Nicole Scherzinger leads stunning 2024 revival

“I’m big. It’s the pictures that got small.”

Perhaps the pictures have always been too small, if they have no place for a woman like Nicole Scherzinger’s radiant Norma Desmond. In the Broadway revival of Sunset Boulevard, Norma may have outgrown the role of an ingénue, but Scherzinger’s captivating performance makes it clear that she can still bring down the house — that there should be room in Hollywood for stories about women who (at 40, gasp!) have more years and complexity under their belt, and that those women can be astonishing.

While all good musicals benefit from the delights of live talent (“Defying Gravity” is arguably most exciting belted by a woman in green face paint, as she’s lifted into the air by a harness) in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard, spectacular talent is also the stakes of the story: Can Norma Desmond still be the greatest star of all? Can she still break our hearts with just one look?

The answer is a resounding yes. Scherzinger’s stunning vocals and lithe dancing are awe- and (in all recent occasions) standing ovation-inducing. With the help of lighting designer Jack Knowles’ brilliant spotlights, she literally glows.

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This nuclear star power is part of how director Jamie Lloyd avoids the cheap shots of a lesser Sunset Boulevard, where a middle-aged actress is treated like a joke because she wants to remain desirable. The true tragedy is much sharper: Former starlet Norma Desmond recruits a struggling writer to help her make a movie so powerful that it “teaches the world new ways to dream.” The problem is that she’s cast herself in the part of a 16-year-old seductress. Her own dreams are limited by the misogyny she’s internalized growing up in Hollywood. She’s still got the it-factor, but she believes she must look like a teenager to deserve the world’s attention.

Scherzinger also nails the comedy of a camp diva, inhabiting Norma’s delusion and ego without ever losing sight of her sincerity. It’s easy to see what both attracts and repulses the writer, Joe Gillis (Tom Francis), to Norma. Lloyd makes space for moments of silly, joyful chemistry between the pair.

The British director’s production is remarkably fresh for a 1990s musical based on a ’50s movie. The stage is sparse; props and set pieces replaced with live projections from a steady cam. (Norma Desmond does, in fact, get her close-up.) The best part is that Lloyd — previously Tony-nominated for similarly sparse revivals of Betrayal and A Doll’s House — knows how to make minimalism fun, to even turn it into camp. He overwhelms the stage with a giant rendering of Norma’s “servant” butler Max (the fabulous and severe David Thaxton), whose gothic energy is both threatening and comically out of place, like he’s supposed to be starring in Sweeney Todd.

But the most memorable use of live projection comes at the top of Act II, where we follow Francis’ Joe backstage, as he prepares to sing the show’s titular song. The sequence (parts of which I won’t spoil, but is documented all over social media) is whimsical, shocking, and one of the best parts of the show. What I will say is, I was tickled by a poster of the Pussycat Dolls in his dressing room. The backstage interlude evokes both the glamour of movies and the glamour of making movies — how both the product and production in Hollywood is aspirational.

Yet Lloyd’s staging never lets you forget the unglamorous and often exploitative way that art gets made. With an ensemble clothed in streetwear-inspired costumes (a stark and refreshing pivot from the standard traditional telling of the Hollywood Golden-era story), we’re reminded that most artists are not stars, but working class. Their hopes to create something beautiful and meaningful means their labor is undervalued in the marketplace at best. The ensemble sings about their scripts being changed irrevocably, of late night meetings, of only getting roles as cops and sex workers — all for little pay. (One ensemble member laments that a producer pressed a button, and “out of the wall fell a four-poster bed.” Post #Me-Too, Harvey Weinstein, and Matt Lauer, this formerly surreal line lands with a shocking literalness.) They seem genuinely angry, staring directly at the audience instead of speaking to each other, each an exhausted striver, the down-on-their-luck protagonist of their own Hollywood story.

Lloyd’s revival proves we don’t need a live rendering of Norma Desmond’s gaudy wardrobe, or a large spiral staircase for her to traipse down. He gives us all the pieces to make new meaning of Webber’s classic musical, and asks us to take up the challenge. As Sunset’s aspiring screenwriter Betty Schafer (Grace Hodgett Young) sings directly to the house, breaking the fourth wall, “Audiences are smarter, smarter than you think.”

Grade: A