‘Sunset Blvd.’ Star Nicole Scherzinger Says She’s More Than Just a Pussycat Doll: ‘This Is Me Outside All of Those Mother-F—ing Boxes’

Michael Appler

Mon, October 21, 2024 at 8:07 PM UTC

7 min read

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When Nicole Scherzinger entered her dressing room at the St. James Theatre on Sunday afternoon, accompanied by an entourage befitting a Pussycat Doll-turned Broadway diva, a bouquet of roses awaited her. It was opening night of “Sunset Boulevard,” and any Norma Desmond preparing to open the breakout Broadway show of the season should expect her lavishing of gifts and florals. But Sunday, beside the roses on the dressing room table, sat a handwritten note. It was from Glenn Close.

For Scherzinger, the gesture was unexpected and overwhelming. For all the adulation she’d received in the West End—where, truly, Londoners tripped over themselves to see director Jamie Lloyd’s bare and bloody re-envisioning of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s classic—the singer had never spoken to Close, Patti LuPone, or any of the leading ladies who’ve embodied this highest role of diva worship.

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“The truth is,” she told Variety in the quiet aftermath of Sunday’s opening night, “the role is mine to make.”

In Lloyd’s production—which strips the show (and Scherzinger) of any comfort, forcing its audience to spend two hours in the emptiness and terror of Desmond’s descent—there is no room for sentimentality.

“Patti LuPone and Glenn Close are my idols,” Scherzinger told Variety. “But I haven’t spoken to them, because if this show is going to be real and authentic, it can only come from me.”

And out from Scherzinger did Demsond roar.

There is no thunder like the clamor inside a Broadway theater on opening night, whose audience has decided they’re watching a remarkable turn. During shows like “Sunset Boulevard,” where the faces of its leading ladies tend to transfigure into Desmond’s, the Broadway fashion plate, ever-hungry for lore, will lose itself in the excitement.

In Sunday’s orchestra sat usual Broadway notables like Anna Wintour and Huma Abedin; Zac Posen and the theater’s landlord Jordan Roth; as well as others, like Jessica Chastain, Ben Platt, Brooke Shields, and Wendell Pierce. Andrew Lloyd Webber was there, and so was Betty Buckley, another of Desmond’s keepers. Other luminaries, like Clive Davis and Jeff Bezos, came to pay respects at an altar of Broadway stardom. In the mezzanine, where Broadway talent could best rage, Jeremy O. Harris sat just seats from the “Real Housewives” tchotchke Countess LuAnn. Near them sat Jesse Tyler Ferguson and husband Jason Mikita, as well actors including Matthew Morrison and Arian Moayed.

What spellbound them—in one way or another—was the making of a Broadway diva before them. They leapt to their feet after Scherzinger’s opening number, “With One Look.” And again after her 11 o’clock number, “As If We Never Said Goodbye.” By curtain call, tears streamed from Ferguson’s face, and fellow Broadway alum, like Andrew Barth Feldman, nearly slung themselves from the mezzanine loge.

The show they watched—a manic, paranoid “Sunset Boulevard”—is unlike one they’d have seen before. How it was conceived is well-documented: “In a dream,” says director Lloyd, whose modern adaptations of traditional material on Broadway—including last year’s “A Doll’s House,” starring Chastain—have installed the Brit as Broadway’s wunderkind for exploding classics into contemporary ashes.

“A ‘reappraisal’ might be a better word than ‘revival,” Lloyd told Variety on Sunday when pressed about his vision for the show. “The truth is, there’s no grand plan in any of this. It’s not like I have an intention to re-energize the material. I’m not committed to that.”

Instead, he said, “I’m fascinated about the idea of the human mind and its need for validation.” He sets his adaptation in that psycho-social plane, he explained—not the world of the material. The stage is barren and harsh, and he disconnects his audience—and his cast— from the comforts of familiarity so that they can enter the psychic world of the show.

“I say to the cast, ‘Take praise as light as a feather. Take criticism as light as a feather.’ That’s the hardest thing to do as a person,” he said. “And that’s what we’re trying to explore. If you take that to the extreme, it’s Norma Desmond.”

On the stage, Scherzinger took her opening night bows covered in the blood of the stage she’d pillaged. In the show’s finale, she bows twice—first as Desmond and, after a flash, herself.

“I can’t describe to you what it’s like to stand there before an audience like that,” she told Variety on Sunday. “It’s taken a lot of years. A lot of struggle, pain and fighting.”

“I feel like we’re doing something just really new, where there are no rules,” she summed, eyes wide and expressive. “My whole life, everybody has put me in a box. They think they know me, that I’m just this Pussycat Doll. But now I’m a part of something. I have this role and this character, and I’m like ‘fuck it.’ This is me outside all of those mother-fucking boxes.”

“I don’t know how to describe it,” she said, having only minutes earlier washed Joe Gillis’ blood from her face and chest, “but I feel this role was written for me.”

See more photos from the opening night of “Sunset Blvd.” below.