How 'Sunset Boulevard' blends film and theatre on Broadway
The Andrew Lloyd Webber musical stars Nicole Scherzinger as a fading Hollywood star, so director Jamie Lloyd's revival incorporates cinema throughout.
Lights! Camera! Broadway! In the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Sunset Boulevard, faded silent-film queen Norma Desmond’s desperate desire to reboot her career puts movies in the spotlight.
As such, director Jamie Lloyd’s daring decision to incorporate cinematic effects throughout his revival makes sense on paper – and thrills on stage, where the production emerges as a hybrid experience of theatre and film noir.
Ask Nicole Scherzinger, who stars as Norma. “What Jamie is doing with theatre, incorporating the cinematography, is just historic,” she told New York Theatre Guide. “It’s something really new.”
Opening and closing credits roll on an enormous screen above the St. James Theatre stage. Giant black-and-white close-ups are projected onto it throughout the show, including when camera operators follow actors on stage, backstage, and outside. The only cinema staple missing is popcorn (though other concessions are available).
The concept presented a unique challenge for Scherzinger, who, along with the show’s other three leads, reprises her role from the production’s 2023 premiere in London.
“It was a bit daunting, I’m not going to lie, to be able to have your pores the size of a human head,” the former Pussycat Doll added. “But it was beautiful.”
Lloyd's concept works to such great effect, she continued, because the movie magic amplifies both intimacy and immediacy. “It allowed you to be really truthful and honest and raw and authentic when you told this story,” Scherzinger said.
Opposite her, Tom Francis plays screenwriter Joe Gillis, Norma's lover and, so she thinks, her way back to the big screen. During the buzzy Act 2 opening number, "Sunset Boulevard," camera operator Shayna McPherson captures Francis's every move as he travels backstage, onto the street outside the theatre, and finally back on stage. He acknowledges that it took time to wrap his brain around the movie-within-a-musical concept.
“It’s a bit crazy in your mind when you first start, just switching up between small to very small, to trying to get a little bit more,” Francis said about switching between subtle, close-up, on-camera acting and more heightened theatre acting, which needs to translate to the very back of the theatre.
Grace Hodgett Young, who plays script editor Betty, shared that in practice, however, the cinematic elements didn't require a huge shift in her and the other principals’ performances.
“I can’t remember a discussion where it was like, there [have] to be differences in what you do,” she said. “We're all very subtle in our acting anyway, and it's all very screen-appropriate.”
“There doesn’t feel, to me, like a massive change between what we're doing when we're just on the stage and what we're doing when we're on the screen,” she added.
The impact of the huge screen for theatregoers, however, is significant. “The audience gets to catch all of these little looks you do that you wouldn't catch if you’re in the back,” Young said.
For Scherzinger, breathing life into Norma under the watchful eye of the camera and the audience has been a liberating and affirming experience. “There’s joy and there’s triumph and there's freedom,” she says. “There's everything.”
David Thaxton, who plays Norma’s devoted butler Max, echoed that sentiment. He welcomed Lloyd's innovative approach, brought to life in tandem with co-video designers and cinematographers Nathan Amzi and Joe Ransom.
“You just open your heart up and open your arms and your mind [...] and just trust the process,” Thaxton said. “Once you get used to it, it becomes very easy.”
He’s focused on giving his performance, not observing it. “I have no idea what [the camera effect] looks like; none of us do,” he added, “but that’s part of the fun. Once you get used to it, it becomes a very easy thing to do.”
And that’s a wrap!
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Gillian Russo contributed reporting to this story.
Photo credit: Sunset Boulevard on Broadway. (Photos by Marc Brenner)
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