Review Roundup: Nicole Scherzinger Stars In SUNSET BOULEVARD

The Jamie Lloyd Company’s production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard is officially open on the West End, starring Nicole Scherzinger as Norma Desmond. Read the reviews!

The production is directed by Jamie Lloyd, with book and lyrics by Don Black and Christopher Hampton, based on the Billy Wilder film.

Nicole Scherzinger (Norma Desmond) is joined by Tom Francis (Joe Gillis), Grace Hodgett Young (Betty Schaefer) and David Thaxton (Max Von Mayerling). As previously announced, Rachel Tucker will be guest starring as Norma Desmond on Thursday 12 October matinee, and all Monday performances from 16 October 2023 – 6 January 2024.

Completing the cast are Carl Au (Myron / Jones), Georgia Bradshaw (Lisa), Hannah Yun Chamberlain (Patsy), Tyler Davis (Sheldrake), Kamilla Fernandes (Dorothy), Ahmed Hamad (Artie), Laura Harrison (Catherine), Charlotte Jaconelli (Joanna / Guard), Olivia-Faith Kamau (Nancy), Luke Latchman (John), Emma Lloyd (Mary / Heather), Mireia Mambo (Jean / Dance Captain), Gregor Milne (Sammy), Kody Mortimer (Finance Man / Frank), Jon Tsouras (Finance Man / Stan / Cecil B. De Mille) and Charlie Waddell (Morino / Hog-Eye), with Lara Denning (Standby Norma), Jordan Cork and Shayna McPherson (Camera Operators / Ensemble), and Catherine Cornwall, Michael Lin (Assistant Dance Captain), Jon Reynolds, Kirsty Anne Shaw, Harrison Wilde and Lillie-Pearl Wildman as swings.

The creative team are Soutra Gilmour (Set and Costume Designer); Fabian Aloise (Choreographer); Alan Williams (Music Supervisor and Musical Director); Jack Knowles (Lighting Designer); Adam Fisher (Sound Designer); Nathan Amzi and Joe Ransom (Video Design and Cinematography); Stuart Burt CDG (Casting Director); Hazel Holder (Voice and Dialect); Kate Waters (Fight Director); Ingrid Mackinnon (Intimacy Coordinator); RACHEL WOODHOUSE (Costume Supervisor); Lily Mollgaard (Props Supervisor); Rupert Hands (Associate Director); Paris Green (Resident Associate Choreographer);  Huw Evans (Associate Musical Director); Kelsh B-D (Associate Sound Designer); Martyn Sands (Production Manager).

The Jamie Lloyd Company continues its commitment to accessibility, with 5,000 stalls and dress circle tickets priced at £20 available across the run exclusively for under 30s, key workers and those receiving government benefits. These tickets will be released weekly from September, with further information to be announced.  

Aliya Al-Hassan, BroadwayWorld: Many words have already been written about whether Nicole Scherzinger, the American actress, ex-Pussycat Doll and X Factor judge, is the right choice to play Norma Desmond, the reclusive silent movie star who dreams of a comeback. Desmond has lost the limelight, whereas Scherzinger remains a global superstar. As it happens, it is just one of many inspired choices in Jamie Lloyd’s dazzling revival.

Matt Wolf, The New York Times: Scherzinger nails Norma’s two showstoppers — one in each act — shedding sunglasses as she lifts the defiant “With One Look” to the rafters and beyond. That number’s second-act equivalent, “As If We Never Said Goodbye,” sung during a deluded Norma’s return to Paramount Pictures, begins plaintively, even tenderly, before building to a mighty roar. Scherzinger extends her long, sinuous arms in the direction of the audience like talons toward prey.

Peter Marks, The Washington Post: Whose inspired idea was recruiting Scherzinger, best known as the lead singer of the Pussycat Dolls? (And more recently a fixture on TV talent shows.) Her casting as erstwhile screen siren is the production’s most exciting brainstorm; you can imagine her as a celluloid Cleopatra. Still, it’s far from the only smart choice. With videographers roaming the Savoy stage, projecting actors’ faces onto a huge screen so crisply you can see into their pores, the director ingeniously invites the camera to be a full artistic partner.

Clive Davis, The Times: In the end, though, the camera trickery becomes overbearing. In a bravura sequence at the start of Act Two, we see Tom Francis, as the doomed screenwriter Joe Gillis, make his way from his dressing room to the stage, passing through corridors before he enters the auditorium via a door in the stalls. It’s clever, yes, but to what purpose? And all the little in-jokes, the cardboard cut-out of Lloyd Webber and the off-duty actors goofing around, only serve to undercut the show’s tragic aura. It doesn’t help, either, that Scherzinger, who, at 45, cuts a seductive cat-like figure, plays Norma less as a monarch in exile and more like a hyperactive Morticia Addams. What about her singing voice? Scherzinger, who studied musical theatre in her youth, possesses the lung power, but too often you can hear her grinding through the gears. The anthemic As If We Never Said Goodbye starts promisingly, but soon lapses into overkill.

Luke Jones, The Daily Mail: Nicole Scherzinger nails it from the off. Any doubts I had about a Pussycat Doll playing Hollywood’s answer to Miss Havisham were banished pronto. The early tune, With One Look, sees Scherzinger, as the mighty Norma Desmond, rip off her sunglasses and, in a tornado of stage haze and white-hot spotlights, roar an ear-popping showstopper. The room leaped to its feet. Fading pop star becomes fading film icon, to dramatic perfection! I gasped – losing a full mouthful of gin and tonic to my shirt. Forget Billy Wilder’s hammy noir original, and the lavish productions of this Andrew Lloyd Webber musical we’re used to. Here is a thrillingly fresh and surprisingly dark revival. For my money (and for a good seat do bring a wheelbarrow of it) this is the show of the year.

Arifa Akbar, The Guardian: Don Black and Christopher Hampton’s book retains some of the best lines of the screenplay, and while the score sounds bombastic at times and many of the songs seem unmemorable, the singing dazzles across the board. Nicole Scherzinger as Norma is not only a formidable vocalist but, as a celebrity playing a woman who is wrestling with the loss of her own celebrity, it is inspired casting for its circularity. The show has a stupendous sense of reinvention, with an end scene so arresting that it surprises even those who know what’s coming. So why, with all these riches, does it leave this critic so removed and restless?

Sara Crompton, WhatsOnStage: Over the past few years Lloyd has been honing a directorial style that presents drama in black and white, stripped back and intense, revealing the bones beneath the skin. It’s a technique perfectly suited to Andrew Lloyd Webber and Don Black’s musical based on a black and white movie, that tells the story of the silent movie star Norma Desmond, whose career has been ended by the coming of sound. It also superbly showcases the power of its star, Nicole Scherzinger, who gives a performance of astounding clarity and commitment. When she stands at the very front of the stage, surrounded by misty haze, her hands gently touching her face, her arms weaving fantastical shapes in the air and sings ‘With One Look’ she is in danger of bringing the house down before the plot has even begun to unfold.

Sam Marlowe, The Stage: With its stark, prop-free design, its noirish black-and-white palette, its jagged, sinewy choreography and its inspired use of live video, it’s as dark and glittering as a black diamond, and as lean and lethal as a stiletto blade. The casting in the lead role of former Pussycat Doll and X Factor judge Nicole Scherzinger – a sex-bomb popstrel now in her mid-40s – is a stroke of genius, pointing up our rampant appetite for fame and exploding stereotypes about how women in middle age should look, think, feel and behave, while rubbing our collective nose in our persistent tendency to slap a sell-by date on female stars. But more – we’re reminded of the pressure that we inflict on ourselves, turning our lives into movies on social media, filtering out our imperfections. Norma may only feel fully alive in front of a camera; yet what a tyrant that lens becomes when we all carry one around every day in our pocket.

Greg Stewart, Theatre Weekly: Fans of the original production might find themselves a little confused by The Jamie Lloyd Company’s revival of Sunset Boulevard at the Savoy Theatre. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s epic Hollywood tragedy has been given a modern reinvention by director, Jamie Lloyd, and it’s unlike anything you might have seen before. Norma Desmond is back, and she’s fierce.

Steven Saunders, The Culture Pages: Despite the source material suggesting the need for decaying glamour, director Lloyd and company have opted to dispense almost entirely with the need for sets or props. Instead the audience are presented with an almost entirely black stage, occasionally augmented by a semi-translucent curtain of shining beads, while the only props are conventional wooden chairs. This may sound austere, but this version of Sunset Boulevard is breath-taking, daring and truly dazzling. The key to the staging of this production is Lloyd and lighting designer Jack Knowles’ use of light and total darkness to dramatic effect.  Different planes of space are created across the performance area as dynamic lighting effects are deployed with clinical precision. Characters appear out of the dark, perfectly isolated in pools of light, silhouettes and smoke are used to enhance the most potent moments of Scherzinger’s performance, while moments of sudden light and darkness are used to both disorientate and shock.

Dominic Cavendish: The Telegraph: 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.

Alice Saville, The Independent: No one would expect avant-garde superstar director Jamie Lloyd to handle 1991 musical Sunset Boulevard with misty-eyed tenderness – not least its brave and trusting parents Andrew Lloyd Webber and Don Black. And, of course, he doesn’t. Even so, there’s something shiver-inducingly thrilling about the way Lloyd thrusts this story into darkest night, setting it in a haunted Hollywood backlot where huge suggestive shadows loom and blood-soaked gothic terrors emerge.

Chris Sellman, Gay Times: So we have a visually striking production, excellent music and a genuine star performance – what’s not to love? Well, for all its incredible set-pieces – and there are many – Sunset Boulevard never really gels as a whole. At times it feels like there’s a bit of a disconnect between what we’re watching and the story they’re telling.

Mert Dilek, The Arts Desk: With book and lyrics by Don Black and Christopher Hampton, Webber's 1993 piece is an adaptation of Billy Wilder’s cult 1950 film, and finds itself, in this instance, subjected to a further adaptation in Lloyd’s masterful hands. Endlessly fierce and hip, this bold interpretation of the material dazzles with its transformation of the musical’s bare bones into a tragic feast of profound power.

Andrzeg Lukowski, Time Out London: Really, the show is the triumph of Lloyd and his creative team. From a purely technical perspective this is just stunning, making astounding use of live video: shout out to video designers and cinematographers Nathan Amzi and Joe Ransom. From the delicious faux opening movie credits sequence onwards, the monochrome footage relayed onto the back of the set is magnificent: it looks great, like a living film noir, but also they seem to have eliminated the latency between live performance and feed, a genuinely groundbreaking achievement.

Marianka Swain, London Theatre: Is Nicole Scherzinger ready for her close-up? That’s the big question coming into Jamie Lloyd’s feverishly anticipated revival of Sunset Boulevard: whether the former Pussycat Doll can follow Patti LuPone and Glenn Close in playing the faded starlet Norma Desmond. Well, now we can stop wondering: Scherzinger doesn’t just handle the role, she devours it. True, that’s partly because Lloyd’s electrifying, revolutionary production is so cleverly shaped around her – and her public persona. (I can’t imagine how it’s played on Rachel Tucker’s dates, but I’m eager to find out.) It’s a cunning way of bringing Andrew Lloyd Webber, Don Black, and Christopher Hampton’s mid-century Hollywood fable bang up to date.

Fiona Mountford, iNews: Jamie Lloyd is not a director who treats the classics deferentially. Rather he strips them down, roughs them up and, if all is going to plan, polishes them to a new and dazzling sheen. The results, as with his production of Cyrano de Bergerac starring James McAvoy, can be revelatory. If he doesn’t manage quite such reinvention with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical take on the Billy Wilder film classic, it is nonetheless a magnificently stylish evening.

Simon Button, Attitude: Literally black-and-white (like the 1950 Billy Wilder film on which the musical is based) until its blood-splattered denouement, the production is a stunner. If little about the Evita rejig made sense, everything here is in service to the story. Stripped of scenery and props, the lush score rises to the fore and the tale of a former star gradually going mad in her mansion is as deeply disturbing as it should be.

Neil Norman, Express: Aside from a handful of dancers who form an impressionistic idea of sharp, hip Hollywood, the four major characters dominate the evening. Scherzinger rules, a delusional diva with a titanic voice and a simmering sexuality.

Nick Curtis, The Evening Standard: Lloyd’s monochrome, dressed down production has no set but builds a cinematic atmosphere through spotlights and projected close-ups, with floating handheld cameras circling the action. It’s a tour de force of a show, in love with showbiz and the creation and destruction of illusions. The art deco glamour of the Savoy Theatre makes it the perfect setting. I’d say you should kill for a ticket, but Lloyd has ensured prices start at £21.

Adam Bloodworth, City A.M.: Lloyd, who is known for his innovative work across recent adaptations of The Seagull,  A Doll’s House and Cyrano de Bergerac, as well as the National Theatre’s The Effect, certainly provides blue sky thinking for how theatre can incorporate film technology in new ways. It’s exciting to think what he may have next. But all the meta tomfoolery of would-be film-makers running on and off with lights and cameras distracts, and, dare I say it, occasionally bores, not leaving enough space for examinations of the characters lifted from the original Billy Wilder film, and Don Black and Christopher Hampton’s original book.

Sheena Oberoi, BNN: The revival, directed by Jamie Lloyd, took a daringly austere approach, forgoing grand stage machinery in favor of a largely monochrome scheme. This artistic choice underscored the bleakness of Hollywood’s ruthlessness in discarding talents still in their prime. The adaptation also incorporated contemporary clothes and parallels, adding an edge of relevance to the timeless narrative.

Photo Credit: Marc Brenner