SUNSET BOULEVARD
A musical gets diced and spliced into relentless TikTok moments.
The Andrew Lloyd Webber musical “Sunset Boulevard” is in previews at the St. James Theater. It is based on the 1950 movie directed by Billy Wilder. Norma Desmond (Nicole Scherzinger) is a faded Hollywood star of the silent movie era who dreams of a come back. A young aspiring screenwriter Joe Gillis (Tom Francis) stumbles into her lair and is seduced and victimized by her.
The musical and this production revolve around its Norma Desmond and Nicole Scherzinger is a sumptuously gifted performer. She has a big Broadway theater-filling voice, a striking face and the supple body of a dancer in peak form. Her rendition of “With One Look” stops the show and the audience leaps to its feet, hooting and hollering as if they were at a Taylor Swift concert. But Scherzinger deserves the furor. I don’t believe I’ve seen anything like Scherzinger on a Broadway stage before and her delivery of her songs was thrilling.
Yet Scherzinger has been directed to act like a cross between Cruella DeVil and Vampira. Her stage actions are amplified beyond her already mythic character. When Norma Desmond is rejected by Joe Gillis for the first time she responds not just with a tongue lashing but by literally kicking Gillis in the balls. Later when Norma demands Joe visit her in her bedroom, she spreads her legs like a porn star to emphasize her demand. Jamie Lloyd, the show’s director, seems to not want us to forget Scherzinger’s alma mater “The Pussycat Dolls” and there’s no shame in that. Scherzinger’s movements in the show (choreographed by Fabian Aloise) are a mix of hip-hop moves, twerking and Las Vegas stripper floor work. And for a former silent film actress Scherzinger’s Norma Desmond has a whole battery of contemporary vocal memes at her disposal, from the millennial vocal fry to “Yass Queen” finger-snapping sassiness.
Norma Desmond in this production has an uncanny affinity with the fragmentary magnetism of the hand held phone. Camera persons roam the stage holding small rigs to record the action which is projected on a huge LED screen. Scherzinger delivers her dialogue to the cameras as much as to her lover, pursing her lips at the cameras in a perfect imitation of a Kardashian. It is a brilliant choice on the part of the direction. The contemporary lure of TikTok and Instagram is being layered over the destructive lure of old Hollywood and it harmonizes beautifully. And this multi-layered world of narcissistic attraction is mirrored by Jamie Lloyd’s style of staging which is a relentless series of attention grabbing tricks.
The orchestrations, credited to David Cullen and Andrew Lloyd Webber, are ugly. A string section is listed in the playbill but the signature Andrew Lloyd Webber orchestral swell of the score sounded filled out with a synthesizer to me. There are some interesting passages played with a guitar which might not be in the original orchestrations. I liked the guitar and it made me want more of an alignment in how the score was being played in the pit with Lloyd’s more adventurous performance style on stage. As it is, the music being played sounds like it is imitating a full orchestra rather than coming up with creative solutions scaled to its present size which might transform the score into something new and surprising.
None of the performers, except for Scherzinger and perhaps David Thaxton as her butler/slave Max Von Mayerling, ever feel like anything other than attractive contemporary actors on a Broadway stage. That might have something to do with the audio and visual obstacle course Lloyd puts them through. As they run through their athletic paces they start to look like the contestants on American Ninja Warrior. It is fun to watch at the beginning but it is a poor substitute for cohesive or cumulative storytelling. Eventually we settle into the rhythm of waiting for the next trick, the next stunt, rather than for a more deeply satisfying development of a theme or an emotional arc.
After Lloyd has unboxed all of the technical toys he will play with in the first act, there is a fun and exhilarating second act opening with the camera following the cast outside of the theater onto the street. But as the show moves towards its conclusion and as the weaknesses of the musical itself become more apparent, Lloyd seems to come up short with new ideas and he begins to throw what feel like random choices into the mix.
The production falls apart as the diva at the center of the story is turned into a kind of Kali, a bloody destroyer goddess. The original film always kept itself poised elegantly between humor and horror. It had a light touch. But in the second act Lloyd and Andrew Lloyd Webber underline everything in bold red ink and the choices and performances are so heavy handed that they start to become ridiculous. The operatic sweep of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s score compounds the problem as it is equally heavy handed. To get to the finish line of the story there is a lot of running around, flashing lights, endless fog, ghoulish vocal effects, and dramatic posing the likes of which have not been seen since the days of Edwin Booth. To call this overwrought directorial style “minimalism” is laughable. It is old fashioned give ‘em what they want show business but they are lapping it up in an old fashioned way over at the St. James Theater.
It is amazing to me that I should begin to miss the old landlords of Broadway with their economies that made the climate and seating uncomfortable and the bathrooms unspeakable. But the Ambassador Theater Group, the new owners of the St. James Theater, seem to be intent on turning its audience into boozehounds. The lounge area in the balcony appears to have shrunk to nothing but a gangplank that pushes patrons either into a bar line or into their seats. The old Broadway owners were penny pinchers but visiting their houses still felt like going to the theater.
