All eyes in “Sunset Blvd” have been focused on the fierce, full-throated and humongously-photographed performance by Nicole Scherzinger as Norma Desmond, the once-reigning silent movie queen long deposed and now delusional. But my attention shifted during a telling moment involving Tom Francis as Joe Gillis, the failed young Hollywood screenwriter. It comes after he has submitted sexually for the first time to the needy Norma, as Act I ends. At the start of Act II, we see Joe singing the title song:

Sunset Boulevard
Frenzied boulevard
Swamped with every kind of false emotion. 

That particular verse of the song spoke directly to me, not just describing the world of Hollywood, but summing up this second Broadway revival of  Andrew Lloyd Webber’s overblown 1994 musical melodrama, which is helmed by the fashionable British director Jamie Lloyd in his signature style (to which New York theatergoers have become familiar over the past dozen years, in Cyrano, Betrayal, A Doll’s House, The Effect): ostentatiously minimalist, vividly colorless.

The moment sums up the show in other ways besides just the lyrics. While he sings of Sunset Boulevard, Francis is not actually on stage at the St. James. Rather, there is a giant screen on which his image is being projected live and in real time. This is not the first or last time that this screen takes center stage; it’s there almost all the time. But the designers and cinematographers execute this moment with particular aplomb.

Francis himself is actually at this moment out on the street, the camera accompanying him, having shown him making his way from his dressing room through the labyrinthine backstage area, greeting individual cast members, including one in a chimp costume. Now we see him passing under the marquees of Broadway as he sings about the temptations, ruthlessness and corruption of Hollywood – a clever wink of comparison.  But in this moment there is another comparison, ironic and inadvertent, that caught my eye. A marquee for a different Broadway show features a quote about how you leave the theater and enter the street still singing the songs.  

I can’t say the same about “Sunset Blvd.” Of its three dozen or so musical numbers, I find only a few to be tuneful, and only one that truly stands out, “As If We Never Said Goodbye.”  The  lushly orchestrated but largely unmemorable score is coupled with forgettable lyrics (the only distinctive lines are those lifted verbatim from the 1950 movie starring Gloria Swanson), in service to a dated plot: 

Escaping thug-like creditors who want to repossess his car, Joe by chance drives onto the driveway on Sunset Boulevard of Norma’s sad if gargantuan mansion, and into her clutches. Upon finding he’s a screenwriter, she hires him to work on her overlong and plainly ludicrous script about Salome, the vehicle by which she plans to return to her former stardom, after years as a little-remembered recluse, her only company her manservant and that now-dead chimp. She makes Joe her kept man; and then, on discovering his attraction to a young producer named Betty, makes him her victim.

 “Nothing’s wrong with being forty, unless you’re acting twenty,” Joe at one point sings/shouts at Norma,  a vile effort to make the show’s air of misogyny and ageism seem less poisonous.

“Sunset Boulevard,”  in another words, would not be my first choice for a revival. 

This is the context in which I concede how adeptly this production pulls off many of its effects – technically, visually, in the movement of the cast — even as I don’t understand why they have undertaken to do so. I especially acknowledge how much the intense performance by Nicole Scherzinger, the former lead singer of the Pussycat Dolls, has proven to be catnip for Broadway diva worshippers, even as the character she’s portraying now makes no sense (if it ever did.)

Norma Desmond is supposed to be garish and decrepit; “She must be about a million years old,“ one unkind character observes.  Scherzinger’s Norma is a glamorous beauty, barefoot in a shiny black slip, with a kind of vampiric chic, hardly somebody that would provoke Joe’s revulsion or his pity.

When Norma says “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small,”  we can take it literally now. There are constant, black and white close-up projections of her – and the other actors — on that huge screen.

I suppose this fits in with what Norma sings about herself

Yes, with one look
I put words to shame
Just one look
Sets the screen aflame 

It’s even arguably a sound artistic decision to rely so heavily on live black and white video projections, since it’s about old Hollywood. It’s harder to see anything other than an abstract, impressionistic connection to Hollywood in Soutra Gilmour’s costumes, which are modern black street clothes, and even less of a connection in  her set design, which basically replaces a set with stage smoke. 

One might credit her and the other designers with evoking film noir. But the show’s website includes  an advisory: “This production includes themes of depression, self-harm, psychosis, death, violence, entrapment, and suicide.” This sounds to me more like horror.

Sunset Blvd
St. James Theater
Running time: 2 hours and 35 minutes, including one intermission
Tickets: $56 – $499. Digital lottery and digital rush: $45
Music by Andrew Lloyd Webber; Book and lyrics by Don Black and Christopher Hampton; Directed by Jamie Lloyd
Set and costume design by Soutra Gilmour, choreography by Fabian Aloise, music supervisor and music director Alan Williams, lighting design by Jack Knowles, sound design by Adam Fisher, video design and cinematography by Nathan Amzi and Joe Ransom , hair and makeup design by Cheryl Thomas, intimacy coordinator Ann James 
Cast: Nicole Scherzinger as Norma Desmond, Tom Francis as ‘Joe Gillis,’ Grace Hodgett Young as ‘Betty Schaefer,’ and David Thaxton as ‘Max Von Mayerling, Mandy Gonzalez will guest star as ‘Norma Desmond’ at certain select performances and Caroline Bowman will standby for the role of ‘Norma Desmond.’
Olivia Lacie Andrews as ‘Nancy,’ Brandon Mel Borkowsky as ‘John,’ Shavey Brown as ‘Finance Man/Stan/DeMille,’ Hannah Yun Chamberlain as ‘Young Norma,’ Cydney Clark as ‘Joanna/Guard,’ Raúl Contreras as ‘Finance Man/Frank,’ Tyler Davis as ‘Sheldrake,’ E.J. Hamilton as ‘Lisa,’ Sydney Jones as ‘Dorothy,’ Emma Lloyd as ‘Mary/Heather,’ Pierre Marais as ‘Sammy,’ Shayna McPherson as ‘Camera Operator/Katherine,’ Jimin Moon as ‘Morino/Hog Eye,’ Justice Moore as ‘Jean,’ Drew Redington as ‘Myron/Jones/Camera Operator,’ and Diego Andres Rodriguez ‘Artie.’ 
Photos by Marc Brenner