Diva alert! Donna Murphy is playing Norma Desmond in a reading of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Sunset Boulevard” this week at the Roundabout Theatre Company.

I’m of two minds about this project, which is being directed by Michael Mayer (“American Idiot,” “Spring Awakening”).

I’m delighted because its score has some of Lloyd Webber and lyricist Don Black’s best songs, including two enduring standards, “With One Look” and “As If We Never Said Goodbye.” Both have been recorded by a parade of divas — Patti LuPone, Glenn Close, Betty Buckley and Barbra Streisand among them.

Though it ran three years on Broadway (1994-1997), “Sunset Boulevard” was not a financial success, generating more headlines than ticket sales.

Lloyd Webber ditched LuPone, who opened the show in London, before bringing it to New York. He had to pay her $1 million, which she spent on a pool — “the Andrew Lloyd Webber Memorial Pool,” she called it.

Lloyd Webber replaced her with Close, who received raves and a Tony. But when Close went on a two-week vacation, one of Lloyd Webber’s subalterns faked the grosses to make it look as though the show wasn’t dependent on its star.

Close let the press know she was one unhappy diva, generating such headlines as “Bullets Over Broadway.”

Buckley and Elaine Paige succeeded her, but the show was so expensive, only Streisand could have saved it.

Trevor Nunn’s production may have been bloated, but the script, adapted from Billy Wilder’s classic movie, is sound and the score lives on. Mayer has a stripped-down version in mind, focusing on the characters and the songs. (And if anyone can play a diva who goes insane, it’s going to be Murphy.)

But why is the Roundabout, a nonprofit theater, doing a show written by the most successful commercial composer of all time? What’s next at the Roundabout — Cirque du Soleil?

I’ll give the theater a pass on “Sunset Boulevard,” however. And I just may sneak in to hear Murphy sing “As If We Never Said Goodbye”— and steal a few moves for my next karaoke night.

Speaking of divas, Broadway bid a jolly and touching farewell to one of its greatest, Elaine Stritch, on Monday at the Al Hirschfeld Theater. Hal Prince, Nathan Lane and Holland Taylor told hilarious stories, and the performances by Buckley, Bernadette Peters, Lena Hall and Christine Ebersole were as good as anything you’ll see on Broadway right now.

Stritch never paid for a ticket to a Broadway show. She just appeared at the box office and demanded to be let in. Only one show refused her: “Mamma F - - kin’ Mia!” as she called it.

The tribute ended with a clip from the ’70s of Stritch singing “Here’s To the Ladies Who Lunch.” That was inevitable and, frankly, I thought I’d heard her do that song one too many times over the years. But there she was, in close-up, telling us to “look into their eyes and you see what they know — everybody dies!”

It was brilliant and chilling. It also reminded me that Stritch was a great actress who happened to do musicals.