the actors trying valiantly to impose emotional intensity on to Don Black and Christopher Hampton’s book and lyrics, the thudding lines that muffle the sharper ones become unavoidably apparent, as do the score’s repetitiousness and syrupy excesses.

The star of the show, naturally, is Kathryn Evans as Norma, whose pop-eyed camp mannerisms and full-throated voice can fall away in a second, exposing a startlingly touching vulnerability. Evans embraces grotesquery, but the desperate longing that underlies her queenliest posturing or her most Medusa-like face-pulling peaks when she revisits the studios where she was so adored. As actors play out a scene in dream-like slow motion on the movie set behind her, she basks in the artificial light and in her own lovely delusion of continuing celebrity.

Ben Goddard as Joe could approach some of his numbers with more cocky insouciance, but he does suggest this handsome young opportunist’s self-loathing as well as his cynicism, his face expressive of mingled pity, guilt and resignation as he submits to Norma’s passions. His delivery of the title song is both boastful and bitter. He may be exploiting her, but he is also seduced by Evans’s dark glitter. And so, too, are we.

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