Broadway review by Adam Feldman
In the 1950 film masterpiece Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood glamour is a dead-end street. Stalled there with no one coming to find her—except perhaps to use her car—is Norma Desmond: a former silent-screen goddess who is now all but forgotten. Secluded and deluded, she haunts her own house and plots her grand return to the pictures; blinded by the spotlight in her mind, she is unaware that what she imagines to be a hungry audience out there in the dark is really just the dark.
One of the ironies built into Billy Wilder’s film, which he co-wrote with Charles Brackett, is that there really was an audience in the dark watching Norma: the audience of Sunset Boulevard itself, whom Norma is effectively addressing directly in her operatic final mad scene. That slippage between the real and the imaginary is even more pronounced in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1993 musical adaptation of the story, by dint of its being performed live onstage. And Jamie Lloyd’s very meta and very smart Broadway revival of the show—which stars the utterly captivating Nicole Scherzinger as Norma and Tom Francis as Joe Gillis, the handsome sell-out screenwriter drawn into her web—pushes it even further through the prominent use of live video. The tension between the real and the imaginary is expanded to include a mediating element: the filmic, whose form can range from documentary to dreamscape.
Thus described, Lloyd’s approach may sound academic—but in practice, it is often thrilling. The original production was famous for the lavish excess of its set and costumes. Here, by contrast, designer Soutra Gilmour’s set is mostly blank space, and she costumes the cast in basic modern black-and-white streetwear, sometimes with athletic socks pulled high. (When the ensemble performs Fabian Aloise’s sharp choreography, it looks a bit like an updated Gap ad.) Even Norma wears just a satiny black slip; this is Sunset, stripped. But you don’t miss the frills: Jack Knowles’s excellent lighting—and the video design by Nathan Amzi and Joe Ransom—fill out the scenes with ample film-noir atmospherics and help Lloyd shape the staging for maximum narrative and emotional impact. Not for nothing has the title been tightened to Sunset Blvd.
Sunset Blvd. | Photograph: Courtesy Marc Brenner
Lloyd’s combination of focus and mixed-media variety provides a dynamism that Sunset Boulevard needs. Don Black and Christopher Hampton’s libretto has been judiciously pruned and polished for this revival; the excision of two lesser songs, ”The Lady’s Paying” and “Eternal Youth Is Worth a Little Suffering,” makes Norma’s isolation more complete, and the scenes between Joe and his screenwriter friend Betty (Grace Hodgett Young, believable and grounded) are more realistic and specific. But with the major exception of Norma’s big moments, Lloyd Webber’s score is heavy on filler. Repetitive jazz leitmotifs—motifs lite—fill out the score like Hamburger Helper as we wait for Norma’s two beefy, “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina”—style solos: ”With One Look” in the first act, “As If We Never Said Goodbye” in the second.
Scherzinger makes these moments worth the wait, and then some. Just as Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard drew resonance from the real-life stardom of its Norma, Gloria Swanson, this one plays with Scherzinger’s musical fame as the frontwoman of the Pussycat Dolls. “Nothing’s wrong with being 40 unless you’re acting 20,” says Joe, and Scherzinger spends some of the show riffing playfully on the notion of an aging pop star on social media. This Norma twerks and does the splits; she fans her legs as she rolls across the stage. After bragging that “no one could play her like I can”—the “her” in question being the teenage Salome—she turns to an onstage camera and silently mouths the word “periodt!” Babbling about her astrologer, she slips into the California vocal fry of a Kardashian.
In real life, before our eyes, Scherzinger is terrific-looking. But the same camera that once made Norma’s beauty eternal—“Caught inside that flickering light beam is a youth which cannot fade,” says her glowering majordomo Max (David Thaxton), depicted here as a mix of bodyguard and superfan—can be unforgiving now; when a close-up of her face is blown up on a giant screen behind her, you can see the baggage she carries under her eyes. Still, Norma is restored to full luster when she returns to Paramount Studios for what she thinks is a meeting with the legendary director Cecil B. DeMille. (He is shown only as a head in silhouette; the truly powerful don’t need to be seen.) Bathed in warm light for what seems like the first time in this chilly and shadowy show, she is radiant—she looks the way the movies in her head make her look.
Sunset Blvd. | Photograph: Courtesy Marc Brenner
In this scene and elsewhere, Scherzinger commands the stage with electrifying confidence. Her singing is gorgeously fluid and controlled, and she knows how to work her songs for drama; singing “I’ve come home at last,” she holds her note on “home” for more than 10 full seconds, earning thunderous claps when she wraps it up. But her silences are as important as the notes. Later in “As If We Never Said Goodbye,” she takes a long pause after singing “so much to live for,” and I heard a few actual gasps. In “With One Look,” she gets applause just for striking a pose between verses, steadfast as the figure on the mast of a ship.
Sunset Blvd. is obsessed with reproductions. The bravura sequence that opens the second act—captured live in a single camera shot—finds Francis singing the heck out of the loungy title song, both backstage at the St. James and outside on 44th Street, where he poses in front of the lifesize photo of himself outside the theater. A related twinning happens throughout the show as Scherzinger’s Norma interacts with a dream ballet version of her younger self (played by Hannah Yun Chamberlain). Part of what makes this revival so absorbing is that you don’t always know where to look—at the actor on stage or the same actor live on screen. The giant images tug at your eye; you sometimes can’t help choosing them over the small, real person who is actually there. In this revival, itself a kind of re-production, that doesn’t feel like a gimmick or a distraction. It’s a new way to see an old dream.
Sunset Blvd. St. James Theatre (Broadway). Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber. Book and lyrics by Don Black and Christopher Hampton. Directed by Jamie Lloyd. With Nicole Scherzinger, Tom Francis, David Thaxton, Grace Hodgett Young. Running time: 2hrs 30mins. One intermission.
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Sunset Blvd. | Photograph: Courtesy Marc Brenner
