Director Jamie Lloyd’s new Broadway production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Blvd. starring Olivier Award winner and Grammy Award nominee Nicole Scherzinger as ‘Norma Desmond’ opened tonight Sunday, October 20 at the St. James Theatre on Broadway. Check out what the critics have to say below!
Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Blvd. features an iconic score including the songs “With One Look,” “The Perfect Year,” and “As If We Never Said Goodbye.”
Haunted by her memories and dreams, movie star Norma Desmond (Nicole Scherzinger) yearns to return to the big screen. A struggling screenwriter (Tom Francis) who can’t sell his scripts to the Hollywood studios may be her only hope, until their dangerous and compelling relationship leads to disaster. Drenched in champagne and cynicism, Sunset Blvd. focuses the lens of ambitions and frustrations of its characters and puts their intoxicating need for fame and adoration in stark close-up.
Jesse Green, New York Times: But I can’t help feeling that Lloyd’s talent and that of his designers, let alone Scherzinger’s, would be better lavished on better material. Making “Sunset Boulevard” a hit again — the original Broadway production ran two-and-a-half years, grossing more than $100 million — is not so much an achievement as a stunt, like reanimating that dead chimpanzee. (Yes, it happens.) The revival is not, like “Cats: The Jellicle Ball” this summer, a completely new way of looking at a Lloyd Webber musical; it’s a completely new way of not looking at one. The waste! It makes me almost sad enough to weep a 10-foot glycerin tear.
Daniel D’Addario, Variety: 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.
Matt Windman, amNY: The production rides on heavy sensory overload, with intense lighting (which is used to depict location rather than scenery or props), live filming and video projections (with tons of extreme close-ups), smoke and fog effects, monochromatic design, stylized ensemble movement (at one point, the chorus members break into convulsions), and other melodramatic and self-aware gestures. The sound quality of the orchestra is also top-notch, allowing the mostly sung-through score to contribute to the outsized experience.
David Cote, Observer: 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?
Adam Feldman, Time Out: Thus described, Lloyd’s approach may sound academic—but in practice, it is often thrilling. The original production was famous for the lavish excess of its set and costumes. Here, by contrast, designer Soutra Gilmour’s set is mostly blank space, and she costumes most of the cast in basic black and white streetwear, sometimes with athletic socks pulled high. (When the ensemble performs Fabian Aloise’s sharp choreography, it looks a bit like an updated Gap ad.) Even Norma wears just a satiny black slip. This is Sunset, stripped. But you don’t miss the frills: Jack Knowles’s excellent lighting—and the video design by Nathan Amzi and Joe Ransom—fill out the scenes with ample film-noir atmospherics and help Lloyd shape the staging for maximum narrative and emotional impact. Not for nothing has the title been tightened to Sunset Blvd.
Sara Holdren, Vulture: Scherzinger’s ravenous performance provides a great part of the adrenaline, but the show is also jolted into new life by the collision of the spartan Lloydiverse with all the plush and purple of Lloyd Webber’s score. Chu described the composer as, in the ’80s, mounting a kind of maximalist coup on musical theater in the name of the operatic notion of primo la musica: “Nothing—neither plot nor character, not social issues, not even good taste—would be more important,” she wrote about his shows, “than what happened when that invisible beam of music shot across the darkened theater into their souls.” Productions of Lloyd Webber’s aspirations to Puccini have long tended to put a hat on a hat. The music throbs and flourishes; so does the stage, loaded up with gondolas and chandeliers, fog and fashion and fur and roller-skates. Lloyd, true to form, runs the other way. He and his collaborators, the set and costumes designer Soutra Gilmour, and the lighting designer Jack Knowles and video designers Nathan Amzi and Joe Ransom, craft a spare, echoing dungeon, girded by towers of LEDs. (This kind of seeming minimalism is its own circus trick, costing as it does millions of dollars.) Inside Gilmour’s vast, deceptively empty box, Knowles, Amzi, and Ransom’s incredible work is, in and of itself, a liquid, high-octane form of scenery. They’ve kept little but the fog.
Johnny Oleksinski, New York Post: The entire production leaves you breathless. We’re transfixed from the moment the giant video screen — this staging’s chandelier — descends from the rafters bearing the image of actor Tom Francis’ dangerous eyes as struggling screenwriter Joe Gillis drives toward his doom.
Elysa Gardner, NY Sun: Overall, Ms. Scherzinger doesn’t suffer for the scrutiny. Her performance is one of remarkable, and at times ludicrous, intensity. This Norma is forever mugging for the camera, scrunching up her face or tossing her hair; I found her antics — surely encouraged, or at least approved, by Mr. Lloyd — a little excessive, though many in the audience ate them up during the preview I attended.
Patrick Ryan, USA Today: That Scherzinger’s performance is so affecting is a credit to her formidable stage presence, given that Lloyd’s muddled concept for the revival is occasionally at odds with the source material. The modern production often seems to take a condescending stance toward Norma, imagining her as a sort of washed-up reality star: Pouting her lips for the cameras, busting out viral dance moves, and slathering on a Valley Girl vocal fry as she yammers about zodiac signs. (With her neutral palette and wet-hair look, she could easily be a sixth Kardashian sister.)
Average Rating:
73.3%
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