Norma's home at last! West End and Broadway director Jamie Lloyd (Cyrano de Bergerac, A Doll's House) reimagines one of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s best-loved musicals – based on the Billy Wilder film - for a whole new generation.
Famed movie star Norma Desmond has been cast out of the Hollywood limelight. Living in a suffocating world of dreams, memories and regrets, a chance encounter with screenwriter Joe Gillis may be her only hope — unless their volatile affair destroys them both
Before it was a musical, Sunset Boulevard was a 1950 film noir directed and co-written by Billy Wilder. The film is led by Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond, a former silent-film star who draws him into her deranged fantasy world, where she dreams of making a triumphant return to the screen.
The movie was nominated for eleven Academy Awards and won three. In 1989 it was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry and in 1998, it was ranked number 12 on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 best American films of the 20th century.
A musical version of the beloved story was written by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Don Black and Christopher Hampton. The original 1993 West End production, directed by Trevor Nunn and choreographed by Bob Avian, featured Patti LuPone as Norma Desmond, Kevin Anderson as Joe Gillis, Meredith Braun as Betty Schaefer, and Daniel Benzali as Norma's ex-husband, Max.
Soon after, it had its American premiere in Los Angeles, this time starring Glenn Close as Norma, Alan Campbell as Joe, George Hearn as Max, and Judy Kuhn as Betty. In 1994 it moved to Broadway, where it opened at the Minskoff Theatre on November 17. It was nominated for 11 Tony Awards and won in seven categories, including Best Musical and Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a musical for Close.
Since then, the musical has toured extensively, and enjoyed international productions in Canada, Germany, Australia, Sweden, the Netherlands, South Africa and many more countries across the world.
In 2017, Glenn Close reprised her performance as Norma Desmond in a revival on Broadway at the Palace Theatre. Featuring a 40-piece onstage orchestra and a relatively minimalist set, it was directed by Lonny Price.
In early 2023, it was announced that Nicole Scherzinger would lead an all-new production at London's Savoy Theatre, directed by Lloyd. When it began performances in September, it immediately grabbed the attention of theatergoers worldwide as an extraordinary reimagination of Lloyd Webber’s iconic musical.
The Broadway cast is led again by Scherzinger, with her acclaimed London co-stars: Tom Francis as ‘Joe Gillis’, Grace Hodgett-Young as ‘Betty Schaefer,’ and Olivier Award winner David Thaxton as ‘Max Von Mayerling.’ Mandy Gonzalez is the Norma Alternate at certain performances.
Drenched in champagne and cynicism, Sunset Boulevard scrutinizes the ambitions and frustrations of its characters and their intoxicating need for fame and adoration.
For me, the big surprise of this “Sunset Blvd.” is Scherzinger’s outrageously campy over-the-top performance. Like so much of this revival, it is both minimal and excessive. Her look is minimal while her acting goes way beyond anything delivered by either Swanson or Close, neither of whom offered particularly subtle studies in mature womanhood.
Scherzinger’s ravenous performance provides a great part of the adrenaline, but the show is also jolted into new life by the collision of the spartan Lloydiverse with all the plush and purple of Lloyd Webber’s score. Chu described the composer as, in the ’80s, mounting a kind of maximalist coup on musical theater in the name of the operatic notion of primo la musica: “Nothing—neither plot nor character, not social issues, not even good taste—would be more important,” she wrote about his shows, “than what happened when that invisible beam of music shot across the darkened theater into their souls.” Productions of Lloyd Webber’s aspirations to Puccini have long tended to put a hat on a hat. The music throbs and flourishes; so does the stage, loaded up with gondolas and chandeliers, fog and fashion and fur and roller-skates. Lloyd, true to form, runs the other way. He and his collaborators, the set and costumes designer Soutra Gilmour, and the lighting designer Jack Knowles and video designers Nathan Amzi and Joe Ransom, craft a spare, echoing dungeon, girded by towers of LEDs. (This kind of seeming minimalism is its own circus trick, costing as it does millions of dollars.) Inside Gilmour’s vast, deceptively empty box, Knowles, Amzi, and Ransom’s incredible work is, in and of itself, a liquid, high-octane form of scenery. They’ve kept little but the fog.
1993 | West End |
Original London Production West End |
1993 | Regional (US) |
Los Angeles Production Regional (US) |
1994 | Broadway |
Original Broadway Production Broadway |
1995 | Canada |
Toronto Production Canada |
1996 | US Tour |
1st National Tour US Tour |
1998 | US Tour |
2nd National Tour US Tour |
2004 | London Fringe |
London Concert Revival London Fringe |
2016 | West End |
English National Opera West End Revival West End |
2017 | Broadway |
Broadway Revival Production Broadway |
2023 | West End |
West End |
2024 | Broadway |
Broadway Revival Production Broadway |
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