Sunset Boulevard
Opening Night: October 20, 2024
Theater: St James Theatre
Website: sunsetblvdbroadway.com
Haunted by her memories and dreams, movie star Norma Desmond yearns to return to the big screen. A struggling screenwriter who can’t sell his scripts to the Hollywood studios may be her only hope, until their dangerous and captivating relationship leads to disaster. Drenched in champagne and cynicism, SUNSET BLVD. focuses the lens on the ambitions and frustrations of its characters and puts their intoxicating need for fame and adoration in stark close-up.
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October 20, 2024
I can’t help feeling that Lloyd’s talent and that of his designers, let alone Scherzinger’s, would be better lavished on better material.
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October 21, 2024
It’s rare for my praise of a show to feel more like a prescription for all to go see it, but I needed this “Sunset Boulevard.” I needed this lion of a woman roaring about how much she believes in herself and her place in the world even when no one else does. In Lloyd’s defining production, that roar is loud and clear. Do not miss your chance to hear it.
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October 20, 2024
Norma Desmond’s problem, as she tells us upon her entrance, is that she is big, but the pictures have gotten small. No such problem here. Scherzinger and the stage she inhabits push each other to grand extremes. The result is something like magic.
READ THE REVIEWOctober 20, 2024
Scherzinger is every bit as stunning and volcanic as you’ve heard, even if Jamie Lloyd’s hollow production doesn’t always match her earthshaking talent.
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October 20, 2024
Part of what makes this revival so absorbing is that you don’t always know where to look—at the actor on stage or the same actor live on screen. The giant images tug at your eye; you sometimes can’t help choosing them over the small, real person who is actually there. In this revival, itself a kind of re-production, that doesn’t feel like a gimmick or a trick. It’s a new way to see an old dream.
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October 20, 2024
Lloyd has somehow managed to create a giddily thrilling revival, with star Nicole Scherzinger delivering one of the greatest performances I’ve ever seen as a psychotic Norma Desmond for the TikTok era.
READ THE REVIEWOctober 20, 2024
Scherzinger, in bare feet and a black slip, could use a shade more vulnerability as past-her-prime Norma. But she shows off powerhouse pipes in the show’s best songs, her crowd-rousing solos “With One Look” and “As If We Never Said Goodbye.”
READ THE REVIEWOctober 20, 2024
In my view, nothing quite like it has ever previously been seen on a Broadway stage or, recently, a West End stage. And whether that’s unadulterated praise remains a question. The immediate answer is weighted toward the positive, since this time waving his revival wand, Lloyd is not merely reducing the film and the musical to its basics but is after a larger point about making black-and-white films.
READ THE REVIEWOctober 20, 2024
Revise your expectations accordingly and you’ll have a good time, as long as you don’t expect to actually see, you know, Sunset Boulevard.
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October 20, 2024
Her command is never in doubt, and Lloyd provides unimpeded access to her every emotion by frequently giving Norma what she craves most — a camera and a closeup.
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October 20, 2024
The current revival, if it does nothing else, should put the show’s mixed reputation to rest. With its silent movie-style black & white color scheme and heavy-shadowed expressionistic sculpting, Sunset Blvd. is quite unlike anything else on Broadway today, fierce and ferocious.
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October 20, 2024
There’s no doubt that Lloyd’s Sunset dazzles in the beholding, though the farther you walk away from it, the more you may find yourself feeling like poor Joe Gillis — remembering the thrill but no longer able to feel it, somehow both stirred and empty.
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October 20, 2024
You are likely to leave the production feeling as ambivalent about the musical (which, despite some high-powered solos, is not the composer’s finest work and is often clunky and meandering) as you do about the production style and performances. On the whole, it makes for exciting, fascinating theater.
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October 20, 2024
So much energy, freshness and unrelenting intensity courses through the veins of director Jamie Lloyd’s startling production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical from beginning to end, you’d swear it was brand new. And adrenaline pumps through our bloodstream anytime the extraordinary Nicole Scherzinger, making her wondrous Broadway debut, wails a note.
READ THE REVIEWOctober 20, 2024
But the video stuff and Nicole Scherzinger’s ferocious singing make this incarnation of Sunset Boulevard little more than a high-concept version of smoke and mirrors.
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October 20, 2024
All those close-ups take our attention away from what’s happening elsewhere on stage. They also expose a lot of things we should not be noticing. Those elements include the ugly around-the-jaw mics, the tape that secures those mics to an actor’s neck, the actors’ sweat — and also their acne. It is quite a youthful cast.
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