Nicole Scherzinger's Norma Desmond transmits a tragic ego the size of the cinema screen in Jamie Lloyd’s slick musical
October 19, 2023 18:00
Sunset Boulevard
Savoy Theatre | ★★★★★
Every now and then it is announced that a director is to stage a classic work that is so familiar it hardly seemed worth reviving. Then the show opens and it is like seeing it for the first time.
It happened with Nicholas Hytner’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and it happened when director Daniel Fish got his hands on the beloved yet creaky old Rodgers and Hammerstein classic Oklahoma!.
Now it has happened again with Jamie Lloyd’s version of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical adaptation of Sunset Boulevard, the 1950 Billy Wilder movie starring Gloria Swanson as forgotten film star Norma Desmond who says the immortal line, “I am big, it’s the pictures that got small.”
Grace Hodgett Young as Betty Schaefer (Photo: Marc Brenner)
Since the musical, whose book and lyrics are written by Don Black and Christopher Hampton, premiered in 1993 there have been a fair few Norma Desmonds beginning with Patti LuPone, and including Elaine Page and West Side Story’s original Anita, Rita Moreno.
Glenn Close is perhaps the most memorable in the list. But it is hard to imagine any performance upstaging Nicole Scherzinger’s.
Though the pop and stage star is slight of frame her Desmond transmits a tragic ego the size of the cinema screen backdrop to Lloyd’s production. More than that she has a voice that can stop a train let alone a show.
We hear it first when she sings With One Look to our narrator, struggling screenwriter Joe Gillis (Tom Francis).
He first encounters Norma in her Sunset Boulevard mansion where she lives in splendid isolation but for her loyal butler Max (David Thaxton).
And we hear it again with Norma’s return to the film studio. Recognised by one of Cecil B. De Mille’s film crew she is bathed in light beams strong enough to knock a mortal off their feet.
The cast of Sunset Boulevard (Photo: Marc Brenner)
