Sunset Boulevard (Broadway)

♣♣♣♣♣/♣♣♣♣♣

A dead man emerges from a body bag and takes us back to 1949. Armed with lofty Hollywood ambitions, Joe Gillis (Tom Francis) finds out the hard way that the entertainment industry is not for the faint of heart. Even so, he makes a pact with fellow writer Betty Schaefer (Sydney Jones) to write a screenplay together. Living in penury, he evades the agents trying to repossess his car due to late payments by driving into the garage of a dilapidated mansion along Sunset Boulevard which turns out to be the residence of washed-out has-been Norma Desmond (Nicole Scherzinger). The aging film star lives in solitude and is served unconditionally by her protective butler Max Von Meyerling (David Thaxton) whose unwavering support includes writing fake fan mail to her to make her feel that she is still relevant. When she finds out that Joe is a writer, her eyes light up and she takes him under her wing, asking him to edit a script she wrote for her comeback film.

I’ve heard of the 1950’s film starring Gloria Swanson as well as the original Broadway musical with Glenn Close but I haven’t seen either one, so there is just no point of comparison here, but we recognize a minimalist stripped-down reimagining when we see one. There are no costumes. There are no sets. The stage is basically an empty black space with four sets of fog lights on each side, and lots of smoke. Props are limited to foldable chairs and fake production cameras. A giant screen descends regularly to stream extreme close ups of the actors’ faces live as they are acting onstage.

What we have here seems to be a marriage between theater and film. To be honest, I haven’t seen anything quite like this. To begin act 2, Francis is shown on the giant screen as he visits all his co-stars backstage before exiting the theater and starting to sing Sunset Boulevard RIGHT OUTSIDE, belting out in the streets of Broadway LIVE before reuniting with the rest of the cast as they enter the theater once again and end up on the stage where Scherzinger and Thaxton are waiting for him to finish his song. It’s insane. I’ve never seen such a gimmick before. It just leaves you in awe with your jaw on the floor. Who conceptualized all of this??

Dontcha wish Nicole Scherzinger ended up on Broadway much earlier to celebrate that phenomenal voice that clearly belongs in the Great White Way? To conclude With One Look, her first solo, she had to hold her pose for a bit because the audience wouldn’t shut up. They weren’t just clapping. They were yelling, ecstatically. As the second act rolled along with her rendition of As If We Never Said Goodbye, the theater was already roaring with applause as she sustained that one extraordinarily long note. By the time she was done, half of the crowd were already on their feet giving her a standing ovation. Phenomenal, I tell you. Like, wow.

While Scherzinger is obviously the center of this musical around which everybody gravitates, it wouldn’t work without worthy co-stars. Thaxton’s Von Meyerling is just as intense, with his song numbers punctuated with those smooth falsettos that manifest his inner struggles. Jones’ Schaefer seems to be the common love interest, but her vocal chops arrest attention, harmonizing well with Francis’ equally powerful Baritenor voice. Of course, the entirety of the ensemble are also doing most of the heavy lifting here, making the main characters shine through their triple threat routines that look difficult to pull off.

Yes, since there are no sets to speak of, it is up to blocking, lighting, and choreography to establish the mood of each scene, providing you with a production that is heavily reliant on choreographed movement and precise cues for everything to work. The live stream extreme close ups accomplish their task well by giving you a closer look at the characters’ facial expressions, which are hard to catch if you are not sitting right in front of the stage. Desmond’s neurotic tendencies are mostly rendered through this technique, which Scherzinger totally eats up as if she were born for that role.

Overall, this has been a really pleasant surprise. In spite of the minimalist production, this reimagining of Sunset Boulevard just hits hard with an intensity accentuated by its actors’ dedication to their roles and storytelling techniques that seem to blend theater and cinema, a potent combo that, by the time Norma asks DeMille for her closeup, you will find hard to forget.