In Billy Wilder’s ur-camp masterpiece “Sunset Boulevard,” from 1950, Gloria Swanson plays Norma Desmond, an aging grande dame of silent film, who slides from self-regarding eccentricity into homicidal delusion. Intent on a comeback, Norma has seduced a young screenwriter named Joe Gillis (William Holden), but, when both he and the studio reject her, she swerves into a permanent dream. “All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my closeup,” she famously purrs to a wall of crime-scene photographers, her face smoothed flat with grease and powder. In the film, Gillis still narrates—though he’s just been shot dead, like Jay Gatsby, in the pool.
Andrew Lloyd Webber débuted his musical adaptation of “Sunset Boulevard” (co-written with Don Black and Christopher Hampton) in 1993, returning to the dark sensibility of his then recent mega-hit, “The Phantom of the Opera.” Webber might have felt on familiar ground. The Phantom and Norma are both attention-hungry spiders in glittering lairs; both are fantasists whose faces, either twisted or simply aging, become their obsessive focus.
Faces—gigantic, black-and-white ones—are certainly the main scenery of the director Jamie Lloyd’s souped-up and stripped-down “Sunset Blvd.,”newly transferred from London to the St. James (after winning seven Olivier Awards), and starring Nicole Scherzinger, onetime lead singer of the Pussycat Dolls. Casting a gleaming Scherzinger as the fading Norma is deliberately counterintuitive: a burlesque dancer, she twerks her way through Fabian Aloise’s club choreography barefoot, wearing only a black negligee. Everything—the “reality” of 1949 and even Norma’s supposed decrepitude (she’s meant to be, like, fifty)—will have to exist in the imagination.
Like Webber, Lloyd enjoys both the gothic and quoting himself. (From “A Doll’s House” to “Cyrano,” there seems to be no drama he won’t stage in a stark emptiness, whether that makes the story hard to follow or not.) The set and costume designer Soutra Gilmour, his frequent collaborator, has created another elegant void for him, filled with white fog and an immense movie screen. Ensemble members, in black-and-white streetwear, carry cameras mounted on Steadicam frames, shooting live closeups of the main characters: Scherzinger’s Norma; the screenwriter Joe (Tom Francis); and Max (David Thaxton), Norma’s butler and chief enabler. Almost every projected face stares directly at us—I was reminded not of film noir but of Andy Warhol’s lonely, mug-shot-inspired “Screen Tests.” Even when Joe and Norma kiss, they seem depersonalized; cold mannequins, colliding in space.
During the Act II overture and the subsequent title song, the video designers Nathan Amzi and Joe Ramson have arranged a thrilling coup de théâtre: a live camera tails Francis from his dressing room down through the guts of the building, then into the street. The company glides behind him as he sings and strides along, staring down the camera’s barrel. It’s been done before—Lloyd sent Jessica Chastain out of “A Doll’s House”; Ivo van Hove did a live walk-and-talk video in “Network”—but here the spectacle is so precise, the superimposition of Broadway on L.A. so droll, that Lloyd turns the cliché fresh again.
A camera makes its own decisions about who has star quality. Francis, as a physical presence, can be recessive, but there’s a silvery charisma in his projected image that his co-stars never find. For all her beauty, Scherzinger onscreen remains unexceptional; she mugs for the camera, like a TikTok influencer taping a reaction video. But, in the final mad scene, she abandons sarcasm, drenches herself in blood, and turns into a terrifying harpy. Tellingly, she’s best when she stops vamping for the camera’s attention and starts reaching, her fingers curled into claws, for the people in the room.
For much of the previous two hours, though, she’s been rolling her eyes. Maybe she can’t believe how shoddy a big-deal musical can be? Despite its many lush passages, Webber’s sung-through score is bloated with repetitive vocal figures, and the lyrics by Black and Hampton fall flat in comparison with lines lifted from Wilder and his co-writers, D. M. Marshman, Jr., and Charles Brackett. For instance, Norma’s iconic “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small” is followed almost immediately by the lyrics “No words can tell / The stories my eyes tell / Watch me when I frown / You can’t write that down.”
If Webber’s uneven musical is a grainy copy of Wilder’s film, this production is an intentionally distorted copy of a copy. But Lloyd is less interested in the specifics of either work than in the chthonic rage underneath. For the folks giving standing ovations during the show, the strategy seems to work. Scherzinger’s voice does contain a terrific power: instead of phrasing lines as thoughts, she attacks every clause with big, jackhammering blows. I was reminded that she has been a judge on “The X Factor”—there’s a sense of desperate competition in the way she delivers her numbers, holding nothing in reserve. The audience responds gratefully to this level of self-abnegation, and the frankly chilling sounds that come out of her. That’s all Norma Desmond wanted! She doesn’t mind suffering, as long as the people in the dark love her for it.
Meanwhile, “Romeo + Juliet,” at the Circle in the Square, takes a more straightforward approach to its star casting. Sam Gold’s inventive, emo-lite production features Rachel Zegler, from the recent film version of “West Side Story,” as Juliet, and Kit Connor, from the teen-Brit TV show “Heartstopper,” as Romeo. The moment we see them, running full-tilt out of a shouting gang of rowdy youths—the 2024 stylings by the costume designer Enver Chakartash include Hello Kitty backpacks, mesh tanks, and lots of baggy pants—they’re already avatars for Gen Z romance.
But the couple must also kindle something together. I found myself thinking wistfully of the National Theatre’s recent film with Jessie Buckley and Josh O’Connor, in which Buckley’s clever Juliet reads as being capable of diverting O’Connor’s Romeo from his violent path. Here, Zegler and Connor both seem like innocents, with a kind of inverse chemistry—as they get farther away from each other onstage, their connection appears to strengthen. Their finest moment is their first one, when they’re almost a full twenty feet apart. Zegler sings a song (written for the show by the über record producer Jack Antonoff) at a Capulet party, and her performance roots Romeo, an otherwise flighty fellow, to the spot.
After his work at Circle in the Square with “An Enemy of the People,” Gold has clearly taken the measure of in-the-round space, and so the rough-and-tumble Montague gang—which includes the wonderful Gabby Beans as Mercutio—clambers around in the catwalks overhead, dropping down near theatregoers in the standing-room section. Connor is particularly deft at interacting with the audience: he plays Romeo as an inexperienced softboi, offering the whole room his flustered courtesy. (When he does a chin-up to kiss Juliet on her balcony, his biceps bulging, the audience gasps. All that flirting really pays off.)
Gold and his company seem most comfortable in these swoony sections. The fights are silly; the final scene in the tomb is bizarrely quick and awkward. But, earlier, the mood is wonderful, and Antonoff’s electronic underscoring gives everything a kind of fuzzed-out, after-midnight sweetness. There’s a lovely moment when the circular black stage floor flips itself over to show a field of flowers. (The set design is by the collective called dots.) I know that the “bank where the wild thyme blows” line is from a different play, but it somehow feels as if it belongs to this production. The cast here is most believable as young people—enemies or not—who stay up all night and then fall asleep in a pile, like puppies in long grass. ♦
