In Billy Wilder’s ur-camp masterpiece “Sundown Boulevard,” from 1950, Gloria Swanson performs Norma Desmond, an getting older grande dame of silent movie, who slides from self-regarding eccentricity into homicidal delusion. Intent on a comeback, Norma has seduced a younger screenwriter named Joe Gillis (William Holden), however, when each he and the studio reject her, she swerves right into a everlasting dream. “All proper, Mr. DeMille, I’m prepared for my closeup,” she famously purrs to a wall of crime-scene photographers, her face smoothed flat with grease and powder. Within the movie, Gillis nonetheless narrates—although he’s simply been shot useless, like Jay Gatsby, within the pool.
Andrew Lloyd Webber débuted his musical adaptation of “Sundown Boulevard” (co-written with Don Black and Christopher Hampton) in 1993, returning to the darkish sensibility of his then latest mega-hit, “The Phantom of the Opera.” Webber may need felt on acquainted floor. The Phantom and Norma are each attention-hungry spiders in glittering lairs; each are fantasists whose faces, both twisted or just getting older, grow to be their obsessive focus.
Faces—gigantic, black-and-white ones—are actually the principle surroundings of the director Jamie Lloyd’s souped-up and stripped-down “Sundown Blvd.,”newly transferred from London to the St. James (after profitable seven Olivier Awards), and starring Nicole Scherzinger, onetime lead singer of the Pussycat Dolls. Casting a gleaming Scherzinger because the fading Norma is intentionally counterintuitive: a burlesque dancer, she twerks her approach by means of Fabian Aloise’s membership choreography barefoot, carrying solely a black negligee. Every part—the “actuality” of 1949 and even Norma’s supposed decrepitude (she’s meant to be, like, fifty)—must exist within the creativeness.
Like Webber, Lloyd enjoys each the gothic and quoting himself. (From “A Doll’s Home” to “Cyrano,” there appears to be no drama he received’t stage in a stark vacancy, whether or not that makes the story onerous to observe or not.) The set and costume designer Soutra Gilmour, his frequent collaborator, has created one other elegant void for him, full of white fog and an immense film display. Ensemble members, in black-and-white streetwear, carry cameras mounted on Steadicam frames, taking pictures reside closeups of the principle characters: Scherzinger’s Norma; the screenwriter Joe (Tom Francis); and Max (David Thaxton), Norma’s butler and chief enabler. Virtually each projected face stares straight at us—I used to be reminded not of movie noir however of Andy Warhol’s lonely, mug-shot-inspired “Display screen Checks.” Even when Joe and Norma kiss, they appear depersonalized; chilly mannequins, colliding in house.
In the course of the Act II overture and the next title tune, the video designers Nathan Amzi and Joe Ramson have organized an exciting coup de théâtre: a reside digicam tails Francis from his dressing room down by means of the center of the constructing, then into the road. The corporate glides behind him as he sings and strides alongside, staring down the digicam’s barrel. It’s been carried out earlier than—Lloyd despatched Jessica Chastain out of “A Doll’s Home”; Ivo van Hove did a reside walk-and-talk video in “Community”—however right here the spectacle is so exact, the superimposition of Broadway on L.A. so droll, that Lloyd turns the cliché contemporary once more.
A digicam makes its personal choices about who has star high quality. Francis, as a bodily presence, may be recessive, however there’s a silvery charisma in his projected picture that his co-stars by no means discover. For all her magnificence, Scherzinger onscreen stays unexceptional; she mugs for the digicam, like a TikTok influencer taping a response video. However, within the ultimate mad scene, she abandons sarcasm, drenches herself in blood, and turns right into a terrifying harpy. Tellingly, she’s finest when she stops vamping for the digicam’s consideration and begins reaching, her fingers curled into claws, for the folks within the room.
For a lot of the earlier two hours, although, she’s been rolling her eyes. Perhaps she will’t consider how shoddy a big-deal musical may be? Regardless of its many lush passages, Webber’s sung-through rating is bloated with repetitive vocal figures, and the lyrics by Black and Hampton fall flat as compared with strains lifted from Wilder and his co-writers, D. M. Marshman, Jr., and Charles Brackett. For example, Norma’s iconic “I’m large. It’s the photographs that obtained small” is adopted nearly instantly by the lyrics “No phrases can inform / The tales my eyes inform / Watch me after I frown / You possibly can’t write that down.”
If Webber’s uneven musical is a grainy copy of Wilder’s movie, this manufacturing is an deliberately distorted copy of a duplicate. However Lloyd is much less within the specifics of both work than within the chthonic rage beneath. For the oldsters giving standing ovations throughout the present, the technique appears to work. Scherzinger’s voice does include a terrific energy: as a substitute of phrasing strains as ideas, she assaults each clause with large, jackhammering blows. I used to be reminded that she has been a choose on “The X Issue”—there’s a way of determined competitors in the way in which she delivers her numbers, holding nothing in reserve. The viewers responds gratefully to this stage of self-abnegation, and the frankly chilling sounds that come out of her. That’s all Norma Desmond needed! She doesn’t thoughts struggling, so long as the folks at nighttime love her for it.
In the meantime, “Romeo + Juliet,” on the Circle within the Sq., takes a extra easy method to its star casting. Sam Gold’s creative, emo-lite manufacturing options Rachel Zegler, from the latest movie model of “West Facet Story,” as Juliet, and Package Connor, from the teen-Brit TV present “Heartstopper,” as Romeo. The second we see them, working full-tilt out of a shouting gang of rowdy youths—the 2024 stylings by the costume designer Enver Chakartash embody Good day Kitty backpacks, mesh tanks, and plenty of dishevelled pants—they’re already avatars for Gen Z romance.
However the couple should additionally kindle one thing collectively. I discovered myself pondering wistfully of the Nationwide Theatre’s latest movie with Jessie Buckley and Josh O’Connor, through which Buckley’s intelligent Juliet reads as being able to diverting O’Connor’s Romeo from his violent path. Right here, Zegler and Connor each appear to be innocents, with a sort of inverse chemistry—as they get farther away from one another onstage, their connection seems to strengthen. Their most interesting second is their first one, after they’re nearly a full twenty ft aside. Zegler sings a tune (written for the present by the über file producer Jack Antonoff) at a Capulet occasion, and her efficiency roots Romeo, an in any other case flighty fellow, to the spot.
After his work at Circle within the Sq. with “An Enemy of the Individuals,” Gold has clearly taken the measure of in-the-round house, and so the rough-and-tumble Montague gang—which incorporates the great Gabby Beans as Mercutio—clambers round within the catwalks overhead, dropping down close to theatregoers within the standing-room part. Connor is especially deft at interacting with the viewers: he performs Romeo as an inexperienced softboi, providing the entire room his flustered courtesy. (When he does a chin-up to kiss Juliet on her balcony, his biceps bulging, the viewers gasps. All that flirting actually pays off.)
Gold and his firm appear most snug in these swoony sections. The fights are foolish; the ultimate scene within the tomb is bizarrely fast and awkward. However, earlier, the temper is great, and Antonoff’s digital underscoring provides all the things a sort of fuzzed-out, after-midnight sweetness. There’s a beautiful second when the round black stage ground flips itself over to point out a area of flowers. (The set design is by the collective known as dots.) I do know that the “financial institution the place the wild thyme blows” line is from a distinct play, nevertheless it in some way feels as if it belongs to this manufacturing. The solid right here is most plausible as younger folks—enemies or not—who keep up all evening after which go to sleep in a pile, like puppies in lengthy grass. ♦
