At the start of Billy Wilder’s film noir classic Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood screenwriter Joe Gillis – the movie’s male lead and narrator – makes his first appearance floating face-down, dead, in an outdoor swimming pool.
Yet Kevin Pieper, the director and set designer for Quad City Music Guild’s new production of the Sunset Boulevard stage musical (running August 4 through 13), has some bad news. “I’ll let the cat out of the bag with you,” he says during our July 20 interview. “We don’t have a swimming pool. We thought about filling the orchestra pit, but that would kind of defeat the purpose.”