Sunset Boulevard – Broadway St James

42ndBlvd has been consistently on point here with this production... You've definitely got my attention once again

Let me tell you, if "sales dip" it will only be because of externals (markets, finances, difficulties in NYC) the buzz and excitement around this is off the charts.  I don't remember the original or 2017 revival coming close to how this is all over the place.  And definitely hitting different demographics.

Tiny clue? 

Pop diva, movie star or big MT name? 

I think I'd struggle to get Nicole out of my mind if this were to open in LA with someone else. She's made this role so unique to her. Gaga could handle the acting but Nicole has a much better voice in my opinion.

No truth in the LA rumour and certainly not with anyone other than Scherzinger

Review from The New Yorker magazine:
STARS COLLIDE IN "SUNSET BLVD." and "& JULIET"

In Billy Wilder’s ur-camp masterpiece “Sunset Boulevard,” from 1950, Gloria Swanson plays Norma Desmond, an aging grande dame of silent film, who slides from self-regarding eccentricity into homicidal delusion. Intent on a comeback, Norma has seduced a young screenwriter named Joe Gillis (William Holden), but, when both he and the studio reject her, she swerves into a permanent dream. “All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my closeup,” she famously purrs to a wall of crime-scene photographers, her face smoothed flat with grease and powder. In the film, Gillis still narrates—though he’s just been shot dead, like Jay Gatsby, in the pool.

Andrew Lloyd Webber débuted his musical adaptation of “Sunset Boulevard” (co-written with Don Black and Christopher Hampton) in 1993, returning to the dark sensibility of his then recent mega-hit, “The Phantom of the Opera.” Webber might have felt on familiar ground. The Phantom and Norma are both attention-hungry spiders in glittering lairs; both are fantasists whose faces, either twisted or simply aging, become their obsessive focus.

Faces—gigantic, black-and-white ones—are certainly the main scenery of the director Jamie Lloyd’s souped-up and stripped-down “Sunset Blvd.,”newly transferred from London to the St. James (after winning seven Olivier Awards), and starring Nicole Scherzinger, onetime lead singer of the Pussycat Dolls. Casting a gleaming Scherzinger as the fading Norma is deliberately counterintuitive: a burl('')—will have to exist in the imagination.

Like Webber, Lloyd enjoys both the gothic and quoting himself. (From “A Doll’s House” to “Cyrano,” there seems to be no drama he won’t stage in a stark emptiness, whether that makes the story hard to follow or not.) The set and costume designer Soutra Gilmour, his frequent collaborator, has created another elegant void for him, filled with white fog and an immense movie screen. Ensemble members, in black-and-white streetwear, carry cameras mounted on Steadicam frames, shooting live closeups of the main characters: Scherzinger’s Norma; the screenwriter Joe (Tom Francis); and Max (David Thaxton), Norma’s butler and chief enabler. Almost every projected face stares directly at us—I was reminded not of film noir but of Andy Warhol’s lonely, mug-shot-inspired “Screen Tests.” Even when Joe and Norma kiss, they seem depersonalized; cold mannequins, colliding in space.

During the Act II overture and the subsequent title song, the video designers Nathan Amzi and Joe Ramson have arranged a thrilling coup de théâtre: a live camera tails Francis from his dressing room down through the guts of the building, then into the street. The company glides behind him as he sings and strides along, staring down the camera’s barrel. It’s been done before—Lloyd sent Jessica Chastain out of “A Doll’s House”; Ivo van Hove did a live walk-and-talk video in “Network”—but here the spectacle is so precise, the superimposition of Broadway on L.A. so droll, that Lloyd turns the cliché fresh again.

A camera makes its own decisions about who has star quality. Francis, as a physical presence, can be recessive, but there’s a silvery charisma in his projected image that his co-stars never find. For all her beauty, Scherzinger onscreen remains unexceptional; she mugs for the camera, like a TikTok influencer taping a reaction video. But, in the final mad scene, she abandons sarcasm, drenches herself in blood, and turns into a terrifying harpy. Tellingly, she’s best when she stops vamping for the camera’s attention and starts reaching, her fingers curled into claws, for the people in the room.

For much of the previous two hours, though, she’s been rolling her eyes. Maybe she can’t believe how shoddy a big-deal musical can be? Despite its many lush passages, Webber’s sung-through score is bloated with repetitive vocal figures, and the lyrics by Black and Hampton fall flat in comparison with lines lifted from Wilder and his co-writers, D. M. Marshman, Jr., and Charles Brackett. For instance, Norma’s iconic “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small” is followed almost immediately by the lyrics “No words can tell / The stories my eyes tell / Watch me when I frown / You can’t write that down.”

If Webber’s uneven musical is a grainy copy of Wilder’s film, this production is an intentionally distorted copy of a copy. But Lloyd is less interested in the specifics of either work than in the chthonic rage underneath. For the folks giving standing ovations during the show, the strategy seems to work. Scherzinger’s voice does contain a terrific power: instead of phrasing lines as thoughts, she attacks every clause with big, jackhammering blows. I was reminded that she has been a judge on “The X Factor”—there’s a sense of desperate competition in the way she delivers her numbers, holding nothing in reserve. The audience responds gratefully to this level of self-abnegation, and the frankly chilling sounds that come out of her. That’s all Norma Desmond wanted! She doesn’t mind suffering, as long as the people in the dark love her for it.

Meanwhile, “Romeo + Juliet,” at the Circle in the Square, takes a more straightforward approach to its star casting. Sam Gold’s inventive, emo-lite production features Rachel Zegler, from the recent film version of “West Side Story,” as Juliet, and Kit Connor, from the teen-Brit TV show “Heartstopper,” as Romeo. The moment we see them, running full-tilt out of a shouting gang of rowdy youths—the 2024 stylings by the costume designer Enver Chakartash include Hello Kitty backpacks, mesh tanks, and lots of baggy pants—they’re already avatars for Gen Z romance.

But the couple must also kindle something together. I found myself thinking wistfully of the National Theatre’s recent film with Jessie Buckley and Josh O’Connor, in which Buckley’s clever Juliet reads as being capable of diverting O’Connor’s Romeo from his violent path. Here, Zegler and Connor both seem like innocents, with a kind of inverse chemistry—as they get farther away from each other onstage, their connection appears to strengthen. Their finest moment is their first one, when they’re almost a full twenty feet apart. Zegler sings a song (written for the show by the über record producer Jack Antonoff) at a Capulet party, and her performance roots Romeo, an otherwise flighty fellow, to the spot.

After his work at Circle in the Square with “An Enemy of the People,” Gold has clearly taken the measure of in-the-round space, and so the rough-and-tumble Montague gang—which includes the wonderful Gabby Beans as Mercutio—clambers around in the catwalks overhead, dropping down near theatregoers in the standing-room section. Connor is particularly deft at interacting with the audience: he plays Romeo as an inexperienced softboi, offering the whole room his flustered courtesy. (When he does a chin-up to kiss Juliet on her balcony, his biceps bulging, the audience gasps. All that flirting really pays off.)

Gold and his company seem most comfortable in these swoony sections. The fights are silly; the final scene in the tomb is bizarrely quick and awkward. But, earlier, the mood is wonderful, and Antonoff’s electronic underscoring gives everything a kind of fuzzed-out, after-midnight sweetness. There’s a lovely moment when the circular black stage floor flips itself over to show a field of flowers. (The set design is by the collective called dots.) I know that the “bank where the wild thyme blows” line is from a different play, but it somehow feels as if it belongs to this production. The cast here is most believable as young people—enemies or not—who stay up all night and then fall asleep in a pile, like puppies in long grass. ♦

Published in the print edition of the November 4, 2024, issue, with the headline “Star-Crossed.”

Here's the full review that the previous post references -from The Daily Beast

Broadway Review: Nicole Scherzinger Stuns in ‘Sunset Blvd.’
BOOK A TICKET! NOW!
Nicole Scherzinger mesmerizes—and raises the roof—in an electric, fabulous revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber‘s “Sunset Blvd.” on Broadway, directed by Jamie Lloyd.
Tim Teeman
Updated Oct. 21 2024 9:00AM EDT /
Published Oct. 20 2024 10:00PM EDT

Wreathed in swirling stage smoke, edging towards the audience in a black slip, arms outstretched as if wanting, defying, daring, threatening and inviting us all at once, Nicole Scherzinger as Norma Desmond isn’t kidding.

“With one look I’ll ignite a blaze,” she sings in Norma’s camp-to-the-max, melodramatic “With One Look,” the standout, sweeping Sunset Blvd. song that is a succinct résumé of the power of the silent movie star that Norma is, or was. That song over, our Broadway audience, to varying degrees of whooping, standing, hollering, and applauding… well, lost its damn mind.

It wasn’t just Scherzinger mega-fans in thralls of ecstasy. As Norma and as herself, Scherzinger ignites multiple blazes of originality, mischief, wit and drama in the stupendous revival of the classic Andrew Lloyd Webber musical (St. James Theatre, booking through July 6, 2025). The show—with book and lyrics by Don Black and Christopher Hampton—transferred laden with awards from London’s West End and opened on Broadway Sunday night, directed with a magnificent witch’s brew of winking satire, absolute dead-seriousness, and stark elegance by Jamie Lloyd.

In this parable of fame, delusion, and Hollywood’s endemic dysfunction, the helpless moths orbiting around Norma flutter with their own distinction. Tom Francis plays Joe, the writer ensnared by the delusional Norma to refine her screenplay about Salomé that she sees as her ticket to return to film star greatness, is a phlegmatic if unmalicious chancer. The excellent David Thaxton as Max, Norma’s lugubrious and devoted majordomo (and more!), who insists she is still a huge star, is both comic and terrifying in his devotion and dedication to her. Grace Hodgett Young does all she can to animate the musical’s most thankless role, Betty, who falls for Joe.

Lloyd’s show is a meta-piece of theater in the most pleasurable, least grating of ways—based on Billy Wilder’s classic 1950 movie, it is its own homage to the power of movie-making using the most inventive of theatrical techniques that in other productions (video design and cinematography are by Nathan Amzi and Joe Ransom) can be intrusive and annoying. Here they are vital additive, witty, and complementary, and marry theater- and film-making gorgeously. The shadows of film noir and the stark beauty of black and white photography and movies assume a striking immediacy of animated light and shadows right in front of us.

The show also uses Scherzinger’s own stardom, lightly but cleverly, to underline Sunset Blvd.’s focus on what fame means: why do we watch these people, what do they command in us, what do we give them, what do they glory in, expect and manipulate, and why are we so happy to be manipulated by their shimmeringly confected charisma? Don’t leave immediately when the show ends—see Lloyd underline his point by rolling actual film-style credits after the actors leave the stage.

Those who have seen previous Lloyd productions—like Jessica Chastain in the relatively recent A Doll’s House revival—will not be surprised to find the look of Sunset Blvd. to be spartan and unbehoven to the historical era.

Soutra Gilmour’s scenic and costume design is monochromatic and simple: Norma in a black slip, Joe in white T-shirt and black slacks; no set decoration bar the sight of the real life theater stripped back to its studs to signify a film set. We must imagine cars, swimming pools, and sweeping grand staircases. However, all the relentlessly swelling, OTT musical lushness Lloyd Webber demands is supplied by his and David Cullen’s orchestrations under Alan Williams’ musical supervision and direction. Jack Knowles’ lighting design is one long, gorgeously spotlit, smoke-filled homage to the silent movies and imagined continued stardom played out in the windmills of Norma’s mind.

The clamorous ovation at the end of this superlative show—the perfect mix of bombastic and restrained, the most fun a tragedy could ever be—says it all. It is not the usual Broadway standing ovation: polite and dutiful. It is not even the appreciative and happy standing ovation: heartfelt and feelgood. This is something else. The whooping and applauding goes on and on, a wave upon wave of loud appreciation, no one in any rush to stop or leave.

The only thing close to this kind of audience fervency in recent years was the reaction to Bette Midler in the 2017 revival of Hello, Dolly! At Sunset Blvd. too, you think the roof could legitimately blow off, or the theater simply launch into outer space powered by an explosive burst of pure gay joy. There should be paramedics outside to make sure everyone emerging, dazed and delirious from the crazy fabulousness of Sunset Blvd. stays safely upright. In the best ways, the show takes camp and spectacle to oxygen-needed-on-Everest levels.

Amazingly, the actors right through this extended curtain call stay in stern-looking character, apart from—the night I went—Thaxton allowing himself a teasing outline of a smile, before he snapped back to inscrutable implacability. I hope this cast are allowed to start screeching like self-congratulatory banshees once they are out of our sight.

The velocity of the audience reaction to Sunset Blvd. is not just about Scherzinger. It’s about the force and concerted visual punch of the show, as executed so expertly by Lloyd.

Scherzinger gives her full-throated diva best to the role, and—just as the best movie directors do—Lloyd ensures we cannot keep our eyes off her. This he does in the cleverest ways possible, making a musical about a silent movie star that is also a semi-film in beautifully lit black and white. We see Norma in close-up, smiling knowingly at us, as well as suffering, enjoying, and emoting. Lloyd knows how to toy with the boundaries of theater and fan worship to let us know the musical is in on the joke, but never enough to detonate it too knowingly from within.

Somehow, we take this Sunset Blvd. absolutely seriously while laughing at Norma’s craziness, and our craziness for nourishing the circus of fame she and Scherzinger embody. She speaks in a divine semi-purr, a menacing demi-whisper that you strain to hear—actually, slightly scared to catch every word. The likes of “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small” and “I’m ready for my closeup, Mr. DeMille” sound like sinister incantations.

The use of cameras also means other moments when the story lags—in the story of Joe’s doomed relationship with Betty, and all the exposition about the venality of Hollywood and all the stuff about criminals and shady goings on—that we get if not clarity, then an appealing visual urgency with dancers (the show’s feast of choreography is by Fabian Aloise) lining up in vertical and horizontal rows, splayed out and fluttering and slinking this way and that.

As with Chastain’s exit at the end of A Doll’s House, Lloyd doesn’t keep his directorial scope restricted to the theater. At the start of act two—as you may have seen the videos on YouTube, or seen how the company performed it in London—Francis heads out into the streets around the theater, and Shubert Alley, to sing the magnificently loopy title song—“Sunset Boolerrrvard!”—with a team of security people and backing dancers, and of course notoriously unpredictable real-life New York to keep at bay.

Producers insist this is live every night, with Adam Fisher’s special sound design ensuring we hear the song sung as if on stage, with no interjections of honking horns or impatient pedestrians calling Francis an asshole for impeding their progress.

This sequence is a total thrill, not least because it begins with Francis leaving the theater, with some very fun peekaboo moments such as seeing inside Scherzinger’s dressing room to see her clad in the kind of bejeweled headgear traditional Norma Desmonds wear. In Thaxton’s dressing room is a picture of Scherzinger’s band, the Pussycat Dolls. And out into the streets Francis goes, singing to camera, before emerging back into the theater via side door. Later, “The Perfect Year,” that song that is about hope against everything denying hope, is sung with defiant party hats, with hugs and delicate dancing and a hanging silver curtain. It really cuts to the quick, with Scherzinger and Francis’ shrugging off of demons all too brief.

That the whole show is so breathtaking, the bad moments of Sunset Blvd. stand out harshly, particularly a messy sequence towards the end where everyone starts running about on stage to signify the series of events which lead to the tragic, dramatic end back at Norma’s mansion. It feels the laziest, basic movement-class bit of execution in an otherwise gold-standard show.

Lloyd’s denouement returns us squarely to its stunning mainframe with Joe’s shooting, stripping, and blood smeared over faces and bodies. Just as Wilder does in the last frames of the 1950 movie, Norma becomes a shimmering out of focus image on that imagined screen between her and us, Scherzinger singing and swearing to us in her delusion-state to be back, right there with us, the biggest star of all.

It looks like she is both receding from us and advancing towards us—a miasma of celebrity. It’s insane, glorious, and wrenchingly sung as a most unusual thing: a crazy-person threat you only wish to be fully realized. Like I say, applaud and whoop for as long as you like, and good luck getting out of the St. James alive and upright.

I'm hoping to see both Nicole and Mandy on my trip over the next two weeks! Can't wait to see it again.

They definitely do rush seats at Sunset, but I assume they sell out just after the box office opens. $45 partial view in the side orchestra from what I heard.

I’ll just get there at 8 on Weds.

First full week post-opening and Sunset Blvd is #4 in top Grossing musicals bringing in $1,664,663 for 8 performances and #4 in total audience attendance.
It should be noted that the 8 performances include the first of Tuesdays with special Guest Star, Mandy Gonzalez... which no disrespect to her, she's definitely not gotten the attention or has the recognition that Nicole has, particularly since all the reviews and now the full press has begun with her appearing on numerous NY and national platforms.