Yes, it’s a revival of a 31-year-old musical that’s based on a 74-year-old black-and-white movie. And both are as fuzzily remembered by young audiences as the main character, Norma Desmond, is by cruel Hollywood.
Theater review
SUNSET BOULEVARD
2 hours and 35 minutes with one intermission. At the St. James Theatre, 246 West 44th Street.
But age is just a number — right, Norma? “Sunset Boulevard,” which opened Sunday night at the St. James Theatre, is Broadway’s most exhilarating show in years.
So much energy, freshness and unrelenting intensity courses through the veins of director Jamie Lloyd’s startling production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical from beginning to end, you’d swear it was brand new.
And adrenaline pumps through our bloodstream anytime the extraordinary Nicole Scherzinger, making her wondrous Broadway debut, wails a note.
She’s otherworldly as that reclusive has-been Norma. A revelation. And when the former Pussycat Doll belts Lloyd Webber’s stirring ballads, “With One Look” and “As If We Never Said Goodbye,” as haze dreamily swirls behind her, the audience all but levitates.
The entire production leaves you breathless. We’re transfixed from the moment the giant video screen — this staging’s chandelier — descends from the rafters bearing the image of actor Tom Francis’ dangerous eyes as struggling screenwriter Joe Gillis drives toward his doom.
From then on, Joe and the ticket-buyers out there in the dark are sucked into Norma’s delusional fantasy — that she still is the greatest star of all; that she’ll make her long-awaited return; that her whole sad life is one big movie.
A damn entertaining one, at that.
Anyone who’s watched Billy Wilder’s 1950 classic starring Gloria Swanson, or saw the show on Broadway in the 1990s and 2017 with Glenn Close, might worry that their glasses prescription is out of date. Lloyd’s production is unrecognizable.
Call it “No-Set Boulevard.” The director has tossed out the grand mansion with its endless staircase and left just a couple of chairs. There’s no 1930s Hollywood lots and sound stages. Scherzinger wears a silky black dress (costumes by Soutra Gilmour) instead of a turban and form-concealing shawl.
A few filler songs, like “The Lady’s Paying,” have been cut. Good! And anachronistic dances — a la “The Robot” — have been added. Norma, desperate to be half her age, sometimes speaks like she’s filming an Instagram reel.
A sensual dancer, Young Norma (Hannah Yun Chamberlain), tickles and tortures Norma with memories of her glory days. Choreographer Fabian Aloise’s movement ranges from alluring to chaotic.
It’s a lot. But some way, somehow, it all works magnificently.
That’s because the tragic tale of fame’s road to ruin is as true and relevant as ever. As Joe bitingly observes: “The world is full of Joes and Normas.”
At first, frustrated Joe is just a writer who can’t land a job, until one day when he’s chased by thugs down Sunset and stumbles into the mansion of Norma Desmond — a kooky silent film star who has been forgotten with the advent of the talkies.
She hires Joe to spruce up her awful screenplay “Salome,” which she plans to be her Hollywood comeback. With no other option, he moves into the cavernous house, lorded over by her Lurch-like butler Max (David Thaxton), and together Norma and Joe careen toward disaster.
Lloyd’s, by the way, is the first production of “Sunset Boulevard” I’ve seen in which the scenes involving Joe, Betty Schaefer (a strong Grace Hodgett Young), the third party in a messed-up love triangle, Artie (Diego Andres Rodriguez) and their LA writer friends are more than just boring water breaks for the actress playing Norma.
The cinematic closeups on their expressive faces as they fall in and out of love, set to Lloyd Webber’s sweeping score, adds real meat to sections that can easily sag.
At the same time, lighting designer Jack Knowles uses shadows and stark brightness to amp up the drama with haunting images straight out of a silent film.
Francis, smoldering and velvet-voiced in his Broadway debut, walks away with the musical’s biggest talker at the top of Act 2.
A feat involving video cameras, fresh air and a mountain of logistics, it’s thrilling, tremendous fun … and will infuriate some people. It wouldn’t be Broadway, after all, if somebody wasn’t whining about videos.
But the show belongs to the titanic Scherzinger, who makes an especially proud and feral Norma. Her confidence and burning desire to succeed makes her fall much greater than that of a dusty hermit.
It occurred to me, while watching her fluid arms as she sang “As If We Never Said Goodbye,” that the actress was channelling Michael Crawford’s ghoulish, lovesick Phantom.
“The Phantom of the Opera,” of course, played right across the street at the Majestic Theatre for 35 years until it closed last spring.
Now, Lloyd Webber’s back on 44th Street with a bona fide new stage star, and it seems fitting. As Norma says, “back where I was born to be!”