‘Sunset Boulevard’ Review: Nicole Scherzinger Astonishes

As she sings the final verse of “As If We Never Said Goodbye,” one of two showstopping numbers that bolster the musical “Sunset Boulevard,” Nicole Scherzinger turns her face skyward. Her architectural cheekbones reflect the glare of the spotlight, and her eyes disappear as she contorts her features into a mask of perverse pleasure. She — both the actress and the character she plays, the has-been screen legend Norma Desmond — seems, for a moment, to be inhaling not oxygen but motes of light.

Scherzinger’s performance as a fallen idol desperate to reclaim her fame is many things, among them a coming-out party for a performer whose plainly evident raw talent has long outstripped her ability to find a landing place in the entertainment industry. (Audience members will likely recall her from her role as the lead singer of the now-defunct girl group Pussycat Dolls or from her work as a reality-show judge.) It is also a capital-E Event, a thrill ride whose greatest pleasure may be that, under the direction of Jamie Lloyd, Scherzinger’s work exists within a production as bold as she is. Norma Desmond’s problem, as she tells us upon her entrance, is that she is big, but the pictures have gotten small. No such problem here. Scherzinger and the stage she inhabits push each other to grand extremes. The result is something like magic.

Lloyd’s “Sunset Boulevard” — styled in this production as “Sunset Blvd.” — is only the latest in the British director’s series of provocations. His 2023 “A Doll’s House” revival placed Jessica Chastain at the center of a minimalist stage and concluded with her opening the stage door to walk out onto the New York street. But where “A Doll’s House” whispered — quite literally, in the case of Chastain’s artfully muted performance — “Sunset Boulevard” howls. Steadicams thrust into the faces of the leads project their expressions, and the sweat on their brows, on a massive screen behind them. (This includes the extended opening to Act II, in which the company enters the theater after marching, on-camera, through Shubert Alley.) Group dance numbers choreographed by Fabian Aloise become a rollicking, violent spectacle; lighting designer Jack Knowles manipulates our sense of reality by alternating between glaring, obliterating spotlights and inky darkness. And Norma is haunted by a wordless, agile younger version of herself (Hannah Yun Chamberlain); her image in celluloid stalks the stage, rendered in physical space in terms that recall this year’s body-double freakout flick “The Substance.”

“Sunset Boulevard” may strike those who know their theater history as an unlikely production to generate such sparks. The last of the musicals Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote at the peak of his own fame, the show played Broadway with Glenn Close as its Norma in 1994; Close reprised the role in New York in 2017. The pleasures of that revival were largely metatextual: Norma, as in the 1950 film classic that originated her story, wants to restage long-ago glories and experience once more a moment that has passed. Close’s game, canny performance of reliving her own past couldn’t quite obscure the ungainliness of some of Webber’s songs, the dudgeon and occasional monotony of the sung-through score, or the strain of trying to generate plot friction in a story with only four major characters. (Five, if one counts Norma’s pet chimp.)

Lloyd flips those weaknesses into strengths: The songs that previously seemed like filler material are bulked out with angular, crisp dancing and now register as cris de coeur about the cruel vicissitudes of Hollywood. And the small circle of characters feels more dimensional than ever, with strong supporting turns by David Thaxton as Norma’s devoted, threatening butler and Grace Hodgett Young as the winsomely ambitious studio employee Betty Schaefer. It’s among the most remarkable aspects of Scherzinger’s performance that she creates space for Tom Francis, the appealing and gifted actor playing doomed writer Joe Gillis. (Like his three main castmates, Francis reprises the role after appearing in the West End production.) It’s through Joe’s eyes that we see Norma; he’s a broke and unemployed scribe who finds in Norma an easy mark. Together, they’re working on her comeback vehicle, one that Joe knows will go nowhere even as he gladly takes Norma’s money. As written, there’s a touch too much film-noir chill to the exchange: That Norma and Joe are mutually using one another is apparent, and somewhat thin gruel for an evening of theater. 

Scherzinger’s Norma, though, has a wicked contemporaneity and a genuinely seductive streak. (Deluded and lost in memory, Norma is capable of flickering moments of clarity, which Scherzinger renders with sharp wit and even a touch of vocal fry.) Norma’s timeline has been adjusted to account for Scherzinger’s relative youth — her Norma became famous in silent cinema in her teens — but it’s not solely Scherzinger’s age that makes Joe and Norma’s double act feel more convincing. Joe doesn’t love Norma. But, as elegantly carried across by Francis in what ought to be a breakout turn, he loves the role he can play for her. He may be writing one screenplay with Norma, and another with Betty. (Among the small miracles of this production is that the Joe-Betty pairing, long one of the show’s weaknesses, now bewitches.) But the poor dope’s magnum opus is the story of his life, one in which he’s the ultimate nice guy.

Unfortunately, Norma has a few notes on Joe’s ending. The 1950 film, directed by Billy Wilder, opens with Joe’s body floating in Norma’s pool; this version sees Joe crawling out of a body bag. Norma ultimately cannot bear to be confronted with reality, and the plain facts that Joe does not love her and has not written her the role of a lifetime break her. Scherzinger is horrifyingly, eerily quiet in the show’s final moments; though the trappings around her are big, her performance has suddenly gotten small.

It’s startling in part because of just how grand Norma has allowed herself to be — perhaps, like any star, even ones whose glitter has faded, she can’t be any other way. If Close’s more recent appearance as Norma, deep into her career, had a meta aspect, so too does Scherzinger’s, as she breaks out. Scherzinger has plainly been waiting for the right stage, and she puts every bit of fierceness and charisma into proving herself. In the show’s two signature numbers, both of them Norma’s declarations of her own worthiness, Scherzinger stands at center stage and belts with shocking vocal power and agility, surrounded by purgatorial swirls of smoke and blown out by that Lloydian white light. In its diva-forward, astonishingly unabashed embrace of pure drama and elemental emotion, the framing looks like the way a Hollywood filmmaker would envision a career-making Broadway turn. It feels like the role Norma and Scherzinger both were born to play. And it transports us into Norma’s mind, as we finally see the way that Norma sees herself.