In a stark and arresting opening scene we see a man unzip himself from the body bag he is in, climb out and move centre stage to directly address the audience. It is typical of the searing boldness and dark humour of director Jamie Lloyd’s Olivier Award-winning revival production of composer Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Blvd., with book and lyrics by Don Black and Christopher Hampton based on Billy Wilder’s 1950 classic Paramount movie starring Gloria Swanson, which is now running on Broadway.
It transpires that the man is Joe Gillis (Tom Francis), a struggling screenwriter trying to score his next paycheck as he becomes ever more jaded and disillusioned with the film business, losing his last shreds of artistic integrity and ambition in oder to survive. Gillis tells us that “a homicide had been reported and promises to give us “the real facts” before the newspapers and “those Hollywood piranhas” can distort what transpired. We are then immersed into his POV flashback of how events unfolded, leading to their inevitable, strikingly staged, bloody conclusion.
That “crazy mansion” which Gillis finds himself repulsed, beguiled and quickly ensnared by belongs to a reclusive and forgotten Silent Era movie star—”maybe the biggest star of all”—Norma Desmond (Nicole Scherzinger). Desmond lives a largely solitary life with only her adoringly dutiful butler Max (a hilarious and heartbreaking David Thaxton) for company. He is a rather sombre figure who ominously looms over proceedings and steps in to manipulate Gillis into staying by guilt-tripping him that Norma will harm herself if he leaves.
Gillis happened to find himself on Norma’s property by chance while attempting to evade a duo of menacing debt collectors, arriving just in time to witness the funeral of her beloved former companion, a chimpanzee. Having initially mistaken Gillis for an undertaker, the actress soon draws him into her bizarre world by seducing him with the promise of some easy money and a taste of the high life, enlisting his services to perfect her interminably long and dull Salome screenplay. It is an epic, dated work beyond repair which she intends to take to Cecil B. DeMille as a vehicle for her to star in.
A belief in one’s ability and star quality might be necessary for the profession, but Desmond has become enraptured by her own mythology as a Hollywood legend. She appears to have been consumed by the studio hype of yesteryear and is tragically delusional about the prospect of her making a comeback, sorry “a return”, as she insists it be termed.
Sunset Blvd. remains one of the essential stories about Hollywood and Lloyd’s production manages to evoke Hollywood at the turn of the 50s while also feeling bitingly relevant. As it pokes at the underbelly of the entertainment business, every note still rings true today as evoked in the lively establishing ensemble number “Let’s Do Lunch”. It is a song that captures the ruthless, dog-eat-dog ambition of those striving to make it in the industry, the stench of trying to get ahead as aspiration turns to desperation, the two-faced fobbing off from the gatekeepers, and the stain of casting couch culture. Despite all that, Gillis’ friends spend their New Year’s Eve dreaming that their success is still come in “This Time Next Year”.
Francis brings an appealingly rugged charm to Gillis which keeps us enticed and sympathetic despite the character’s considerable flaws and he makes for a stoic and cynical counterpart to Scherzinger’s more impassioned and eccentric Desmond and there’s electrifying chemistry between them. Scherzinger’s performance is utterly entrancing throughout, and she is a commanding presence whether in complete stillness, or playing it up for an imagined camera. Her Desmond is a mercurial figure who veers from the exaggerated, highly mannered artifice of her star persona, with an affected purring voice to match—channeling the great roles that she has played like Joan of Arc—to quieter, uncertain moments of distressing fragility. When we do glimpse the vulnerable human behind the mask, like in the opening of “As If We Never Said Goodbye”—her passionate love song to the movies when she finally returns to the studio lot and revels in her all-encompassing devotion to her career—it is equally captivating and deeply moving. Not to mention how exceptional her singing is, which goes beyond technical perfection and feels just as alive and exhilaratingly unpredictable as her acting.
Fabian Aloise’s dynamic choreography incorporates some anachronistic dance moves, like Joe and Norma pulling out the robot on New Year’s Eve. This is most striking in the scene where Norma reminisces about her glory days on screen and hits the floor with a dance routine that encompasses recognizable flourishes of iconic Pussycat Dolls choreography. Norma Desmond has always been an amalgam, a composite character of Silent Era movie stardom that emphasizes the way that the entertainment business often discards those female stars it once treasured and moves on to the next bright young things. In this production it broadens that significance to bring in Scherzinger’s own biographical elements, which serves to make her performance all the more compelling.
As Jamie Lloyd puts it, he wants the audience to question, “Where does Nicole Scherzinger end and where does Norma Desmond begin?” In fact the entire production feels designed to remind us that we are watching a show that is being performed before our eyes and to contemplate, in a show about show business, where does reality end and the performance begin? One particularly effective recurring device sees each actor remove their microphone as they make their final exit. That sense of self-awareness made me all the more engaged, feeling complicit in the creation of the piece.
In contrast to the larger-than-life characters that she is surrounded by, Grace Hodgett Young’s performance as Betty Schaefer, an ambitious Hollywood assistant who is equally smitten with Gillis’ talent as a writer as she is by the man himself, might at first glance seem underplayed in its naturalism, but she pitches it just right and it becomes increasingly poignant. Betty represents a different kind of ambition and has managed to maintain her humanity and integrity. In a town of bullshitters, Betty tells it like it is and thinks that motion pictures should have something to say to an audience that should be credited with intelligence. But pehaps she is just as delusional as Norma in her own way in believing that she can make it without compromising, selling out or succumbing to the darker side of the business.
With stark but stunning lighting design by Jack Knowles and sparse set design by Soutra Gilmour, the stage is frequently filled with dry ice. Powerfully, it is the combined imaginations of the cast and the audience who fill in this space with what is not literally shown, including no props (aside from a few New Year’s Eve party hats), not even the smoking gun. While the production’s sexy monochrome costume design (also by Gilmour) often resembles contemporary rehearsal attire, with Desmond dressed in a slip dress that emphasizes the character’s disquieting allure.
One of the aspects that makes this production so electrifying is the way it blends a sleek cinematic quality with a heightened theatricality, incorporating a giant screen as a backdrop at times, showing a live video feed from the on-stage cameras that Norma plays to, resulting in some extreme close-ups whether she’s ready for them or not. Whereas other production’s use of filmed elements can feel distancing, here the results serve to draw us in closer, and feel intimate and immediate. The use of live video is thrillingly introduced at the top of the show when Francis holds a handheld camera using its square handle like a steering wheel as the character drives through Los Angeles with the opening credits playing behind him.
In an astounding achievement that merges theatre and live video, that had me simultaneously engrossed and questioning, how they hell are they pulling this off?, the opening of Act Two sees Tom Francis make his way from his dressing room backstage, down the staircase, and out onto West 44th Street. There he delivers his propulsive, urgent and indignant interpretation of “Sunset Boulevard” on the sidewalks of Midtown Manhattan flanked by the theatre’s security guards. It is an audacious move by Lloyd that really pays off, creating a jaw-dropping sequence on screen inside the theatre, before Francis reenters the house through a side door of the auditorium and climbs back up on stage.
With such a stripped back show visually, Webber’s music and Black and Hampton’s evocative lyrics take centre stage. The production’s orchestration, by Webber himself, is exquisite and under the musical direction of Alan Williams his compositions sound rich, atmospheric and sweepingly cinematic while the vocals have real vigour and bite to them. It is a show that makes us question hyperbolic, grandiose terms like “the greatest star of them all”, but this breathtaking production deserves every accolade. In fact, it might might just be the greatest show of them all on Broadway right now.
By James Kleinmann
Sunset Blvd. officially opened at the St. James Theatre on Broadway on October 20th, 2024 and is now booking until July 13th, 2025. For more details and to purchase tickets head to: sunsetblvdbroadway.com. SUNSET BLVD: The Album is available now on The Other Songs label.