Nicole Scherzinger is Norma Desmond. Not literally, but in director Jamie Lloyd’s vision of Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Sunset Blvd., there’s not much difference between a silent movie star in 1949 and a pop star over 40 in 2024. The production that officially opened on Broadway on October 20 is minimalist and metatextual, and should be alienating. Yet by stripping it down, Lloyd has made what was originally grandiose and over the top into something intensely personal and gripping. It helps that Lloyd Weber’s collaborators were playwrights Don Black and Christopher Hampton.
There wasn’t anything wrong with that grandiosity. Billy Wilder’s original film Sunset Boulevard provided a perfect story of broken dreams, fakes, and phonies to match Lloyd Weber’s pop opera visions. In this production, we get no glitz and glamour. Everyone dresses in black and white at odds with an environment that at best is shades of grey. They’ve been directed to be almost Brechtian (yes, I have a license for that term) in their removal from emotion — most of the time.
Norma, of course, has enough emotion to make up for it. Director Lloyd starts the show with Scherzinger dancing as Salome, the subject of her overwrought screenplay. Or maybe it’s not Norma, but a vision of her younger self — the screen idol that she cannot let go of being. Or maybe again, it’s a dance right out of Scherzinger’s days in the Pussycat Dolls. Despite what some may prefer, sensuality never goes out of style.
Then the show really begins.
Instead of set pieces, a screen tilts into view upstage, and when Joe Gillis (Tom Francis) drives his car away, it’s actually a camera rig. We’re faced with a huge close-up, and actual opening titles. This isn’t Wilder’s movie, but Lloyd has found a way to use film language in a stage musical that enhances it instead of dividing focus.
The effect reaches its highest point when Norma has her butler Max (David Thaxton) play her silent film classic, Joan of Arc. Norma flashes back to her youth, and the screen reveals her younger self with the stunning double of Hannah Yun Chamberlain. It fades back and forth between Chamberlain, who really does look like a young Scherzinger, and Scherzinger herself. Still beautiful at 46, of course, but allowing us to see the lines that 46 has wrought. In 1949, that would have relegated a female movie star to an awkward dowdier phase; in pop stardom 2024, you’re simply not supposed to look 46. Norma can retreat into her own memory, but time (and the camera) annoyingly reveals everything.
In Wilder’s original film and the original West End/Broadway productions, Norma (Gloria Swanson) was 50; here, the age has been lowered to 40. A crueler judgment, perhaps, and instead of retreating to a Hollywood mansion, a star in 2024 retreats into being a judge on a reality show.
Except now, Scherzinger has been matched with a role that allows her to pull out all the stops. Each of Norma’s songs garners standing ovations. That’s not an exaggeration; Scherzinger is just that powerful. And again the parallels must be noted; as the lead singer of the Pussycat Dolls, at least one of her songs, “Dontcha,” was so popular it was a beer commercial played constantly on sports broadcasts. I didn’t know who she was then; I just knew that even my 4-year-old was singing that song. But that faded.
Scherzinger’s past plays well into the role. She turns to the camera with knowing looks and hair flips that Swanson (or Glenn Close) couldn’t have gotten away with. At the end of the intermission, the camera goes backstage to acknowledge a classic costume and line cut from this production. Which then goes into what Broadway fans have already seen/heard — the stage action actually bursting into Shubert Alley, as Tom Francis sings the bitter title song.
With the lights of Broadway subbing in for the lights of Sunset Boulevard, it’s a bold move that just proves the illusion is everywhere. That includes the idea that everything we’ve seen in the show may all be in Norma’s head. As the song sort of goes, she did give the world new ways to dream.
Sunset Blvd. performs at the St. James Theatre in New York City at least through the beginning of July 2025.
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Also, I justify covering musicals because I maintain they’re science fiction — set on worlds where people casually burst into song, sort of like that Strange New Worlds episode…
