DIVALICIOUS Review! Sunset Blvd. Believe the Bloody Buzz: Nicole Scherzinger is Here To Win (and Shatter!) Your Heart
By Caroline Cao | October 25, 2024 | Celebrity & Culture
All the reasons to see Broadway’s new hit revival: Sunset Blvd.!
In the song number “Salome,” Nicole Scherzinger performs a sultry floorwork, an anachronistic dance that appears stylized after contemporary choreography that would be familiar to her as a former Pussycat Dolls. Yes, it’s funny. The audience certainly chuckled; perhaps some got the reference. But we can also discern that Scherzinger’s Norma Desmond feels powerful and loves having the camera and audience at her command. And this revival, which premiered on Broadway this week, is all about the thrill of the camera screen.
Jaime Lloyd’s direction of this Sunset Blvd. revival (lyrics and book by Don Black and Christopher Hampton; composition by Andrew Lloyd Webber) wouldn’t be what an old theater fan might expect of Sunset Blvd., the stage musical of the 1950 black comedy film, unless you are well acquainted with Lloyd’s direction before, Cyrano and A Doll’s House among them. And yet, Lloyd’s choices could not be more fitting for the material.
Lloyd’s take on Sunset Blvd. is minimalistic, but it’s the kind of minimalism that highlights the grander details of its expression. The ensemble only wears black and white; the stage is bare except for a ginormous video screen behind the actors, where a live feed from the actual performance you are witnessing is broadcast. The video design by Nathan Amzi and Joe Ransom sees the live filming medium as a tool of psychology. When these live feeds are screened for the audience in conjunction with stage performances, we see that psychology play out. Norma, the obscured silent film star, devotes her entire being to that camera. The ensemble has stony deliveries. Norma, though, is overtly theatrical.
We also see the camera psychology in play first when Tom Francis, playing the screenwriter stranded at Desmond’s decaying mansion, takes the camera as if it’s a steering wheel, and his bulging eyes stare straight at the audience. The cameras are both tools of control and the prison. Lloyd’s direction suggests that everyone is trapped in the theatricality, the cinematic and theatrical. If they don’t leave the melodrama or the camera frame soon enough, they are doomed. One character, Grace Hodgett Young’s Betty Schaefer, seems to grasp this lesson just in time.
The Broadway musical previously starred Glenn Close, who reprised her role for a brief 2017 Broadway revival, and the Patti LuPone casting drama is a different story for another day. Scherzinger plays and owns her Norma Desmond like any good Norma Desmond, a diamond left unappreciated by her era. Following Desmond’s whims is her servant Max, the imposing David Thaxton, the “keeper of [Desmond’s] flame.” Thaxton’s performance also insinuates a level of grooming that the previous version did not lean into.
Interlaced into Sunset Blvd. is the ruthless machine of the film industry that, in Norma’s words, smashes the idols.
Sunset Blvd. does something that radicalized revivals should do: engage the material with new angles and push the form. We see Sunset Blvd. as something old and novel all at once.
SUNSET BLVD: THE ALBUM, recorded live at the Savoy Theatre in London’s West End, will be released globally on Friday, October 25.
Photo credit: Marc Brenner
