Lucy Komisar
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“Sunset Boulevard” fails even as camp in spite of Scherzinger’s power singing. “Sunset Boulevard.”
The best thing about the revival of “Sunset Boulevard” (book and lyrics by Don Black and Christopher Hampton) which starred Glen Close in 1993 and 2017 is the singing by Nicole Scherzinger as the faded film star Norma Desmond. The second best is her famous final line: “I’m ready for my closeup,” now in common parlance. Not so good is the over-the-top camp acting or script.
I found the show generally deadly. Hokey, like a ghost story, even a bit of a horror show, predictable as it starts with the report of a murder as well as blinding car headlights, a typical shtick in such productions. Camera men move around on stage to project Scherzinger and others onto the overwhelming floor-to-ceiling screen backdrop, as if director Jamie Lloyd wants to remind people this was once a film.
Sometimes you don’t know where to look, but you certainly don’t miss a minute of the star’s mugging, even with her odd-shaped dark glasses (and bare feet). Tom Francis portrays Joe Gillis, a young movie script writer who is not faded because he never shined. It’s 1949. Gillis can’t get work. Thuggish finance men want to repossess the car on which he owes $300. The studio exec is a creep. There’s a lot of “let’s do lunch.”
A bright spot is Betty Schaefer (Grace Hodgett Young, a charmer) an ambitious young working -class studio secretary who liked one of his stories, which she wants to develop. But he’s too dumb to follow that up and work with her. Also, so dumb or desperate as to be taken in by Desmond. When he meets her, he says, “You used to be in pictures. You used to be big.” She, “I am big. It’s the pictures that got smaller.” The pictures also got color (“The Wizard of Oz” and “Gone with the Wind,” both 1939), but the play reverts to black and white, with chiaroscuro costumes, as were the old films. (The Gloria Swanson movie was in 1950.)
“You’ve written pictures?” Scherzinger asks him, as the spider to the willing fly. She is weird as the has-been star. Her slinky opening dance (she crawls and turns on the floor) was lost on me. (Most of the choreography by Fabian Aloise is generic acrobatic dancing.)
The Los Angeles (probably Beverly Hills) mansion is a haunted house in which Desmond does the haunting. Gillis becomes her ghost writer, ends up staying there at her insistence and eventually becomes her gigolo. She hyperventilates when he says he may go home. And sets her trap. Along the way, director Lloyd seems so desperate to take a break from the melodrama, or find another use for the ubiquitous cameras, that he stops the show for a rain-or-shine live video of a walk by Gillis and his accompanying throng in the street outside the theater. On the positive side, Scherzinger’s voice soars. And David Thaxton as Max, her manservant and former husband, has a fine operatic baritone. I wished the music by Andrew Lloyd Webber (which echoes his other musicals) was not so loud and overmiked. “Sunset Boulevard” was better in the original movie version, sans music and with cameras outside the scene.
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