A Madly Showy Sunset Blvd.
Andrew Lloyd Webber and the director Jamie Lloyd might seem like an odd couple at first glance — the literal baron of musical melodrama and the heavily tatted, working-class-raised stripper-down of classics. But 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. Lloyd Webber for all the reasons my colleague Andrea Long Chu brilliantly enumerated in her critique of the enduring, insidious spell cast over Broadway by The Phantom of the Opera. Lloyd on more complicated grounds: It can be difficult to feel unalloyed excitement for the parade of male auteurs produced by Europe and the U.K. — directors with piles of accolades and severe stylistic signatures (sophisticated shticks but shticks all the same), whose work lands on Broadway or at the Park Avenue Armory or the Shed like a flash bomb. It may as well be purpose-built to dazzle Americans with the wonders that can be produced with actual government funding and a lasting apprentice-to-master pipeline, at least where promising young men are concerned. Or maybe I’m just still riled by the director’s dumb response to a game of “F*ck, Marry Kill” (Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov edition) that Playbill imposed on the company of A Doll’s House last year: “Chekhov might be a bit of a bore … All those plays are kind of funny, but, you know, they go on a little bit.” Jamie, you might be a great guy, but when your inevitable minimalist-brutalist staging of The Cherry Orchard shows up on Broadway, I’m going to remember you said that.
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. If you spend any time at all following the hypes and hysterias of theater and its accompanying Twitterverse, it will hardly surprise you to hear that this Sunset is more of a solar flare, sometimes quite literally blinding its audience. The show picked up seven Olivier Awards this spring, including Best Director for Lloyd and Best Actor and Actress for its leads, Tom Francis as the jaded screenwriter Joe Gillis and Nicole Scherzinger as the majestically delusional silent-film star Norma Desmond who turns Joe into her kept boy. Ever since blurry phone videos of Scherzinger, barefoot and wraithlike in a bias-cut black slip dress—oh, and covered in blood—started flooding social media last fall, musical-theater kids of all ages on this side of the Atlantic have been panting for her gory close-up. When I saw the show, the house at the St. James was practically vibrating. Large sections of the audience leapt to their feet after every major number, which gave the show, for all Lloyd’s glossy modernity, a curiously Victorian energy. See Madame S—, back by Popular Demand to perform the Musical Stylings of Baron L— - W—! Tableaux Vivants Magnificent and Macabre! Lloyd-Webber, a Barnum at his core, would approve; so would Norma.
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.
They leave everything else, everything lavish and luscious, to the orchestra, themselves playing in high contrast to the music’s saturated hues. Nodding to Billy Wilder’s nonpareil noir, Gilmour dresses the ensemble in black and white and nothing but (the clothes are, for the most part, casually hip streetwear, a style that doesn’t land as powerfully as the monochrome palette). Amzi and Ransom use live-feed camera rigs, manipulated by the actors, to fill a massive moving wall panel that backs the set, or floats ominously above it, with lurid close-ups. Perhaps you’ve tired of this device and perhaps you haven’t, but at least here it functions to keep the movie—and the idea of movies—alive in the space (so many flaring nostrils, dilated pupils, and garish, spider-ish eyelashes). The actors, especially in big group numbers, sing Don Black and Christopher Hampton’s splashy, knowing lyrics with dead eyes and straight stances. In the propulsive opening number, as Joe introduces us to the shallow, flurrying world of Paramount Studios, choreographer Fabian Aloise keeps sweeping the cast back onto a kind of conveyor belt of cynicism: One by one they’re deposited beside Joe at downstage center, they say something vapid while staring out, expressionless, hands in pockets, before disappearing to the back of the line.
It’s the show’s most aggressive deployment of the Darren Nichols school of direction, and Lloyd deliberately and effectively uses it to set the tone. You can almost see the ghost of a more standard interpretation flickering in the background — the colorful mid-century costumes and character shoes, the swirls of fancy scenery and jaunty choreography, the extras pushing Klieg lights or gesturing with clipboards. Sunset Boulevard is, in essence, a Greek tragedy that unfolds when ultimate cynicism meets uttermost fantasy. Lloyd begins by theatricalizing the immovable object of Joe’s disillusionment before introducing it to Norma’s unstoppable force. Joe (wonderfully sung and played with a compelling veneer of masculine numbness by Tom Francis) can no longer see any of Hollywood’s color or charm, so neither can we. The stage is as empty as both his spirit and his pockets, a nihilist vacuum ready for a dangerous flood.
Hurricane Norma doesn’t colorize Joe’s world — after all, she’d have no desire to; the ambitions still consuming her years after the height of her stardom all lie in the Hollywood of silence and desaturation. She dreams in grayscale. (Boy does she dream, and sing about it. A lot.) But she does bring light, shadow, and torrents of atmosphere along with her. Knowles shoots blinding cones of luminescence at Scherzinger from either side or from underneath, catching her in their intersection like the pop star she was (the gambit of her casting works; the resonances are real and clearly not lost on her). When she lets rip, as in her ceiling-shakers “With One Look” or “As if We Never Said Goodbye,” rolling clouds of haze pour across the stage, obscuring everything but her: This is Norma’s world, just as we’ve seen Joe’s — she lives in a permanent spotlight and, in Lloyd’s rendering, on a literal cloud.
There’s nothing floating or aloof, however, about Scherzinger’s performance. With no armor to depend on (I kept wondering if she’s cold in that little black sheath or if Knowles’s lights and her own nerves generate enough heat), her Norma is gargantuan and almost feral. She charges head first at the famous lines (“I am big. It’s the pictures that got small”), delivering them with a cavernous boom. She’s not dignified — she’s so big that she seems to be ripping her own seams. But she’s also got a wily little sense of humor, a giggling, contemporary-coded bounce and wiggle that come out especially when the cameras are around. She whips her hair back and forth and flashes duck-lips for the onstage paparazzi, even throwing some splits and twerks into the mix. It’s surprisingly funny, and also tinged with sadness: Here’s a woman who may have lost the better part of her mind, but not the part that’s entirely aware of how the kids are telegraphing sexiness these days, even as those kids have no idea who she is.
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. Lloyd mics the bejesus out of his shows (here with sound designer Adam Fisher), and the results are mixed: Yes, it’s exciting for Scherzinger to be able to go internal, her breathy whispers beamed into our ears, but on the loud end, the organic power of her voice is eaten by the amplification. When she belts, it’s thunderous, but there’s also a mechanical buzz to the sound. On the other side of the scale, though, Fisher and Lloyd are able to release something animal in the horror of the play’s bloody finale. I won’t spoil the details of it, but it’s not just a straightforward matter of firing Chekhov’s gun. As Joe and Norma reach the explosive end of their road, noises come from Scherzinger in the dark, between retina-burning flashes from Knowles, that suggest something altogether grislier than a gunshot, something with teeth.
The show is sharpest when its sights are fixed on Norma and Joe, and also on the looming figure of Norma’s manservant and eternal enabler, Max. David Thaxton is fantastic in the part, building a sturdy arc all the way from comedy—he starts by channeling Lurch, and the massive, underlit close-ups of his face wouldn’t be out of place in Young Frankenstein—to fully felt melodramatic revelation. His role lies in gothic territory that could simply play as camp, but Thaxton gives it real ache and agony. Grace Hodgett Young doesn’t fare quite as well in the part of Betty Schaefer, the smart young script-reader at Paramount who falls for Joe and attempts to pull him out of Norma’s death-grip. Though Young has a clear, lovely voice and an appealing matter-of-factness about her, neither Lloyd nor the show seems very interested in Betty’s B-plot, maybe because its girl-next-door sweetness and rationality feel wan beside the play’s central house of horrors. Lloyd doesn’t encourage much chemistry between Francis and Young; nor does he invest their scenes with any significant fascination or power. When Joe and Betty sing together, we’re just waiting for the tidal wave of Norma to hit again.
It may be this lack of real struggle for Joe’s soul—Betty has no chance—that ultimately makes this Sunset more striking than moving. The production runs on its ability to stun: Francis’s much TikTok-ed, live-recorded adventure through the bowels of the theater and out onto 44th Street at the top of the second act during the title number is a legitimate rocket, spectacle as cocaine jolt. (It’s also funny: When Francis pops by Max’s dressing room, Thaxton is reverently contemplating a photo of the Pussycat Dolls taped to his mirror.) And as the show builds to its mad climax, Aloise plunges the ensemble into criss-crossing chaos — they dash around the space like cars on a tangle of freeways before converging downstage in a unified, Pina Bausch-ian mass. Leaning forward ominously across the footlights, their bodies hit the same slant as Gilmour’s massive background panel just as it floods with red for the first and only time. It’s a hell of an effect, and it’s not the only one. There’s no doubt that Lloyd’s Sunset dazzles in the beholding, though the farther you walk away from it, the more you may find yourself feeling like poor Joe Gillis — remembering the thrill but no longer able to feel it, somehow both stirred and empty. Hooray for Hollywood!
Sunset Boulevard is at the St. James Theatre.
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