Sunset Boulevard – Savoy Theatre 2023/24

{Spoiler - click to view}
As the overture starts playing, Young Norma, who has been standing behind the curtain for a good ten minutes, does a little interpretative dance. The stage is bare, except for Nicole sitting at the back of the stage with her back to the audience, and a body bag in the middle. As the music goes on Joe opens and crawls out of the body bag. The whole "Let's Have Lunch" sequence is staged with characters coming on front stage, delivering their lines, and moving back: it's a very young cast, modernly dressed in black and white and looking like a zara advert. During the car chase, Joe holds a wheel-cum-camera as he sits in front stage while his face is projected on the LED screen and credits start appearing on it too, culminating with the title as the Sunset Boulevard motif starts playing.

Nicole looks like a star, and she's never more regal than when she stands there doing nothing. Her voice is brilliant, and the acting is very Real Housewifes of Beverly Hills. A lot of fingers snapping, hair flipping, and looking into the camera as if she were in The Office. Eg, when Joe warns her that he is very expensive she replies something like "Don't worry about money, HON–EYYY". Some lines are delivered directly into the camera and she got a lot of laughs, not sure if they were intentional. When Joe suggests that the audience doesn't want to see her in every scene of Salome, she replies "Of course they do" and then do the camera “What else would they have come for?” *wink wink*

You couldn't drop her in Trevor Nunn's production and expect her to be great, but it's a performance that works in this context, although you never get the sense that she used to be a movie star. She acts and talks like every woman in reality tv shows, and even when a more organic character emerges as act two goes on, I think we never really come to appreciate she used to be a Hollywood star – let alone wondering why someone looking so young and sexy and acting like everyone in showbusiness is not working in showbusiness anymore. "Nothing's wrong with being forty" (the line has been updated) "unless you're acting twenty" etc etc

The only bit that really doesn't work – imo – is Salome, in which she does a whole pussycat routine with even the split and sultrily rolling around the stage with spread legs like Velma in All That Jazz. It's a performance that works because it builds on NS' persona and career, I'd be curious to see if Rachel Tucker is directed to do the same or has a different approach, because some of the lines make sense only if NS delivers them. Young Norma is quite charming, works better than the Lonny Price's version from a few years ago, although she is not fully necessary.

I liked the use of the screen and the way the conversations at Paramount – Sheldrake telling Max they want the car, Joe meeting Betty again, Max telling Joe the truth – only appear on screen, while Norma remains center stage. She never leaves the stage for the whole of act 2. DeMille never appears, his face is just a gigantic silhouette on the screen, and it works.

Jamie Lloyd makes a lot of bold choices, and most of them work. The entr'acte and title song, as discussed, is entirely done on screen, starting with Joe chilling in his dressing room and watching the scene in which Gloria Swanson engulfs William Holden in her arms (the equivalent of act 1 ending) before meeting his fellow castmemebers as he walks through the backstage and sings the title song while he exits the stage door, goes around the block, enters the Savoy, goes down the endless stairs and finally enters the stalls and climbs on stage for the final note. It's trashy, it's gimmicky, I loved it, it was fantastic, and the audience ate it up. Biggest ovation till curtain call, got a full standing ovation, unlike "As If We Never Said Goodbye", which was partial.

Again, a lot of the choices sound ridiculous when described (and even when you see them), but most of them actually work. In the whole orchestral section between "The Phone Call" and Betty's arrival at the house Max, Joe and Norma run endlessly around the stage. When Joe tells Betty "That's Norma Desmond, That's Norma Desmond, That's Norma Desmon" the whole cast appears on stage, dressed in NS' black négligée. As the confrontation between Joe and Betty climaxes, all characters start running in a circle. Again, makes no sense, but it's fantastic. I think it kinda works only if you're willing to buy into it. I was ironically puzzled for most of act 1, but really engrossed in act 2.

The script and score have been trimmed, although it's not always done consistently. In the "Salome" reprise in the final scene, Norma says "Mad about the boy", but it makes no sense since she never presented Joe with the cigarette case before The Perfect Year – in which she really does tango.

For some reasons, they really try to make you feel for Artie, which is odd because I doubt anyone has ever spent a single thought on him. He dramatically walks around the stage as Joe and Betty sing Too Much in Love To Care. When they kiss, the huge LED screen on the back – think about the mirror in A Chorus Line or the original production of Cabaret – shows a close-up of Artie with a single tear rolling down his cheek. You can't make stuff like this up.


David Thaxton is usually brilliant at making boring characters shine (eg Giorgio in Passion), but he's not quite there yet, it was a lot of looking dour into the camera and not much else, but he's a fantastic actor and I'm surely he'll be great eventually.

Tom Francis is wonderful. He looks and acts a bit like Jeremy Allen White, wonderful voice, and charismatic stage presence. He is a bit young to be so disillusioned, but again everyone in the cast is too young. Grace Hodgett Young is a very good Betty too.

The orchestra is wonderful and it's very well sung.

It's not quite camp, but it has a minimalist sort of camp that makes it work. The purists will hate it – which is very fair, it's doesn't always work, and NS is not a Norma Desmond – but I had a blast.