Review: Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ‘Sunset Boulevard’ Ready For Its UHD 4K Close-Up

This revival of the 1994 Andrew Lloyd Webber musical is full of modern eye-candy and a few surprises. Among them, how Nicole Scherzinger commands her scenes in her Broadway debut.

Nicole Scherzinger and Hannah Yun Chamberlain (projected on the screen) and Tom Francis (seated) in Sunset Boulevard. Marc Brenner

The latest revival of Sunset Boulevardglossily stark and aggressively meta—puts several shades of lipstick on a pig. “Shades” being black, white, and red. “Pig” being a musical that may be one of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s better efforts but remains a bloated, subtlety-free slab of pop melodrama. Director Jamie Lloyd and his chic design team immerse Webber’s 1994 adaptation of the movie classic in a vertiginous zone of inky surfaces and white highlights, all swaddled in incessant billows of stage fog. Soutra Gilmour’s modish costumes are likewise monochromatic, as is her sparse scenic design—essentially a cavernous camera obscura. When the threat of murder arises, lighting designer Jack Knowles floods the stage in a scarlet wash. By the end of the action (slight spoiler), fallen star Norma Desmond (Nicole Scherzinger) is a gothic vision: glowing olive-toned skin, black silk slip, and neck streaked in gore. The remarkable thing about this brutally regimented palette is how it helps distract from the music.

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Granted, I am a Sondheim man and Webber’s syrupy, hammered-home melodies and blunt power ballads—which require equally stunted lyrics—bore me stiff. His musical storytelling is stuck between operetta and English Music Hall; it’s turgid, repetitive, and allergic to nuanced characterization (not to mention genuine emotion). At least with Sunset Boulevard, book writers and lyricists Christopher Hampton and Don Black (talented pros) had excellent bones on which to build. Billy Wilder’s love letter to Hollywood was etched with a poison pen, a spiky dance between satire and sympathy in its twisted portrait of Norma Desmond, the silent movie queen tipped out of her throne by the talkies. Reclusive and periodically suicidal, Norma dwells in a celluloid Neverland where she’s forever young in moving pictures. When down-on-his-luck screenwriter Joe Gillis (Tom Francis) accidentally pulls into the driveway of Norma’s spooky mansion on the title street, a deadly game of mutual exploitation begins.

Nicole Scherzinger in Sunset Boulevard. Marc Brenner

Apart from bona fide Webber fans (apparently, they exist), the big draw is Nicole Scherzinger, ex-Pussycat Doll and pop icon from the first decade of this century. The first glimpse we have of our leading lady is a visual trick: as the metallic beaded curtain parts during Webber’s crashing and swelling overture, we think that’s Norma gyrating in shadow at the lip of the stage. In fact the figure is Hannah Yun Chamberlain, the strikingly beautiful dancer who portrays Young Norma. Chamberlain is, effectively, Scherzinger’s body double and reappears frequently, at one point dancing with her older self. (Think of The Substance, minus green goo and spine splitting.) How apt: a stunt Norma for a stunt production.

Lloyd steers most of his actors toward tense, frontal deadpan. As Joe Gillis, Tom Francis (giving Jeremy Allen White) simmers and paces, coiled, fists shoved in pockets. It came as a relief when Francis was allowed to gesticulate; I’d started to wonder how his character typed. Gillis is broke. Goons try to repossess his car as he makes the rounds at Paramount, schmoozing Hollywood sharks and minnows. Perhaps to underscore the concept of Tinseltown as a place that feeds youth into a meat grinder, Lloyd casts the ensemble with young performers, a Gen Z phalanx of grim-faced choristers and supporting players.

Nicole Scherzinger and Hannah Yun Chamberlain in Sunset Boulevard. Marc Brenner

Soon after Joe washes up on Norma’s shore, he’s absorbed into her diva-gone-wild universe of secrets and lies. We meet an ooky German manservant named Max (David Thaxton) and hear of a pet chimp, recently deceased. Also, there’s Norma’s garish and overwritten screenplay about Salomé, which she wants Joe to punch up for her big return to movies. When Joe asks how old the character is, Norma nonchalantly replies, “Sixteen.” Scherzinger looks great for her age, but lands the laugh, nonetheless.

In her Broadway debut, the leading lady grows on you. In contrast to audience members who stood and screamed every time Scherzinger blasted out one of Norma’s obligatory, overheated ballads (“With One Look,” “As If We Never Said Goodbye”), I went in with minimal expectations. Happily, Scherzinger commands her scenes—on stage and blown up to gargantuan proportions on the 27′ x 23′ LCD screen fed live video by actors strapped into camera units.

Scherzinger may begin tentative and stiff, but soon she’s vamping and pouting for the camera like a giddy teenager with her first TikTok account. When Norma talks astrology with Joe, she adopts a goofy Valley Girl vocal fry. Is Norma aware of her eccentric excesses, or is that Scherzinger and Lloyd commenting on it? The anachronistic, self-mocking gestures extend to the choreography. Fabian Aloise gives Scherzinger cheeky quotes from the Pussycat Dolls’s synchronized strutting. Scrawled somewhere in my notes is “Norma twerks?” If it weren’t horribly outdated to say postmodern, that’s how I would describe Scherzinger’s delightful pastiche.

There’s an obscene amount of eye candy to look at—including Francis and the ensemble’s outstanding work with the Act II opener that takes them (on video) throughout the guts of the St. James Theatre and onto the streets in a virtuosic single tracking shot. The actual song “Sunset Boulevard” is dopey as heck (“Sunset Boulevard / Frenzied boulevard / Swamped with every kind of false emotion”). But the live video sequence is a knockout, poking fun at the show as Francis and ensemble members prowl the street looking sexy and cool, joined by a guy in a monkey outfit (shout out to the dead chimp). Most of Webber’s hits involved outlandish stage effects: Phantom’s crashing chandelier; a giant flying tire in Cats; Sunset Boulevard premiered with a mansion rolling toward the audience. Removing lumbering set pieces from a Webber musical is like reading a Michael Bay screenplay for its urbane wit. Here, Lloyd supplies the perfect spectacle for our mediated, homogenized age: digital projection, dematerialized sets, uniform couture.

All that luscious black-and-white video, the backstage winks, the fuck-you deadpan in fuck-me boots—it’s fun. I never expected to have fun at an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. (Even this summer’s queer ballroom makeover of Cats was, well, Cats.) Lloyd’s camp yet surgical staging fuses form and content: it’s the resurrection of a faded (kitsch) icon, a critique of the invasive camera, a cosplay of the BDSM rituals of celebrity and fandom. Just as Scherzinger inhabits Norma within giant neon quotation marks, the whole production seems to admit the overall musical is trash. What happens if you dress up trash as art and stick a camera in its face? Twenty feet high, those faces—coldly sensual graven images—demand your abject worship. It’s a thin line (movie-screen thin) between glamour and horror. “We gave the world new ways to dream,” an enraptured Norma sings. Lloyd finds new ways to give us nightmares; who wants to wake?

Sunset Boulevard | 2hrs 30mins. One intermission. | St. James Theatre | 246 West 44th St. | Buy Tickets Here   

Review: Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ‘Sunset Boulevard’ Ready For Its UHD 4K Close-Up