The newest revival of Sundown Boulevard—glossily stark and aggressively meta—places a number of shades of lipstick on a pig. “Shades” being black, white, and crimson. “Pig” being a musical that could be one in all Andrew Lloyd Webber’s higher efforts however stays a bloated, subtlety-free slab of pop melodrama. Director Jamie Lloyd and his stylish design staff immerse Webber’s 1994 adaptation of the film basic in a vertiginous zone of inky surfaces and white highlights, all swaddled in incessant billows of stage fog. Soutra Gilmour’s modish costumes are likewise monochromatic, as is her sparse scenic design—basically a cavernous digital camera obscura. When the specter of homicide arises, lighting designer Jack Knowles floods the stage in a scarlet wash. By the top of the motion (slight spoiler), fallen star Norma Desmond (Nicole Scherzinger) is a gothic imaginative and prescient: glowing olive-toned pores and skin, black silk slip, and neck streaked in gore. The exceptional factor about this brutally regimented palette is the way it helps distract from the music.
Granted, I’m a Sondheim man and Webber’s syrupy, hammered-home melodies and blunt energy ballads—which require equally stunted lyrics—bore me stiff. His musical storytelling is caught between operetta and English Music Corridor; it’s turgid, repetitive, and allergic to nuanced characterization (to not point out real emotion). No less than with Sundown Boulevard, guide writers and lyricists Christopher Hampton and Don Black (gifted professionals) had glorious bones on which to construct. Billy Wilder’s love letter to Hollywood was etched with a poison pen, a spiky dance between satire and sympathy in its twisted portrait of Norma Desmond, the silent film queen tipped out of her throne by the talkies. Reclusive and periodically suicidal, Norma dwells in a celluloid Neverland the place she’s ceaselessly younger in shifting photos. When down-on-his-luck screenwriter Joe Gillis (Tom Francis) by chance pulls into the driveway of Norma’s spooky mansion on the title road, a lethal sport of mutual exploitation begins.
Other than bona fide Webber followers (apparently, they exist), the massive draw is Nicole Scherzinger, ex-Pussycat Doll and pop icon from the primary decade of this century. The primary glimpse we have now of our main girl is a visible trick: because the metallic beaded curtain components throughout Webber’s crashing and swelling overture, we expect that’s Norma gyrating in shadow on the lip of the stage. The truth is the determine is Hannah Yun Chamberlain, the strikingly stunning dancer who portrays Younger Norma. Chamberlain is, successfully, Scherzinger’s physique double and reappears continuously, at one level dancing along with her older self. (Consider The Substance, minus inexperienced goo and backbone splitting.) How apt: a stunt Norma for a stunt manufacturing.
Lloyd steers most of his actors towards tense, frontal deadpan. As Joe Gillis, Tom Francis (giving Jeremy Allen White) simmers and paces, coiled, fists shoved in pockets. It got here as a aid when Francis was allowed to gesticulate; I’d began to marvel how his character typed. Gillis is broke. Goons attempt to repossess his automotive as he makes the rounds at Paramount, schmoozing Hollywood sharks and minnows. Maybe to underscore the idea of Tinseltown as a spot that feeds youth right into a meat grinder, Lloyd casts the ensemble with younger performers, a Gen Z phalanx of grim-faced choristers and supporting gamers.
Quickly after Joe washes up on Norma’s shore, he’s absorbed into her diva-gone-wild universe of secrets and techniques and lies. We meet an ooky German manservant named Max (David Thaxton) and listen to of a pet chimp, lately deceased. Additionally, there’s Norma’s garish and overwritten screenplay about Salomé, which she needs Joe to punch up for her huge return to motion pictures. When Joe asks how outdated the character is, Norma nonchalantly replies, “Sixteen.” Scherzinger seems nice for her age, however lands the chortle, nonetheless.
In her Broadway debut, the main girl grows on you. In distinction to viewers members who stood and screamed each time Scherzinger blasted out one in all Norma’s compulsory, overheated ballads (“With One Look,” “As If We By no means Stated Goodbye”), I went in with minimal expectations. Fortunately, Scherzinger instructions her scenes—on stage and blown as much as gargantuan proportions on the 27′ x 23′ LCD display fed stay video by actors strapped into digital camera models.
Scherzinger could start tentative and stiff, however quickly she’s vamping and pouting for the digital camera like a giddy teenager along with her first TikTok account. When Norma talks astrology with Joe, she adopts a goofy Valley Woman vocal fry. Is Norma conscious of her eccentric excesses, or is that Scherzinger and Lloyd commenting on it? The anachronistic, self-mocking gestures prolong to the choreography. Fabian Aloise offers Scherzinger cheeky quotes from the Pussycat Dolls’s synchronized strutting. Scrawled someplace in my notes is “Norma twerks?” If it weren’t horribly outdated to say postmodern, that’s how I might describe Scherzinger’s pleasant pastiche.
There’s an obscene quantity of eye sweet to have a look at—together with Francis and the ensemble’s excellent work with the Act II opener that takes them (on video) all through the heart of the St. James Theatre and onto the streets in a virtuosic single monitoring shot. The precise tune “Sundown Boulevard” is dopey as heck (“Sundown Boulevard / Frenzied boulevard / Swamped with each sort of false emotion”). However the stay video sequence is a knockout, poking enjoyable on the present as Francis and ensemble members prowl the road trying attractive and funky, joined by a man in a monkey outfit (shout out to the lifeless chimp). Most of Webber’s hits concerned outlandish stage results: Phantom’s crashing chandelier; a large flying tire in Cats; Sundown Boulevard premiered with a mansion rolling towards the viewers. Eradicating lumbering set items from a Webber musical is like studying a Michael Bay screenplay for its urbane wit. Right here, Lloyd provides the proper spectacle for our mediated, homogenized age: digital projection, dematerialized units, uniform couture.
All that luscious black-and-white video, the backstage winks, the fuck-you deadpan in fuck-me boots—it’s enjoyable. I by no means anticipated to have enjoyable at an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. (Even this summer time’s queer ballroom makeover of Cats was, properly, Cats.) Lloyd’s camp but surgical staging fuses type and content material: it’s the resurrection of a pale (kitsch) icon, a critique of the invasive digital camera, a cosplay of the BDSM rituals of movie star and fandom. Simply as Scherzinger inhabits Norma inside large neon citation marks, the entire manufacturing appears to confess the general musical is trash. What occurs if you happen to costume up trash as artwork and stick a digital camera in its face? Twenty toes excessive, these faces—coldly sensual graven photos—demand your abject worship. It’s a skinny line (movie-screen skinny) between glamour and horror. “We gave the world new methods to dream,” an enraptured Norma sings. Lloyd finds new methods to provide us nightmares; who needs to wake?
Sundown Boulevard | 2hrs 30mins. One intermission. | St. James Theatre | 246 West forty fourth St. | Purchase Tickets Right here
