Sunset Blvd. The Musical on Broadway

 In Jamie Lloyd's minimal staging of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Sunset Blvd., based on Billy Wilder's film noir, so much is left to the audience's imagination that if you have not seen the original film, you might be confused by the action onstage. Why is that man, who we eventually find out is named Joe Gillis, (Tom Francis) coming out of a black body bag? Yes, he is dead, and he's going to tell us the story from beyond the grave, a common film noir approach to story telling. For those of us who know the film, we miss Joe Gillis's body floating dead in a pool. 

If Mr. Lloyd's numerous tattoos represent a maximalist approach to his personal body art (he recently got the number "10086" tattooed under his ear -- Norma Desmond's address), his professional directorial art depends on having very little onstage. A dark empty stage with actors wearing black and white clothing is enough to bring to life the year 1949. To remind us that the source material is a classic film, videographers with Steadicam rigs project black-and-white images of the actor's faces on a gigantic screen while also giving us opening and closing credits. This revival of Sunset Blvd. is both a stage and film adaptation of a movie that had been turned into a musical back in 1993.

The not so-secret weapon of this production is Nicole Scherzinger, a powerhouse performance who embodies the aging silent film star Norma Desmond barefooted and, following the style of this production, wearing only a black negligee. On London's West End she won the Laurence Olivier Award, and last week she won the Tony for her performance. It is a not-to-be-missed star turn (in her Broadway debut!) that might demand more than one viewing to fully absorb its layers of brilliance. Last night, the crowd at the St. James Theatre went crazy just by appearing onstage without singing a note. After she sang "With One Look," the beautiful anthem to the joys of the silent era, something happened that I had never seen on Broadway: a standing ovation in the middle of the performance. And more followed. By the end of the play, where Broadway seems to give every production a standing ovation, the act of standing up applauding seemed like we had already done that numerous times -- and we had!

There are amazing moments in this production, the most impressive is when the production goes outside to 44th street and ambles to Shubert Alley (you have to see it to believe it), and it is all captured by those ubiquitous Steadicams. The moment has the same gravitas found in those long shots in classic films (the opening shots of Touch of Evil and The Player and the Copacabana shot in Goodfellas) where every element has to be there at the right time otherwise the magic is lost.  And it is all live! They do this at every performance, rain or shine, and it is a coup-de-téâtre that you will not soon forget.

The run has been extended to late July. Do not miss this great production and the amazing performance of Nicole Scherzinger.