New Ways To Dream: Jamie Lloyd's Mesmerizing Revival & Nicole Scherzinger's Brutal Wakeup Call
The Intelligent Showmosexual's Guide to Theatergoing and Ticket-buying With a Key to the Pictures
Content Guidance: this critique assumes at least a basic knowledge of Sunset Blvd.’s plot. If you need a précis, look elsewhere; if you’re sensitive to spoilers, you’ve had about 75 years to see the movie, so…
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To say I went into Jamie Lloyd’s revival of Sunset Blvd. skeptical is an understatement. In general, I’m not a fan of productions where I see the director more clearly than the characters. There have been exceptions—I loved Daniel Fish’s polarizing revival of Oklahoma and Sam Gold’s even more divisive (i.e., widely reviled) revival of The Glass Menagerie—but I usually don’t enjoy it when concept seems like a higher priority than storytelling. Moreover, one of the production’s most buzzed about features, its extensive use of video, is a recurring gripe of mine in “edgy” staging. My feeling is: use the tools of the medium in which you’re working; let theatre be theatre, and, if you really need to use film to tell your story, make a movie. My misgivings were further exacerbated by photos that came out of its earlier incarnation in London, inspiring memes like the one below on Instagaym, and my extreme dislike of Rebecca Frecknall’s revival of Cabaret, which London critics and audiences embraced as enthusiastically as they did Sunset.
Nevertheless, I made it my business to be at Sunset’s first preview. I felt I owed it to my 12-year-old-self, who would have given anything to experience a major production of Sunset at the ground level. And indeed everything about the evening suggested it was an “event.” Andrew Lloyd Webber sat two rows in front of me. Director Jamie Lloyd worked the crowd. Cecily Daniels smiled sweetly at the young Musical Theatre Fangirl telling her how much she loved Schmigadoon. I was charmed by the buzz, but I refused to be taken in by it. I was there for Sunset, not for Instagram.
When the overture began, I reminded myself to remain open, even though I felt my reservations rising, as the production announces itself as stylized from the moment the lights come up. But…then…a clever bit of staging for the posthumous entrance of Joe Gillis (Tom Francis) impressed me, not only because it was unexpected, but because it immediately signaled that Lloyd was not interested in recreating iconic touchstones from the film. Still, a moment does not a production make.
The ensemble filed in for the opening number, decked out entirely in black and white, a nod to the original film and immediately creating an atmosphere of noir. Again, clever. And, at the same time, a little annoying: those black and white costumes were highly contemporary, despite a supertitle informing us that our story was still taking place in 1949. Then, they started singing. “Let’s Have Lunch,” the opening song, had become “Let’s Do Lunch,” which I also knew to be anachronistic…because my Sunset Blvd. coffee table book from the early 1990s told me that they’d revised the song’s original lyrics to be more historically accurate. Other, smaller lyrical changes (some of which are clever, some of which are genuine headscratchers), as well as the choreography’s distinctly modern aesthetic, also situate us in the here and now—in direct opposition to that 1949 supertitle. When are we?
There was, however, no mistaking where we were. The ensemble delivers their lyrics jadedly and directly facing forward. Cynical as they are, they’re still always on the lookout for someone or something better. This was unmistakably Los Angeles. “It’s a cool effect,” I thought, “but is no one actually going to speak with each other the whole night? This is going to get old real quickly.”
Just as I started thinking my initial doubts about Lloyd were more on-target than whatever confidence he’d quickly garnered, Joe and Betty (Grace Hodgett Young) made eye contact. Although their bodies were still angled out, the adjustment was more than an indicator of the important change in their dynamic; it was a sign that Lloyd’s concepts would shift as necessitated by the narrative. Moments later, after Betty helps Joe dodge the men trying to repossess his car, the first use of video came—but in a way that was so simultaneously theatrical and cinematic, for the first time, it occurred to me, “Holy shit, I might actually love this revival.”
And here’s where I’ll stop essentially live (dead?) tweeting my experience because here, with Joe’s arrival at Norma’s home—historically referred to as a palazzo, but now described as a McMansion (more anachronisms)—is where I succumbed to Lloyd’s vision. It’s where I, for the most part, stopped experiencing the production part-by-part because it became a cohesive whole. It’s where actors finally turned to face each other and could truly relate to each other. It’s where Max, reinvented by the vocally thrilling David Thaxton less as a stoic butler and more as a tortured bodyguard, ushers Joe inside to meet Norma, who is certainly the spine of any Sunset, but here also seems to be the raison d’être of Lloyd’s entire concept.
As Norma, Scherzinger floats in, somehow simultaneously both ethereal and feral; beautifully delivers an infuriatingly truncated version of Webber’s haunting “Surrender”; and begins growling at Joe as soon as she realizes he’s not whom she thinks he is. Her animalistic characterization of Norma suggests something primal about the need for attention driving her character and, perhaps, all of us. Knowing Scherzinger to be a pop star and a judge on a singing competition, I feared her singing would involve nonstop, American Idol-esque showboating, but her formidable instrument is strategically applied to the score with variation and seemingly the utmost respect for what’s written.
Lloyd’s dogged devotion to minimalism creates some unnecessarily clunky moments in the storytelling—the dead chimpanzee Norma eulogizes is now in another room; the screenplay she’s written that Joe says “looks like six very important pictures” is nowhere to be seen; her New Year’s gift to Joe, and Betty’s later curiosity about it, are cut, but a pivotal reference to it in the finale remains intact. However, the combination of Lloyd’s ideas is greater than the sum of their parts. Much of this thinking, particularly in the first act, seems inextricably tied to Scherzinger’s casting. The entire production urges us to consider Scherzinger’s celebrity as someone who has struggled to (1) remain as relevant as she was ~20 years ago and (2) capitalize on her early potential. It’s a highly intentional blurring of the lines between actress and character that is shrewdly mined for meaning, but also makes me wonder how the revival lands on those who are unfamiliar with her “star text.”
Despite my general reservations about the incorporation of video in theatre, I was surprised to find Lloyd’s use of it organic and thought-provoking. Scherzinger/Norma plays to the camera so shamelessly, anachronistically, and with such direct pandering to the audience, it seems intentional that it recalls the way some stars engage with social media, especially older stars (like, I’m sorry to say, my beloved Madonna) whose posts often smack of desperation as they try to mimic what younger celebrities are doing on TikTok, Instagram, etc.
Lloyd’s use of video elsewhere in the production is often just as stimulating. So much attention has been paid in the press and on social media to the opening of the second act that I expected to be underwhelmed, but Francis’s backstage tour and outdoor rendition of the title song is so deliriously meta and technically impressive, it’s impossible not to be entertained by it. Less discussed but, for me, more intriguing are the sequences where Lloyd uses the camera not to replace onstage action but to heighten it. For example, it zooms in on Joe and Betty while they connect at a New Year’s celebration, thrown by her fiancé Artie (Diego Andres Rodriguez), as they’re surrounded—and, in fact, obscured—by a dancing mob of jubilant partygoers. The combination of the intimate camera work and frenetic choreography captures the experience of intensely connecting with someone in a crowd in a way that could not be accomplished had only one medium been used; the effect is achieved only by combining the filmic and the theatrical. Later in the performance, an ongoing device where characters remove their earpieces upon exiting the narrative is introduced on video and then builds to a crushing conclusion.
In a production stacked with meta-theatrics, references to the Pussycat Dolls were perhaps inevitable, but it feels downright ingenious to deploy them in “Salome,” the song where Norma describes the film she’s envisioning as her comeback (er, return). As she enacts scenes from her screenplay, Scherzinger’s Norma’s actually does old Pussycat Dolls choreography. Even though it gets laughs, I found it to be one of the most fascinating choices in the revival. Scherzinger is still gorgeous, and she executes her dance moves of yesteryear flawlessly…and yet, at the same time, there’s something grotesque about watching her do overtly and crudely sexual choreography that we associate with her younger self. So, why is it grotesque on her now? Just because of her age? Because of the context? Never before would I have guessed that a rendition of “Salome” could inspire such reflection on my own internal biases around ageism.
Other anachronistic and/or meta flourishes don’t have the same payoff, including a projection of the text from the last scene as Joe and Betty’s screenplay (on a Mac) and a regrettable dance break in “The Perfect Year.” While they’re just as daffy as the Pussycat Dolls references and do elicit some titters, they don’t feel as thoughtful or personalized. Conversely, Lloyd’s cuts of “The Lady’s Paying” and, to a lesser extent, “Eternal Youth Is Worth a Little Suffering” help to maintain the generally effective dark tone, but also deprive the audience of some welcome levity, dilute Joe’s increasing dependence on Norma and Norma’s belief in the eventuality of her movie, and, worse, create some excruciatingly awkward transitions.
Nevertheless, the calculus of reinvention still adds up emphatically in Lloyd’s favor. His progressively more abstract staging in the second act cranks up the tension so forcefully, Sunset feels less like the black comedy that it began as on film or the musical melodrama that it began as onstage and more like a bona fide thriller. By the time the production reaches its climax—at which point Lloyd and his design team brilliantly introduce some color to their otherwise black-and-white design—it feels positively Grecian.
For anyone who’s been clocking how frequently I invoke the names of those involved with the revival, it should come as no surprise that I left thinking its “greatest star of all” is Jamie Lloyd. His vision is so singular and so fully realized, he opened my eyes to new ways of seeing material that I literally know by heart. But his vision could not be realized without his uniformly compelling cast, including a dynamic ensemble who has not gotten the recognition they deserve.
Francis is a confident, capable and charismatic anchor, though the cool detachment that defines his performance—and the production’s overall style—deprives him of playing a big emotional arc. Young acts her scenes with a convincing combination of earnestness and a low tolerance for bullshit, but doesn’t navigate the music as satisfyingly. In a much smaller part, Rodriguez makes such a strong impression, I can’t wait to see what he does next (and would love to see him, one of two understudies for Joe, go on for Francis). As mentioned before, Thaxton is in such glorious voice, his singing alone would have made his Max special, but he also has such a fresh take on the character, he banishes thoughts of Eric von Stroheim and George Hearn. And if it wasn’t clear from what I’ve already written, Scherzinger proved herself to be worthy of the hype. Her performance is deservedly an event. Is she a great actress? I don’t know. She benefits greatly from the production being so radically different from its predecessors that you can’t really compare her to a Glenn Close or Gloria Swanson. But she is a fiercely committed actress, and it’s exhilarating to see someone commit to such bold choices so wholly and fearlessly. Furthermore, it’s not hyperbole to write that no one has ever sung the role better.
All that being said, I wanted to center Lloyd in my praise for the production even more after the controversy surrounding Scherzinger’s post-election posts on Instagram. Despite waffling on the subject of whether we should separate the art from the artist, I generally land on the side that we should (with some obvious exceptions…I’m not going to asterisk a discussion of Hitler with “but what a painter!”). Here, however, I’m not sure I can—not only because we’re at a terrifying moment in American history where our democracy and rights are being aggressively threatened, but because, as my friend Holly C. astutely pointed out, this is a production that capitalizes and arguably even relies on our knowledge of Nicole Scherzinger the Person. If I’m supposed to bring what I know about her career and celebrity to my experience of this Sunset, then how can I justifiably compartmentalize her abhorrent politics or, at best, unwillingness to take a stand at a moment in history when it is imperative that we all do?
When I returned to see the alternate Norma Desmond, Broadway stalwart Mandy Gonzalez, I desperately wanted to be just as thrilled as I was the two times that I saw Scherzinger. Unfortunately, though Gonzalez turns in a respectable performance with a particularly touching final monologue, the experience showed me just how dependent much of Lloyd’s concept is on his star. It was a fine afternoon at the theatre, but the production just didn’t blaze on all cylinders the way that it does with its headliner. (Side-note: Gonzalez has openly discussed how important it was to her that she wear her hair curly as Norma, which I applaud, but I sure wish the creatives had wigged the actress playing her younger counterpart accordingly; as it is, she bears such a striking resemblance to Scherzinger, it’s distracting.)
Interestingly, it worked much better when I attended the one performance where original Norma standby Caroline Bowman went on before departing to originate a role in Smash. Without taking anything away from Bowman’s significant skill—she is a superlative vocalist and intelligent actress with very sharp comic timing—part of what made the experience exciting, specifically in the way that it is with Scherzinger, was a house packed with her family members, friends, and fans. Because the audience already had a connection to the afternoon’s star, they could transfer their knowledge of her to the production and create a reciprocal, meta relationship similar to the one general audiences have with Scherzinger. Perhaps if I’d gone to the show when Gonzalez’s fellow original castmates from In the Heights all turned up, the same effect might have been achieved.
So where does that leave my relationship to this production of Sunset? Can I recommend it? The two times I saw it with Scherzinger (both before the election), it was enormously satisfying and did everything that I want a revival to do. Without Scherzinger, it neither made as much sense nor felt as exhilarating. Do I want to go back to see her again? Hell, yeah, but, to paraphrase a lyric from the show, until Scherzinger makes things right, I will not allow myself to surrender.
a guide to ticket-buying
Price and location breakdown for the four times I’ve seen this production of Sunset
Sept. 28, 2024 (first preview): $332.92 / Orch. Center K101 (face value with fees from ticket vendor, SeatGeek)…a great seat…orch. center I, where Lord Lloyd Webber sat, and J are the only rows that would have been better
Oct. 24, 2024: $66 / Balcony D5 (through TodayTix)…my beloved friend Molly D. was visiting and wanted to see the show, but didn’t want to spend a lot of money…I was initially reluctant because the St. James balcony is so high and far back, it has made it difficult to connect to other productions, even musicals as big as The Producers and Bullets Over Broadway. However, this was an entirely different experience. The vantage point the balcony offers in terms of the video projections and their contrast in size with the actors makes it a fascinating place to watch the show. Incidentally, Molly’s boyfriend bought a last-minute ticket and ended up in the rightmost seat in the very last row of the balcony…and still loved it.
Dec. 24, 2024 (with Mandy Gonzalez): $85 / Orch. Right H1 (bought as a next day matinee tickets from TKTS Lincoln Center)…another great seat; however, this is a very “center-oriented” staging, so I probably wouldn’t sit more than four seats off the center aisle in the right or left sections
Jan 12., 2025 (with Caroline Bowman): $110 / Orch. Center J114 (bought as a next day matinee tickets from TKTS Lincoln Center)…the best of the seats I’ve had
a key to the pictures
Much to Glenn Close’s chagrin, there is no movie musical of Sunset Blvd., but here are some ways you might get a taste of it on a screen:
Nicole Scherzinger singing “As If We Never Said Goodbye” on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert
Tom Francis performs “Sunset Blvd.” at the Olivier Awards
My post about my history with Sunset include video links to the Tony’s performance and a decent slime tutorial with Betty Buckley; however, you can usually find MANY more live videos on YouTube, including a full capture of the 2017 revival with Close, and clips with Elaine Paige, Karen Mason, Linda Balgord, and Petula Clark.
It’s a strong piece of theatre - kudos to Jamie Lloyd - and I love how this revival is introducing a new generation to Sunset!