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All that madness in Gloria Swanson's eyes at the end of Billy Wilder's 1950 masterpiece Sunset Boulevard is amplified to breathtaking lengths in Jamie Lloyd's commanding and gorgeous renovation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's 1993 musical Sunset Blvd. With a career-expanding performance that redefines the one-time Dancing With The Stars competitor Nicole Scherzinger as thoroughly as Lloyd's staging does Lloyd Webber's musical, the revival opening tonight at Broadway's St. James Theatre is a stunner, stark always, funny sometimes and ultimately terrifying.
The musical - which, like the film, has heretofore been Sunset Boulevard but is now stylized with Blvd.; to avoid confusion, I'll refer to the stage show, past and present iterations, with the abbreviation - has always been something of an also-ran in the Lloyd Webber oeuvre, known mostly for two, three, maybe four of its best songs, a big ol' staircase and the stinging behind-the-scenes feud between the composer and his original star Patti LuPone way back in the day.
The current revival, if it does nothing else, should put the show's mixed reputation to rest. With its silent movie-style black & white color scheme and heavy-shadowed expressionistic sculpting, Sunset Blvd. is quite unlike anything else on Broadway today, fierce and ferocious.
From the start, Lloyd stakes his claim on the material, doing away with the original staging's showy corpse-in-a-pool effect to present our drowned hero Joe merely unzipping himself from a body bag that we hadn't even noticed before. Initially we might be fooled into thinking we're about to see a rehash of the compelling theatrical ideas the director presented so well in his presentation of Betrayal with Tom Hiddleston in 2019 and A Doll's House starring Jessica Chastain in 2023. Stark lightings? Check. Celebrity casting? Check. Chilly and crystalline visuals. Double check. In fact, Blvd. begins with more fog than a San Francisco dawn, the cast largely in angular silhouettes thanks to side-of-the-stage klieg-like lights.
But a few minutes in, with crashes of sound and light and color and the scrolling of movie-style credits, Lloyd signals that the minimalism of his other productions will be augmented with here-and-there flashes of theatrical derring-do that sets Blvd. quite apart. True, he's borrowing the handheld camera device we've seen in recent productions of West Side Story and Network - both from director Ivo van Hove - but Blvd. one-ups those productions both in execution and purpose. One second of Scherzinger's narcissistic silent-star has-been Norma Desmond upstaging her costars for a better camera angle tells us pretty much all we'll need to know about the long-ago-faded Hollywood has-been.
Aside from the cast and all that beautifully lit fog, the Blvd. stage has virtually nothing by way of set furnishings. There's a large horizontal screen that hovers, ceiling-like, over the stage, tilting vertically when a backdrop is needed to bear the movie-like close-ups of a desperate looking Norma or sad-faced Joe (Tom Francis, boyish and cynical and Scherzinger's equal every step of the way), the penniless screenwriter taken in by the older star under the guise of script-doctoring a comeback project that Norma believes will be her return to the Hollywood A-list.
The plot points of the story are so familiar as to have become one of Hollywood's foundational tales of itself: Once ensconced in Norma's decaying Sunset Boulevard mansion, Joe finds the cash grab hard to give up, not to mention the pity he feels for this used-up human being who deserves better. Norma, for her part, is a monster, except for when she isn't, when the tyrannical facade slips just enough to reveal the beautiful, guileless and dream-filled 16-year-old starlet that made the Hollywood that made her. There wouldn't be a Paramount if not for her, she says, standing in for all the young talent upon which an industry and a city was built before being tossed into memory's gutter.
And while some have criticized the stunning 46-year-old Scherzinger's casting as Hollywood's most famous tossed-aside star this side of Baby Jane Hudson, the former Pussycat Doll's presence makes Wilder's original point all the more forcefully: When those on-stage cameras zoom in for merciless close-ups, silently comparing the results side-by-side on the screen with the much younger actress (Hannah Yun Chamberlain) playing Norma in her youth, the effect underscores just how stringent and misogynistic and insane Hollywood's - and society's - codes of beauty truly are.
While Joe is relieved to have a place to dodge creditors, he feels the guilt of a kept man and a true-love longing for Betty (a fresh Grace Hodgett Young), the young Hollywood hopeful with whom he's undertaken a screenwriting project. She happens to be the girlfriend of Joe's best friend Artie (Diego Andres Rodriguez), yet another source of guilt and angst to factor into the macabre horror of Joe's "home" life.
While Blvd.'s book and lyrics by Don Black and Christopher Hampton remain more or less faithful to Wilder's movie, Webber's score tends toward a melodrama not entirely in keeping with the film's dark comedic elements. The dichotomy was clearly evident in the original stagings of Sunset Blvd., with elaborate sets that featured, for example, a very very grand staircase down which a turbaned Patti LuPone or Betty Buckley or Glenn Close or Elaine Paige would sweep, an over-the-topness that, while certainly not without appeal, added another layer of camp to a musical that was already prone to it.
The only turban in view during Lloyd's production is seen in a quick glimpse during a remarkable backstage tour that opens the second act of the production, as Joe, or rather Tom Francis, leaves his dressing room (where Wilder's Sunset Boulevard is playing on a little TV) and makes his way downstairs and out to the street, stopping to say hello to his cast mates (the excellent David Thaxton, as Max, has a Pussycat Dolls poster in his room, a nod to Scherzinger's resume, and someone in an impossibly phony chimp costume is standing around for an entrance he'll never make in this production. (A chimp? If you know you know.)
Francis, all the while, is singing the musical's title song, even as he makes his way down 44th Street past the marquees of other Broadway productions and finally back to his own theater, his every move and expression having been capture by camera and projected onto the screen before our own eyes. When he finally takes the stage, a very still Norma waits for him.
The whole segment is done as a single tracking shot (courtesy ensemble member and camera operator Shayna McPherson) and it's a remarkable coup de theatre, even if we have seen it, or something similar (and lesser) in other productions. And here, it's not even the most thrilling moment of the show: That comes earlier, when Scherzinger, her straight hair hanging long, her only costume the flimsy black slip she'll wear through the entire production, stands near the edge of the stage to belt out the musical's best song - "With One Look" - a vocal tour de force that comes well before intermission and, at the reviewed performance, had a roaring audience on its feet.
The first of several showstoppers, "With One Look" not only displays Scherzinger's revelatory vocal skills, but the brilliant contributions of Lloyd's excellent creative team. Soutra Gilmour's set and costume design - the cast is attired in mix and match black and white costumes that suggest no particular era, perhaps a bit too coyly - while Fabian Aloise's choreography combines contemporary dance with the vaguely avant garde movement that has Norma posing at jutting, sharp angles calling to mind the bizarre imagery of a James Whale film. Jack Knowles (lighting design, superb), Adam Fisher (sound design, excellent), Nathan Amzi and Joe Ransom (video design and cinematography, flawless), and Cheryl Thomas (hair and makeup design, wonderful) are in peak form throughout.
And finally, a note on Lloyd Webber's score. With two original numbers cut from the revival - "The Lady's Paying" and "Eternal Youth Is Worth a Little Suffering," neither a great loss - this visually stripped-down (though not exactly to say simplified) staging does what the best of New York's City Center's Encores! productions have always done: Remove clutter, visual and aural, to allow the music to be heard with fresh ears. Lloyd Webber's Sunset Blvd. benefits tremendously from the approach. "With One Look," "As If We Never Said Goodbye," "The Perfect Year," "The Greatest Star of All," "New Ways To Dream" and the title song have never needed defending, but the current revival, with musical direction and supervision by Alan Williams, polishes even the more unexceptional numbers of the score - Every Movie's a Circus, Surrender, The Perfect Year - into small gems.
Spoiler alerts probably aren't necessary for a tale that's been around for 74 years, and Joe's emergence from that body bag at the show's beginning leave nothing to the imagination, but don't be fooled into thinking Lloyd and his superlative Sunset Blvd. have no surprises left. Wilder's film, for all its offbeat humor and quotable zingers, was always about the ugliness of Hollywood and the monstrous cruelty of an industry that drains its players like a vampire does its victims. We can only imagine how tickled Wilder might have been if given the chance to see the red smears all over the blacks and whites and victims of Lloyd's revival.
Title: Sunset Blvd.
Venue: Broadway's St. James Theatre
Director: Jamie Lloyd
Book and Lyrics: Don Black and Christopher Hampton
Music: Andrew Lloyd Webber
Cast: Nicole Scherzinger, Tom Francis, Grace Hodgett Young, David Thaxton, with Olivia Lacie Andrews, Brandon Mel Borkowsky, Shavey Brown, Hannah Yun Chamberlain, Cydney Clark, Raúl Contreras, Tyler Davis, E.J. Hamilton, Sydney Jones, Emma Lloyd, Pierre Marais, Shayna McPherson, Jimin Moon, Justice Moore, Drew Redington, Diego Andres Rodriguez. Mandy Gonzalez will guest star as 'Norma Desmond' at certain select performances.
Running time: 2 hr 30 min (including intermission)
