Sunset Boulevard Broadway Reviews Round-up – starring Nicole Scherzinger

"Nicole Scherzinger plays screen icon Norma Desmond in a bold noir revival of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical"

"That slippage between the real and the imaginary is even more pronounced in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1993 musical adaptation of the story, by dint of its being performed live onstage. And Jamie Lloyd’s very meta and very smart Broadway revival of the show—which stars the utterly captivating Nicole Scherzinger as Norma and Tom Francis as Joe Gillis, the handsome sell-out screenwriter drawn into her web—pushes it even further through the prominent use of live video."

"Lloyd’s combination of focus and mixed-media variety provides a dynamism that Sunset Boulevard needs. Don Black and Christopher Hampton’s libretto has been judiciously pruned and polished for this revival."

"... Scherzinger commands the stage with electrifying confidence. Her singing is gorgeously fluid and controlled, and she knows how to work her songs for drama; singing “I’ve come home at last,” she holds her note on “home” for more than 10 full seconds, earning thunderous claps when she wraps it up. But her silences are as important as the notes."

"In this revival, itself a kind of re-production, that doesn’t feel like a gimmick or a distraction. It’s a new way to see an old dream."

"Nicole Scherzinger Astonishes in Jamie Lloyd’s Remarkable Broadway Staging of the Andrew Lloyd Webber Musical"

"Scherzinger’s performance as a fallen idol desperate to reclaim her fame is many things, among them a coming-out party for a performer whose plainly evident raw talent has long outstripped her ability to find a landing place in the entertainment industry."

"It is also a capital-E Event, a thrill ride whose greatest pleasure may be that, under the direction of Jamie Lloyd, Scherzinger’s work exists within a production as bold as she is... The result is something like magic."

"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."

"It feels like the role Norma and Scherzinger both were born to play. And it transports us into Norma’s mind, as we finally see the way that Norma sees herself."

"Nicole Scherzinger stuns in scorching, brilliant Broadway revival"

"... Broadway’s most exhilarating show in years. So much energy, freshness and unrelenting intensity courses through the veins of director Jamie Lloyd’s startling production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical from beginning to end, you’d swear it was brand new. And adrenaline pumps through our bloodstream anytime the extraordinary Nicole Scherzinger, making her wondrous Broadway debut, wails a note."

"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."

"The cinematic closeups on their expressive faces as they fall in and out of love, set to Lloyd Webber’s sweeping score, adds real meat to sections that can easily sag."

"... the show belongs to the titanic Scherzinger, who makes an especially proud and feral Norma. Her confidence and burning desire to succeed makes her fall much greater than that of a dusty hermit."

"In ‘Sunset Boulevard,’ Nicole Scherzinger Is 23 Feet Tall"

"A fascinating Broadway revival of the bombastic 1994 musical blows it up even further."

"... despite many fascinating interventions by the director Jamie Lloyd and his technical team, and the fact that it is based on one of the greatest of movies, the musical remains too silly for words. In that sense, and others, Norma would have loved it."

"... [Jamie Lloyd's] production feels like a response to the problems of the 1994 musical and, wherever possible, a distraction from them. Is the material campy? Make it campier. (There are innumerable winks to the audience.) Is the mise en scène clunky? Get rid of it. (Soutra Gilmour’s set is evocative without ever representing a real place.) Is the music bombastic? Bomb the audience’s ears with it. (Adam Fisher’s sound design seems to include microphones lodged in the actors’ intestines.) This is all at its most intense in Scherzinger’s exciting yet exceptionally weird and counterintuitive performance."

"Still, there are pleasures in submitting to Lloyd’s brutalist take on a submissive show. Francis, as Joe, does shutdown-cynical-corpse very well. The opening of each act includes beautifully executed surprises that set new standards, as perhaps “Sunset Boulevard” is best suited to do, for filmic theatricality."

"Nicole Scherzinger is too glam for ‘Sunset Blvd.’ It hardly matters."

"The onetime pop star makes an astonishing Broadway debut as faded film siren Norma Desmond."

"Nicole Scherzinger’s radiance as Norma Desmond in “Sunset Blvd.” is difficult to overstate. She sings “As If We Never Said Goodbye,” an aching one-sided duet with fame, with such delicacy and gut-slugging power that even Barbra Streisand, who covered it the same year the musical came to Broadway in 1994, might consider retiring the song from her repertoire. If that sounds like hyperbole daring theater queens to flood my mentions, here are a few more: Scherzinger, who moves with the steely grace of an exacting ballet mistress, is almost absurdly glamorous. She has the rare, unflinching magnetism of an exotic bird and commands the spotlight with bone-chilling intensity."

"Lloyd does brilliant work capturing and directing attention, paring visuals down to bare bones and leveraging the audience’s nose-to-screen instincts. When the lens pushes in, we get the story in microexpressions, with every pore and imperfection (few though there may be) magnified to awesome degrees. This is most often how we experience Norma’s man-in-waiting, Max, whom David Thaxton plays with a guard dog’s snarl and a simmering, operatic bravado."

"Nicole Scherzinger is transcendent in bold new revival"

"The revival, which opened Oct. 20 at New York’s St. James Theatre, is already shaping up to be a word-of-mouth hit stateside. And for good reason: Scherzinger is every bit as stunning and volcanic as you’ve heard, even if Jamie Lloyd’s hollow production doesn’t always match her earthshaking talent."

"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"

"The chemistry between Joe and doe-eyed script editor Betty Schaefer (Grace Hodgett Young) is severely lacking, although David Thaxton is a chilling standout as Max von Mayerling, Norma’s loyal but predacious butler."

"Grade: A: Nicole Scherzinger stuns in Broadway revival that improves the Andrew Lloyd Webber classic"

"Director Jamie Lloyd's electric reinvisioning also stars Tom Francis, Grace Hodgett Young, and David Thaxton."

"In the Broadway revival of Sunset Boulevard, Norma may have outgrown the role of an ingénue, but Scherzinger’s captivating performance makes it clear that she can still bring down the house — that there should be room in Hollywood for stories about women who (at 40, gasp!) have more years and complexity under their belt, and that those women can be astonishing."

"... in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard, spectacular talent is also the stakes of the story: Can Norma Desmond still be the greatest star of all? Can she still break our hearts with just one look? The answer is a resounding yes. Scherzinger’s stunning vocals and lithe dancing are awe- and (in all recent occasions) standing ovation-inducing. With the help of lighting designer Jack Knowles’ brilliant spotlights, she literally glows."

"Scherzinger also nails the comedy of a camp diva, inhabiting Norma’s delusion and ego without ever losing sight of her sincerity. It’s easy to see what both attracts and repulses the writer, Joe Gillis (Tom Francis), to Norma. Lloyd makes space for moments of silly, joyful chemistry between the pair."

"Yet Lloyd’s staging never lets you forget the unglamorous and often exploitative way that art gets made. With an ensemble clothed in streetwear-inspired costumes (a stark and refreshing pivot from the standard traditional telling of the Hollywood Golden-era story), we’re reminded that most artists are not stars, but working class."

"Nicole Scherzinger Evokes Sally Bowles and Carrie White"

"Jamie Lloyd’s revival is both minimal and excessive"

"The director of the new revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Sunset Blvd.” takes the final line from Billy Wilder’s noir classic – “I’m ready for my close-up!” – and repeats it ad nauseam. The line is spoken only once on stage, at the end. But from the opening of Jamie Lloyd’s ridiculously foggy and overwrought production, this director gives us close-ups not only of all the principal actors, but every chorister as well."

"For me, the big surprise of this “Sunset Blvd.” is Scherzinger’s outrageously campy over-the-top performance. Like so much of this revival, it is both minimal and excessive. Her look is minimal while her acting goes way beyond anything delivered by either Swanson or Close, neither of whom offered particularly subtle studies in mature womanhood."

"As Norma Desmond, Nicole Scherzinger is gargantuan and almost feral"

"... despite their divergent aesthetics, both director and composer are Lloyds in search of effect. They want an audience breathing hard, and they trust that feeling hard will follow; thinking hard is a distant third priority. Both these blokes rub me the wrong way."

"Sometimes, though, ingredients for which you may think you know your taste combine to make a remarkable new dish. I dared myself to come into Lloyd’s revival of Lloyd Webber’s 1993 megamusical Sunset Blvd. with a wide-open mind. And this production is indeed remarkable, at least on its charged-up, sweat-slicked surface."

"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."

"The pop singer in Scherzinger can also do a thrilling range of things with her voice. There’s nothing classical in the way she bites into the songs — she simply devours them, ricocheting between vulnerable tremblings and voracious howls."

"Nicole Scherzinger Is Sensational in a Bold Reimagining of the Andrew Lloyd Webber Musical"

"Director Jamie Lloyd strips down both the material and the staging, threading film into theater in his radical take on the 1993 show based on the classic Hollywood noir about a forgotten screen siren."

"So how does Sunset Blvd., as the show is titled here, hold up without all the gilded grandeur that allowed Norma to remain locked inside her fantasy of eternal stardom? Magnificently, it turns out. Despite a few full-ensemble numbers of varying effectiveness, Lloyd has chiseled what was once a behemoth into a chamber musical for four characters, ingeniously designed in atmospheric black and white, like the Wilder film, until murder bathes the stage in blood red."

"I’ll confess I’ve always thought of Sunset Boulevard as a second-rate musical elevated by a couple of great songs and by the glorious scenery-chomping opportunities it affords its leading ladies. This is the first time I’ve really considered it as a searing tragedy with something to say to contemporary audiences."

"... Grace Hodgett Young, enchanting.. David Thaxton, what a voice!"

"That virtuoso camera choreography, taking in a prime stretch of Broadway real estate, seems to suggest that showbiz glory can be equally fickle in any medium. As Norma watches all this on the screen, we can almost see the cracks forming in her illusory world."

"Nicole Scherzinger Steals Broadway With One Look"

"With a career-expanding performance that redefines the one-time Dancing With The Stars competitor Nicole Scherzinger as thoroughly as Lloyd’s staging does Lloyd Webber’s musical, the revival opening tonight at Broadway‘s St. James Theatre is a stunner, stark always, funny sometimes and ultimately terrifying."

"The current revival, if it does nothing else, should put the show’s mixed reputation to rest. With its silent movie-style black & white color scheme and heavy-shadowed expressionistic sculpting, Sunset Blvd. is quite unlike anything else on Broadway today, fierce and ferocious."

"The whole segment is done as a single tracking shot (courtesy ensemble member and camera operator Shayna McPherson) and it’s a remarkable coup de theatre, even if we have seen it, or something similar (and lesser) in other productions. And here, it’s not even the most thrilling moment of the show: That comes earlier, when Scherzinger, her straight hair hanging long, her only costume the flimsy black slip she’ll wear through the entire production, stands near the edge of the stage to belt out the musical’s best song – “With One Look” – a vocal tour de force that comes well before intermission and, at the reviewed performance, had a roaring audience on its feet."

"Nicole Scherzinger’s Norma Desmond"

"The actress makes a commanding Broadway debut in director Jamie Lloyd’s smartly contemporary staging of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical adaptation of the classic film."

"Nicole Scherzinger is devastating in a sultry new ‘Sunset Blvd.’ on Broadway"

"There’s no more gilded cage for Norma in director Jamie Lloyd’s red-hot, straight-from-London revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s noir 1993 musical, “Sunset Boulevard,” not with Nicole Scherzinger sizzling in the lead role. At the St James Theatre, Norma Desmond has morphed from deranged diva to sexy beast, from an object of creepy pity warbling emotional ballads of regret to an eroticized star at her sexual peak, making wide-eyed love to a camera even when dripping with her lover’s blood. Wowza!"

"None of Lloyd’s hipster ideas to make extensive use of live video feeds and have his charming and judiciously understated male lead, Tom Francis, start the top of Act 2 while walking down 44th Street and singing live among the tourists into a camera would have worked without a Norma who could deliver Lloyd Webber’s best score."

"And here’s the other thing. You’ve got a big orchestra in the pit playing Lloyd Webber’s maximalist score with the shimmering strings. Ergo, a delicious contrast: Director Lloyd’s minimalist but intensified physical urges (and his sense of humor) are bundled with a non-ironic score that still feels like it came out of the golden age of Hollywood."