Despite Norma Desmond, who famously declares in the film “Sunset Boulevard” that it’s not her but “the pictures that got small,” the opposite is true on Broadway these days. In musicals especially, video and projections have grown ever more dominant. Perhaps it is not so much an irony as an inevitability, then, that at the St. James Theater, where a revival of the musical based on “Sunset Boulevard” opened on Sunday, the pictures — live video streamed onto an LCD screen more than 23 feet tall — are so big they almost blot out the show below.
But alas, only almost.
For despite many fascinating interventions by the director Jamie Lloyd and his technical team, and the fact that it is based on one of the greatest of movies, the musical remains too silly for words. In that sense, and others, Norma would have loved it.
Which isn’t praise. You will recall that Norma (Nicole Scherzinger of the Pussycat Dolls) is deluded: a washed-up silent film star who, in her 50-ish dotage, haunts a grand, ghostly Los Angeles mansion with only her grim manservant and a recently dead chimpanzee for company. By 1949, when the musical starts, she has barely left the premises for decades, let alone made a movie; still, she believes that she, and the silents, could achieve a marvelous comeback if only Cecil B. DeMille would direct her in the epic version of “Salome” she has written.
The rest is madness. She conscripts Joe Gillis, a hunky, seedy, unsuccessful screenwriter, to polish her draft and, soon enough, other things. Joe (Tom Francis) seesaws between his luxurious life as Norma’s kept man and the more idealistic promptings of Betty Schaefer, an ambitious studio underling he at first brushes off as “one of the message kids.” Still, when Betty (Grace Hodgett Young) urges Joe to adapt a story of his called “Dark Windows,” they fall in love, while the servant, Max von Mayerling (David Thaxton), offers a dark window of his own into Norma’s modus operandi with men. (Razor and gun included.) None of this ends well, or rather it does not begin well, as the tale is narrated postmortem by Joe’s corpse.
The 1950 film, directed by Billy Wilder, stands at a wry remove from these tawdry proceedings, with a cool appreciation but no embrace for human pathos and the hysteria of Hollywood dreams. Norma is a drama queen, Joe a gigolo, Betty a simp and Max a goblin. We know nothing of their emotions beyond what their actions show us.
A musical cannot work that way. Opening their mouths to sing, characters are all emotion. Perhaps that’s why Stephen Sondheim and, later, the team of Kander and Ebb abandoned attempts at adaptation.
But where angels feared to tread came Andrew Lloyd Webber to write the tunes and Don Black and Christopher Hampton to write the words, turning Wilder’s critique of camp into an overblown celebration of it instead. Lloyd Webber’s music, some of it quite stirring, at least delivers the largeness and fragility of Norma’s self-regard in songs like “With One Look” and “As If We Never Said Goodbye,” with their nervous first choruses and bellowing finishes. But the lyrics, often accented on ridiculously wrong syllables, are fatally awkward, and the book, softening everyone in the process of giving them legible motivations, turns Wilder’s worldliness into kitsch.
I have to believe that Lloyd, who has directed exceptional New York revivals of “Betrayal” (with Tom Hiddleston), “A Doll’s House” (with Jessica Chastain) and “Cyrano de Bergerac” (with James McAvoy), knows all this. Indeed, his production feels like a response to the problems of the 1994 musical and, wherever possible, a distraction from them. Is the material campy? Make it campier. (There are innumerable winks to the audience.) Is the mise en scène clunky? Get rid of it. (Soutra Gilmour’s set is evocative without ever representing a real place.) Is the music bombastic? Bomb the audience’s ears with it. (Adam Fisher’s sound design seems to include microphones lodged in the actors’ intestines.)
This is all at its most intense in Scherzinger’s exciting yet exceptionally weird and counterintuitive performance. That a stunningly youthful woman of 46 is playing a character said to be “about a million years old” is the least of it; Gloria Swanson, in the movie, was only 50. Nor are we meant to take it literally that Scherzinger is barefoot throughout the show and wears only a slinky slip dress. (The entirely black-and-white costumes, in deference to black-and-white movies, are also by Gilmour.) This is a stripped-down Norma, which you might well argue is no Norma at all.
Yet the characterization is also intensely baroque, more demented even than Glenn Close’s in the original production and the 2017 revival. If sometimes a zombie, at other times Scherzinger makes each gesture feel like a semaphore flag, ornately choreographed for people on land from a ship at sea. That being precisely what silent movie acting is, Lloyd goes to great lengths to emphasize the effect, offering extreme close-ups on the giant screen of a mouth, a moue, a glycerin tear. (The gorgeous video design and cinematography are by Nathan Amzi and Joe Ransom.) Scherzinger’s singing is likewise gestural: poised, aimed and detonated syllable by syllable, fiercely drilled and smartly deployed.
But the result is that you are aware at all times, as if this were Brecht, of the performance as a performance, not as a characterization. (Still, in London, Scherzinger won praise and an Olivier.) The production’s many meta Easter eggs — the Pussycat Dolls and Lloyd Webber himself are referenced — do the same thing, taking some of the gas out of a gassy show but in the process pandering to the audience. When Scherzinger offers coy imitations of various contemporary vocal styles, her Norma becomes a woman who is in on the game, the last thing that oblivious creature could be.
Still, there are pleasures in submitting to Lloyd’s brutalist take on a submissive show. Francis, as Joe, does shutdown-cynical-corpse very well. The opening of each act includes beautifully executed surprises that set new standards, as perhaps “Sunset Boulevard” is best suited to do, for filmic theatricality. The lighting, by Jack Knowles, like an arena show in your amygdala, is startling throughout. The singing, too, is excellent and, even better, two of the tackiest songs (“The Lady’s Paying” and “Eternal Youth”) have been cut. I wish more were.
But I can’t help feeling that Lloyd’s talent and that of his designers, let alone Scherzinger’s, would be better lavished on better material. Making “Sunset Boulevard” a hit again — the original Broadway production ran two-and-a-half years, grossing more than $100 million — is not so much an achievement as a stunt, like reanimating that dead chimpanzee. (Yes, it happens.) The revival is not, like “Cats: The Jellicle Ball” this summer, a completely new way of looking at a Lloyd Webber musical; it’s a completely new way of not looking at one. The waste! It makes me almost sad enough to weep a 10-foot glycerin tear.
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