Sunset Boulevard, Savoy Theatre, review: Nicole Scherzinger is an unmistakable triumph
Nicole Scherzinger – the American actress, singer and former X Factor judge – has a bankable name and star quality. But is she a good fit for the anti-heroine of Sunset Boulevard - Norma Desmond, the eclipsed silent screen goddess who, holed up in her LA mansion, yearns for a comeback?
Gloria Swanson was only around 50 when she played the role in the 1950 Billy Wilder film that inspired Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1993 musical. But her whole demeanour – from the severe headscarves, to the scowling, widening eyes that lurked behind her dark glasses, to her sedentary restraint – bespoke a Miss Havisham-esque ossification.
When Scherzinger, 45, played aged Grizabella in Lloyd Webber’s Cats in 2014, some critical claws came out for the former Pussycat Dolls singer for being too young. Here she looks more than ready for the close-up Norma desperately craves; so doesn’t the character’s self-delusion dissipate?
Yes, and no. The point – flagged in interviews ahead of this revival by Jamie Lloyd, which shrugs off confining period detail to allow in vaguely contemporary clothes and parallels – is that Hollywood’s special ruthlessness lies in its ability to discard those still in their prime. In this unravaged reading, it matters less that Norma was a silent-screen star, more that she exemplifies a silenced talent, whom no one in the business will listen to, and who must vent to herself or – her unexpected audience and seized-on romantic salvation - the hack screen-writer Joe Gillis, who pitches into her lair by accident and comes to rue the day.
Whether you buy into the casting justification or no, what’s not in doubt is the intensity and purity of the experience that Lloyd, applying an experimental lens (and tricksy live camera-work) to the lushly beautiful, hypnotic show, unleashes. As with his radical West End Cyrano, he offers something bracingly austere; no grand staircases, a world removed from the (notorious) stage machinery of the original production.
Daringly applying a largely monochrome scheme, he has the ensemble suggest the cinematic world for us like flickering particles in a void – sometimes isolated in piercing spotlight, darting in shadows, and forming looming silhouettes. The tightly drilled, production-line fleet opening choreography brings out the springy cynical wit of the material. There is a magnificence in simplicity, and Scherzinger’s Norma, initially drawing herself regally downstage, in black dress and shades, her dark hair long with a soupcon of the untamed warrior, has a poise that thrills.
When she lets loose with her lungs, though, this creature from the pre-talkies attains the shattering force of a sonic boom. Have the lonely diva’s big numbers – With One Look and As If We Never Said Goodbye – ever been rendered with such heart-stopping immensity? As the increasingly mad-eyed femme fatale’s foil Tom Francis’s Joe is cocky, wary, beguiled, defeated. The unrelentingly stark evening has its longueurs, but it’s hard not to salute Scherzinger’s unmistakable triumph or fall in love with Lloyd Webber’s satisfyingly sinister opus once again.
Until Jan 6. Tickets: sunsetboulevardwestend.com
