Wreathed in swirling stage smoke, edging towards the audience in a black slip, arms outstretched as if wanting, defying, daring, threatening and inviting us all at once, Nicole Scherzinger as Norma Desmond isn’t kidding.
“With one look I’ll ignite a blaze,” she sings in Norma’s camp-to-the-max, melodramatic “With One Look,” the standout, sweeping Sunset Blvd. song that is a succinct résumé of the power of the silent movie star that Norma is, or was. That song over, our Broadway audience, to varying degrees of whooping, standing, hollering, and applauding… well, lost its damn mind.
It wasn’t just Scherzinger mega-fans in thralls of ecstasy. As Norma and as herself, Scherzinger ignites multiple blazes of originality, mischief, wit and drama in the stupendous revival of the classic Andrew Lloyd Webber musical (St. James Theatre, booking through July 6, 2025). The show—with book and lyrics by Don Black and Christopher Hampton—transferred laden with awards from London’s West End and opened on Broadway Sunday night, directed with a magnificent witch’s brew of winking satire, absolute dead-seriousness, and stark elegance by Jamie Lloyd.
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In this parable of fame, delusion, and Hollywood’s endemic dysfunction, the helpless moths orbiting around Norma flutter with their own distinction. Tom Francis plays Joe, the writer ensnared by the delusional Norma to refine her screenplay about Salomé that she sees as her ticket to return to film star greatness, is a phlegmatic if unmalicious chancer. The excellent David Thaxton as Max, Norma’s lugubrious and devoted majordomo (and more!), who insists she is still a huge star, is both comic and terrifying in his devotion and dedication to her. Grace Hodgett Young does all she can to animate the musical’s most thankless role, Betty, who falls for Joe.
Lloyd’s show is a meta-piece of theater in the most pleasurable, least grating of ways—based on Billy Wilder’s classic 1950 movie, it is its own homage to the power of movie-making using the most inventive of theatrical techniques that in other productions (video design and cinematography are by Nathan Amzi and Joe Ransom) can be intrusive and annoying. Here they are vital additive, witty, and complementary, and marry theater- and film-making gorgeously. The shadows of film noir and the stark beauty of black and white photography and movies assume a striking immediacy of animated light and shadows right in front of us.
The show also uses Scherzinger’s own stardom, lightly but cleverly, to underline Sunset Blvd.’s focus on what fame means: why do we watch these people, what do they command in us, what do we give them, what do they glory in, expect and manipulate, and why are we so happy to be manipulated by their shimmeringly confected charisma? Don’t leave immediately when the show ends—see Lloyd underline his point by rolling actual film-style credits after the actors leave the stage.
Those who have seen previous Lloyd productions—like Jessica Chastain in the relatively recent A Doll’s House revival—will not be surprised to find the look of Sunset Blvd. to be spartan and unbehoven to the historical era.
Soutra Gilmour’s scenic and costume design is monochromatic and simple: Norma in a black slip, Joe in white T-shirt and black slacks; no set decoration bar the sight of the real life theater stripped back to its studs to signify a film set. We must imagine cars, swimming pools, and sweeping grand staircases. However, all the relentlessly swelling, OTT musical lushness Lloyd Webber demands is supplied by his and David Cullen’s orchestrations under Alan Williams’ musical supervision and direction. Jack Knowles’ lighting design is one long, gorgeously spotlit, smoke-filled homage to the silent movies and imagined continued stardom played out in the windmills of Norma’s mind.
The clamorous ovation at the end of this superlative show—the perfect mix of bombastic and restrained, the most fun a tragedy could ever be—says it all. It is not the usual Broadway standing ovation: polite and dutiful. It is not even the appreciative and happy standing ovation: heartfelt and feelgood. This is something else. The whooping and applauding goes on and on, a wave upon wave of loud appreciation, no one in any rush to stop or leave.
The only thing close to this kind of audience fervency in recent years was the reaction to Bette Midler in the 2017 revival of Hello, Dolly! At Sunset Blvd. too, you think the roof could legitimately blow off, or the theater simply launch into outer space powered by an explosive burst of pure gay joy. There should be paramedics outside to make sure everyone emerging, dazed and delirious from the crazy fabulousness of Sunset Blvd. stays safely upright. In the best ways, the show takes camp and spectacle to oxygen-needed-on-Everest levels.
Amazingly, the actors right through this extended curtain call stay in stern-looking character, apart from—the night I went—Thaxton allowing himself a teasing outline of a smile, before he snapped back to inscrutable implacability. I hope this cast are allowed to start screeching like self-congratulatory banshees once they are out of our sight.
The velocity of the audience reaction to Sunset Blvd. is not just about Scherzinger. It’s about the force and concerted visual punch of the show, as executed so expertly by Lloyd.
Scherzinger gives her full-throated diva best to the role, and—just as the best movie directors do—Lloyd ensures we cannot keep our eyes off her. This he does in the cleverest ways possible, making a musical about a silent movie star that is also a semi-film in beautifully lit black and white. We see Norma in close-up, smiling knowingly at us, as well as suffering, enjoying, and emoting. Lloyd knows how to toy with the boundaries of theater and fan worship to let us know the musical is in on the joke, but never enough to detonate it too knowingly from within.
Somehow, we take this Sunset Blvd. absolutely seriously while laughing at Norma’s craziness, and our craziness for nourishing the circus of fame she and Scherzinger embody. She speaks in a divine semi-purr, a menacing demi-whisper that you strain to hear—actually, slightly scared to catch every word. The likes of “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small” and “I’m ready for my closeup, Mr. DeMille” sound like sinister incantations.
The use of cameras also means other moments when the story lags—in the story of Joe’s doomed relationship with Betty, and all the exposition about the venality of Hollywood and all the stuff about criminals and shady goings on—that we get if not clarity, then an appealing visual urgency with dancers (the show’s feast of choreography is by Fabian Aloise) lining up in vertical and horizontal rows, splayed out and fluttering and slinking this way and that.
As with Chastain’s exit at the end of A Doll’s House, Lloyd doesn’t keep his directorial scope restricted to the theater. At the start of act two—as you may have seen the videos on YouTube, or seen how the company performed it in London—Francis heads out into the streets around the theater, and Shubert Alley, to sing the magnificently loopy title song—“Sunset Boolerrrvard!”—with a team of security people and backing dancers, and of course notoriously unpredictable real-life New York to keep at bay.
Producers insist this is live every night, with Adam Fisher’s special sound design ensuring we hear the song sung as if on stage, with no interjections of honking horns or impatient pedestrians calling Francis an asshole for impeding their progress.
This sequence is a total thrill, not least because it begins with Francis leaving the theater, with some very fun peekaboo moments such as seeing inside Scherzinger’s dressing room to see her clad in the kind of bejeweled headgear traditional Norma Desmonds wear. In Thaxton’s dressing room is a picture of Scherzinger’s band, the Pussycat Dolls. And out into the streets Francis goes, singing to camera, before emerging back into the theater via side door. Later, “The Perfect Year,” that song that is about hope against everything denying hope, is sung with defiant party hats, with hugs and delicate dancing and a hanging silver curtain. It really cuts to the quick, with Scherzinger and Francis’ shrugging off of demons all too brief.
That the whole show is so breathtaking, the bad moments of Sunset Blvd. stand out harshly, particularly a messy sequence towards the end where everyone starts running about on stage to signify the series of events which lead to the tragic, dramatic end back at Norma’s mansion. It feels the laziest, basic movement-class bit of execution in an otherwise gold-standard show.
Lloyd’s denouement returns us squarely to its stunning mainframe with Joe’s shooting, stripping, and blood smeared over faces and bodies. Just as Wilder does in the last frames of the 1950 movie, Norma becomes a shimmering out of focus image on that imagined screen between her and us, Scherzinger singing and swearing to us in her delusion-state to be back, right there with us, the biggest star of all.
It looks like she is both receding from us and advancing towards us—a miasma of celebrity. It’s insane, glorious, and wrenchingly sung as a most unusual thing: a crazy-person threat you only wish to be fully realized. Like I say, applaud and whoop for as long as you like, and good luck getting out of the St. James alive and upright.
