Theatre in Review: Sunset Blvd. (St. James Theatre)

	Nicole Scherzinger. Photo: Marc Brenner

When Billy Wilder attended the opening night of Sunset Boulevard, the musical, in 1993, he was quoted as calling it "a very lush, very well-done production." He added, "The best thing they did was leave the script alone." Oh, Billy, you should see what they're doing now! Wilder's 1950 film, a landmark of American cinema is a noirish Hollywood gothic informed by the director's acrid wit. Andrew Lloyd Webber, aided by Don Black and Christopher Hampton, colorized and sentimentalized the property into a vehicle for divas of a certain age. Now the director Jamie Lloyd has applied his smash-and-grab tactics to the material, returning it to its black-and-white roots but hyping it into a camp trash horror epic closer to Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? than anything Wilder ever imagined. It may be Broadway's first exploitation musical.

That the stage is essentially bare, with lighting suitable for the operating room, is no surprise; this has been Lloyd's standard operating procedure in revivals of Betrayal, Cyrano de Bergerac, and A Doll's House. Also par for the course is how the actors frequently face front, delivering their dialogue largely drained of emotion. (At times it seems as if everyone is running their lines.) Everyone creeps around the stage, dressed in black, picked out by stark shafts of light, overwhelmed by bug-eyed closeups on the enormous video screen that looms over the action. It's like a visit to the Isle of the Dead; next to this bunch, the characters in Our Town inhabit a Technicolor Schmigadoon!

As Wilder noted, the musical closely follows the film, about Joe Gillis, a bankrupt hack screenwriter who, still easy on the eyes, ends up playing gigolo to Norma Desmond, an aging silent movie queen holed up in her mansion, deliriously fixated on the past, attended only by Max, her zombie-like butler/chauffeur. Joe is ostensibly hired to patch up the unreadable screenplay with which Norma intends to make her comeback (as the world's oldest Salome), but he earns his keep after hours in her bedroom. Overwhelmed with self-disgust, Joe starts working with aspiring screenwriter Betty Schaefer, who is engaged to his best friend Artie, an assistant director. By the time Joe and Betty finish the script and start writing their personal love story, the desperate Norma is bent on revenge.

For Lloyd Webber -- for anyone, really -- the score is surprisingly good, a romantic, doom-filled pastiche of midcentury movie composers like Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Franz Waxman, occasionally spiked with jazzy accents. (Barry and Hampton's lyrics are occasionally clunky but far above the Lloyd Webber average.) Lloyd has mercifully cut "The Lady's Paying," a too-cute episode showing Joe at the haberdasher's, being fitted up as the kept man he has become. Otherwise, this is pretty much Sunset Boulevard as usual.

Except it isn't. Lloyd has zero interest in the trappings of 1950s Hollywood or the history of silent film, both key narrative points. The director and his choreographer, Fabian Aloise, stage the group numbers with such indifference to the story that anyone unfamiliar with it will most likely be lost. (These include, "Let's Have Lunch," a swirl of cynical on-set conversations littered with showbiz platitudes; "Every Movie's a Circus," featuring a gaggle of film hopefuls at Schwab's Drugstore, plotting their futures; and "This Time Next Year," a New Year's Eve blowout in which everyone hopes for better times. Wait for Aloise's big Pina Bausch moment in the climax, with male and female dancers, dressed like Norma, throwing themselves on the floor, convulsing.) Soutra Gilmour's costumes combine 2024 casual dress and athleisure; perhaps to suggest she is all-business, Betty is outfitted like a soccer coach.

Surprisingly, no previous production of Sunset Boulevard in my experience has employed projections, a medium that would seem natural for the material. Lloyd overcompensates here with an enormous video screen, deploying teams of camerapersons to catch everyone in extreme close-up. The title number, Joe's lament about being trapped in a web of corruption, has always been problematic, thanks to its pontificating lyrics; here, Lloyd opts for the full Ivo Van Hove treatment, using cameras to capture Tom Francis, who plays Joe, descending from his dressing room on a high floor of the theatre, stepping out onto 44th Street, and walking to Shubert Alley and back. On the way, he interrupts his co-stars, jokes with a stagehand, and passes two male chorus members kissing. On the street, he is joined by most of the company, including a guy in an ape suit, an allusion to Norma's pet chimp who dies and is buried early on. The audience roars when he poses next to his image outside the theatre. The giggly, aren't-we-cute tone gives rise to the suspicion that Lloyd isn't reviving Sunset Boulevard so much as he is sending it up.

The director's deepest energies are focused on Nicole Scherzinger, who delivers a Norma Desmond like nothing you've ever seen. Dressed in a black slip, barefoot, hair courtesy of Morticia Addams, she moves slowly and deliberately, often seeming to mentally count the seconds between grand gestures. Her line readings are carefully measured, often featuring weirdly extended vowels. "Sit dooooown," she commands Joe, her voice coming to a soft landing after a long, long drop. Worried that Joe will abandon her New Year's party, she protests, "I can't possibly do this without you. I've already sent out all the invitaaaaations." Scherzinger tries on voices and attitudes like hats. Her climactic mad scene seems so unhinged largely because her entire performance is a mad scene from the get-go, forcing her to go way, way over the top.

Norma has the score's best numbers, "With One Look," in which she evokes the power of silent film (starring her, of course), and "As If We Never Said Goodbye," sung at a visit to Paramount Studios when she becomes erroneously convinced her former director Cecil B. DeMille wants to shoot her comeback vehicle. In each case, Lloyd directs Scherzinger to step downstage into a limbo area, where, framed in sidelight, she gives a kind of concert-style rendition. The actress is utterly decontextualized from a show already decontextualized from its native milieu. Her singing, delivered at half-tempo and accompanied by sweeping gestures, is heavily processed -- pumped up through the sound system and shaped by reverb. It is an astonishingly manufactured performance and I'd be lying if I didn't add that it brings much of the audience to their feet.

Have we reached the point where plot and character count for little or nothing so long as the diva has her showstoppers? Possibly; then again, flaws and all, Sunset Boulevard usually delivers a Norma who, for all her follies, astounding selfishness, and emotionally grasping ways, is essentially pitiable, a star who outlived her gilded youth and can't adapt to changing times. With her bizarre line readings -- glaring, pop-eyed into the video screen, she brings up memories of Carol Burnett's spoof Norma -- Scherzinger puts on a freak show. Illustrating Salome's dance of the seven veils, she rolls around on the floor, her legs spread; she spreads them again, leering at Joe, when announcing it is time for bed. Spoiler alert: The film and (usually) the musical end with Norma plugging Joe full of lead at a safe distance; at the St. James, she's a regular Vampira, drenched in gore and feasting on her victim's blood.

Francis, making his first entrance emerging from a body bag, offers a fairly standard Joe Gillis; his breathy singing is a little off-putting at first, but he improves, and his rather soft, baby-faced look suggests the disappointments of a dreamer from Dayton, Ohio, burned by the discovery that people don't play nice in the film colony. A constant presence, he is surely the hardest-working man on Broadway right now. David Thaxton is a superb Max; looking, thanks to lurid video images, like he's trying out for The Boris Karloff Story, he nevertheless finds something pitiable in his character's subservient devotion to Norma. Thanks to his stunningly resonant baritone, his big number, "The Greatest Star of All," provides the evening's biggest vocal thrills. No one has ever made much of an impression as Betty Schaefer, one of musical theatre's most thankless roles, and now Grace Hodgett Young joins their ranks, although her work is thoroughly professional. (Lloyd can't do a thing with Betty and Joe's duets, especially "Too Much In Love to Care," during which they make like musical comedy ingenues; it is staged statically, to get big closeups of them on the screen; the director's big moment of invention is to insert tearful close-ups of Artie, who, on location in Tennessee, has apparently guessed that his upcoming marriage is off.)

On its own terms, Gilmour's set effectively evokes a haunted, empty soundstage and the sweeping video screen movements add plenty of drama. If one begins to long for just a touch of color, Jack Knowles' lighting is certainly muscular and arresting, even with enough clouds of smoke onstage to alarm the fire department. Adam Fisher's rich, full sound design gets full value from the expansive orchestrations by David Cullen and Lloyd Webber. The video design and cinematography by Nathan Amzi and Joe Ransom are certainly impressive, so much so that the live actors can't compete; much of the time, Sunset Blvd. feels like a night at the movies.

It's interesting to see how Lloyd Webber, who once exerted such control over his properties, has now entirely capitulated to the demands of director's theatre, both this summer with the ballroom edition of Cats and now with Sunset Blvd. Few will go to bat for Sunset Boulevard as an untouchable property, and Lloyd's approach is certainly an attention-getter, clutching at the audience like Norma reaching for Joe. To be sure, the director has successes, for example, in the screening of an old Norma vehicle, her role is taken by a young dancer; the video cuts between the young and older Norma, illustrating her horror of aging. The presentation of DeMille in silhouette on the video screen, his face obscured, is a creative way of suggesting the director's godlike place in Norma's universe. To be sure, Lloyd has an endless knack for theatrical effects; this is not a production from which easily one looks away. But everything is applied without regard to the nuances of plot or character; the adrenalized approach races from sensation to sensation, eager to provoke the next ovation. It's a relentless and exhausting way to treat an audience. --David Barbour