Review: Video Thrills and Musical Stars in Killer Revival of Sunset Boulevard

I’d love to know what Carl Jung, pioneer of the shadow theory, thought of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard movie. A forlorn, psychologically tormented movie star, watching Polaroid prints of her younger self on repeat, staring into mirrors while obsessed with reclaiming her own image, and a lost past.

If you need a more obvious example of the theory, I doubt you’ll find it. So it’s fun when director Jamie Lloyd (famously the one that sat Jessica Chastain on a chair before pushing her out onto 45th Street) takes this notion and runs with it in his stellar new London revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber, Don Black, and Christopher Hampton’s Sunset Boulevard — with top-tier cast including Nicole Scherzinger in tow. 

In some ways, the musical is iconoclastic — gone are the staircases, gone are the swimming pools, gone are the extravagant outfits in the much-loved tale of a long-forgotten silent movie star who ensnares a down-and-out screenwriter to be her muse and bedfellow, with murderous results. 

Scherzinger spends the entire show in a black smock, few characters get any significant costume changes. She is often followed around by her mute younger shadow, played with physical litheness by Hannah Yun Chamberlain. Designer Soutra Gilmour has layered the show in monochrome — stripping back the set and allowing Jack Knowles’ lighting design to add flashes of desaturated chiaroscuro. 

As is fitting for a musical based on one of the great film noir classics, Lloyd makes sure video design is given a seismic starring role in this revival. Though Scherzinger has a whole raft of moments to shine (which she seizes with glistening, shimmering ease), the show is far from hers. Indeed, her achievements are dwarfed somewhat, almost literally, by the huge screen that acts as the main centerpiece of Lloyd’s production. Three gimbal operators whiz across the stage, providing close-ups, cross-fades, and focus-pulls, bearing silent witness as performer faces are transformed into 10-foot-high filmic fresco. 

It’s not the first time a production of Sunset Boulevard has straddled the worlds of screen and  stage — UK regional venue Leicester Curve captured a production during the pandemic with some mightily convincing results. Lloyd, nevertheless, accomplishes a whole lot more. 

In the hands of a lesser director, the video trickery may feel facile, or surface-level aesthetic embellishment. Here however, echoing the psychological vividness of the original flick, Lloyd understands that for Norma Desmond, film is simultaneously an agonizing window to a bygone era, preserved for all time on old reels, as well as a chance at redemption, through her bewildering new Salomé screenplay and her desire to make a grand return to the Paramount lot. Changes to the material double down on this intense close-up between individual characters — including the fortunate removal of the downright ghastly number “The Lady’s Paying.”

For all the artistry, there are some outright technical triumphs along the way — Lloyd’s incredible opening to Act 2, conducted without a single millisecond of latency, sees cameras follow Tom Francis’s Joe Gillis out of the Savoy Theatre, around onto London’s Strand and back inside the auditorium by the end of the number. It’s a masterful combination of video wizardry (Nathan Amzi and Joe Ransom step forward), angle-perfect blocking and choreography, and, ultimately, high-speed 5G signal. 

Even the scenes not embellished with video feel kinetic and fresh. Choreographer Fabian Aloise gives numbers like “Every Movie’s a Circus” a rough-and-ready, heady franticness — a reflection of a Hollywood filled to the brim with desperate wannabes with empty pockets and eyes full of stars. 

It takes a dedicated and crafty cast to bring Lloyd’s vision to life while also allowing each character to shine on their own terms. Casting director Stuart Burt hasn’t let the side down here — the often thankless role of Joe Gillis’s sweetheart and earnest creative Betty Schaefer is transformed into a savvy, emotionally conflicted foil to Norma’s hysteria by Grace Hodgett Young (an astounding professional debut). Starting the show in a body bag, Tom Francis (last seen in the West End taking over as the flamboyant romantic Romeo in & Juliet) gives Gillis a put-upon, placid manner — quietly haunted, perhaps, by the prospect of his eventual fate. 

The word “revelation” is almost always overused, but Scherzinger (a bit of a question mark when the production was first announced) is certainly tipping in that direction. It goes without saying that her vocal chops are more than enough to handle the ceiling-shaking epic sweep of standards like “As If We Never Said Goodbye” and “With One Look,” but it’s in her playful, maniacal characterization of Norma that she really excels — injecting a playful, almost feverish quality to the faded movie star. You get the sense that Desmond has been swallowed by the ravages of narcissism as well as time. 

In short, Lloyd continues to prove why he’s one of the best in the business working right now. With critical clamor and gigawatt star power, I’d lay my bets down now that there’ll be a Joe Gillis crooning his way around the back of a Broadway venue within the next year or so.