Fans—and there are legions of them—of director Jamie Lloyd's radical spin on that story which recently opened at the St. James Theatre can’t stop gushing about how extraordinary and revelatory this new version is. Meanwhile naysayers can’t stop griping about how this incarnation is all superficial style with no real substance and barely any regard for the story. Alas, as you can probably tell from the title of this post, I belong to the latter group.
Maybe the folks who love this production love it because they don’t like the movie. And maybe I don’t like the production because I so love the film. I also liked the more faithful stage adaptation which won Glenn Close a Tony back in 1995.
But so many of the current reviews seem to celebrate the fact that Lloyd’s approach is a putdown of the original narrative, now dismissed as too melodramatic. Which raises the following question for me: if you don’t like the show, why revive the show?
The answer I suppose is that Lloyd belongs to the auteur school of theatrical directing, whose members also include Ivo van Hove, Sam Gold and John Doyle. For these guys, their style of storytelling tends to matter more than the stories they’re telling.
I’ll grant you that some of their reimaginings can be exciting. I still have vivid memories of van Hove’s sensational 2015 revival of A View From the Bridge (click here to read my review of that) and I even kind of appreciate the Gen-Z-inspired machinations of Gold’s recently-opened Romeo + Juliet (click here to read my Quickie review on that one).
But any one-aesthetic-fits-all approach can also quickly turn into a gimmick. That’s what happened with Doyle’s practice of replacing pit musicians with actors playing instruments onstage for his musicals. It was novel for a while. And then it became silly.
Similarly, not every show is enhanced by the now-too-common techniques of stripping away scenery and props, putting actors in modern dress (usually black and, for some reason, often barefoot) and moving hand-held cameras around the stage to project close-ups of the actors' faces onto big screens.
Lloyd’s Sunset checks every one of those boxes and indulges in a few of his own devise. As he did with last year's revival of A Doll’s House, he has an actor literally walk out of the theater. This time, the actor is filmed, accompanied by body guards, while walking down 44th Street and into Shubert Alley before returning to the stage, all the while singing the title song.
What, I ask, does a Theater District stroll have to do with a story set in Hollywood? Or anywhere else for that matter? I can’t help wondering if the next Lloyd production will feature an actor walking out of the theater, hailing a pedicab and riding to Central Park.
And while I’m asking questions, why does Sunset’s main character Norma Desmond end up drenched in blood when—70-year-old spoiler alert—she shoots someone else? It may be a stunning image but is blood dripping from this Norma's mouth because she chewed her victim to death? Talk about melodramatic.
There’s no question that Nicole Scherzinger, who plays Norma, is dynamic in the role and can sing the hell out of the musical’s songs. Her already Olivier-award-winning renditions of its signature numbers “With One Look” and “As If We Never Said Goodbye” stop the show (click here to read an interview with her).
And if this were a traditional opera where performing arias tend to matter more than telling stories I might be cheering this show too. But this is musical theater where I think everything in it should serve the story. That isn’t the case here. If you don't already know the plot, it's quite possible that there are many moments when you won't know what's going on.
Scherzinger and Lloyd have also come up with a version of Norma that often makes no sense. As originally created, Norma is an eccentric in the grande-dame style. “I am big, it's the pictures that got small,” she tells Joe Gillis, the younger screenwriter she seduces into becoming her reluctant writing partner and paramour and who is nicely played here by Tom Francis.
But this Norma, outfitted throughout the show in only a slinky black slip, is totally Brat. And Scherzinger, the former lead singer of the pop girl group The Pussycat Dolls, underscores that by twerking and even in one moment mewing like a cat.
Even their mission to show how badly society treats women as they age gets muddled. Throughout the show Norma is haunted by a younger version of herself played by Hannah Yun Chamberlain. But the 46-year-old Scherzinger is so lithe and gorgeous that when the two finally engage in a showdown pas de deux it's impossible to tell one from the other.
Still, unlike me, Lloyd Webber seems to be solidly in the fan camp. He’s already announced that he’s working on a new musical with Jamie Lloyd and that he hopes that a production of his Evita that Lloyd directed in 2019 will also make it to Broadway. In the meantime, I'll be rewatching—and enjoying a lot more—my DVD of the original version of Norma's story.
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