Sunset Boulevard review: Nicole Scherzinger camps it up to showstopping perfection

Jamie Lloyd’s dark, kitsch revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1991 musical about a faded Hollywood star is full of delicious metatheatrical twists

Scherzinger as Norma Desmond in ‘Sunset Boulevard’ (Marc Brenner)

No one would expect avant-garde superstar director Jamie Lloyd to handle 1991 musical Sunset Boulevard with misty-eyed tenderness – not least its brave and trusting parents Andrew Lloyd Webber and Don Black. And, of course, he doesn’t. Even so, there’s something shiver-inducingly thrilling about the way Lloyd thrusts this story into darkest night, setting it in a haunted Hollywood backlot where huge suggestive shadows loom and blood-soaked gothic terrors emerge.

There is a gamble at the centre of this very Halloween-appropriate project: can Pussycat Dolls lead singer Nicole Scherzinger showcase an emotional range as flexible as her four-octave vocals? Luckily for everyone involved, she more than delivers in the central role of Norma Desmond. But she’s not the stately, fading former silent movie actor that you might expect if you’re a fan of the 1950 film noir this musical is based on.

Instead, she’s the mercurial heart of Lloyd’s often kitsch, always unsettling meditation on fame. An onstage camera constantly follows her, projecting her face onto the wall behind her, cinema-style – and she can’t resist it, making campy little nods to the audience, pulling grotesque faces of exaggerated tragedy, then breaking into volleys of splits like an attention-hungry stage school kid. It’s an audience she hungers for, so when struggling young screenwriter Joe (Tom Francis) stumbles into her crumbling Hollywood mansion she falls on him with vampiric glee.

Stark as this show’s monochrome lighting and design are, they still manage to create a sense of ornate grandeur, of black-and-white movie nostalgia. In Fabian Aloise’s brilliantly rich choreography, the chorus rise and fall like hammered piano keys, tumbling in canon to amplify Norma’s growing torment.

The inner world of Joe, her reluctant lover, is a bit more opaque here. He accepts Norma’s embraces more readily than this story normally allows, a willing fly in this twisted web. But why, when she’s so obviously controlling and messed up? Perhaps, like her, he’s playing for the gallery, already turning their doomed romance into a blockbuster movie in his head, aware how infinitely more dramatic Norma’s real life is than the stale fictions she aspires to star in once more.

Tom Francis and the ‘cast of Sunset Boulevard' (Marc Brenner)

This sense that Joe is dramatising his own life is heightened by a masterful metatheatrical twist in the second act which had the whole audience breathless with glee (a cardboard cutout of Lloyd Webber himself features). Lloyd stuffs this play with so many directorly flourishes, sometimes to the point where it feels like multiple approaches are fighting for breath. But for every gimmick, there’s a visual gesture of overwhelming power, such as the scene where omnipotent Hollywood director Cecil B DeMille becomes a mountainous shadow towering over his shrunken former leading lady Norma as they sing a heartbreaking duet.

Sunset Boulevard isn’t one of Lloyd Webber’s finest scores – it’s peppered with reminders of catchier musicals such as his Evita, which Lloyd staged a stripped-back revival of in 2019 – but it sounds magnificent here, with Scherzinger bringing rich, unfussy, powerful depth to torch songs like “As If We Never Said Goodbye”. It’s the kind of uncompromisingly brilliant performance that makes you want to use cliches like “tour de force”. And somehow, the fact that Scherzinger’s own star shines so brightly here adds poignancy to Norma’s desperation, as she scavenges for such approval on a stark, deserted stage.

Savoy Theatre, until 6 January 2024