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Sunset Boulevard is now set to rise again on Broadway.
Patti LuPone originated the role of the delusionally grand former movie star Norma Desmond in the 1993 London premiere of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical, adapted with librettists Don Black and Christopher Hampton from Billy Wilder's landmark 1950 film about Hollywood decay. Glenn Close took over for the 1994 Broadway production, and also headlined a 2017 revival. This time, Norma will be played by Pussycat Dolls frontwoman Nicole Scherzinger, who has earned ecstatic reviews for her performance of the role in the show's current London revival.
"Scherzinger gives an unexpectedly unsettling performance as a woman hollowed out by the fading memories of her glory days, a nightie-clad wraith, a madwoman in the attic," wrote Andrzej Lukowski in his five-star Time Out review of the West End production. "There’s something thrillingly kamikaze about her full-on embrace of the insecurities of the aging star. She can also sing with staggering power."
In a striking departure from the lavish design of the original production, director Jamie Lloyd stages Sunset Boulevard in a minimalist style—akin to his approach to A Doll's House last year—that makes plentiful use of live video. "Lloyd has been one of our best directors for a long time now, but for me this feels like a landmark for him, a perfect synthesis between the gleeful, gory showmanship of his earlier work and the more challenging artiness of his recent stuff," wrote Lukowski. "The pictures may have gotten small, but theatre has rarely felt so alive with possibility." The Broadway transfer will maintain Scherzinger's London costars: Tom Francis as her young lover Joe, and Grace Hodgett-Young as his colleague Betty, and David Thaxton as Norma's loyal majordomo, Max.
Broadway watchers may recall that the charismatic Scherzinger was expected to make her Great White Way debut in the 2016 revival of Lloyd Webber's Cats as Grizabella, another part she had played in London. But after a period of uncertainty as to whether she would reprise that role or not—a situation that was not known, but should have been known, as "Scherzinger's Cat"—she opted to take a job as a judge on X Factor instead. Whatever bad blood arose between her and Lloyd Webber in the aftermath of that decision was soon cleared up, and she is committed to filling the Lloyd Webber–size hole created when The Phantom of the Opera and Bad Cinderella closed last year, leaving Broadway without a show by the composer for the first time since 1979.
Production dates for Sunset Boulevard's Broadway run have not yet been announced, but producers say that the details will come soon. You can find out more at the production's website.
