The Afterlife of “Sunset Boulevard”

Ethan Warren argues that Jamie Lloyd’s “Sunset Boulevard” revival strips away theatrical excess.

By Ethan WarrenJuly 18, 2025

• Film

• Music

A WOMAN DESCENDS a staircase. She is regal, but she is mad. Below her, she can see the one thing she’s longed for: an audience, which has gathered to behold her. No matter that it’s because she has committed a murder; no matter that they’ve arrived to escort her to prison. All that counts is that they’ve brought cameras. And then this woman says a few words that will echo through pop-cultural history: “All right, Mr. DeMille. I’m ready for my close-up.”

The woman is Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), an aged silent movie star now living in self-imposed exile on Sunset Boulevard, the street that lends Billy Wilder’s 1950 cinematic masterpiece its name. And the line—delivered with breezy high-handedness to the eminent director Cecil B. DeMille—has gained its own following in the 75 years since the film’s release, uttered in everything from episodes of Glee and Two and a Half Men to Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. It was quoted in Mrs. Doubtfire, and paraphrased in Red Dragon and Better Call Saul. The moment, like the movie itself, has passed into myth.

But Sunset Boulevard’s most lasting adaptive offshoot must be the 1993 stage musical written by Andrew Lloyd Webber with Don Black and Christopher Hampton, whose Broadway revival opened last year and is scheduled to close later this month. This production is directed by Jamie Lloyd (no relation to Andrew), a well-known theatrical pseudo-provocateur and purveyor of starkly—if safely—reimagined classics like the 2023 production of A Doll’s House starring Jessica Chastain, or his next Broadway gig, the Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter vehicle Waiting for Godot, premiering this fall. With a long list of West End credits studded with everything from Pinter to Ibsen, Lloyd is a heavyweight in the modern theatrical landscape. With this production, Lloyd radically transforms both Lloyd Webber’s musical and Wilder’s film, exposing a raw, timeless pathos at the heart of a classic story, one only enhanced by its stark, barren staging choices.

Lloyd Webber and Black weren’t the first to attempt a stage version of Sunset Boulevard. Throughout the 1950s, Swanson herself made repeated stabs at a musical version of the film, to be titled simply Boulevard! By the following decade, Stephen Sondheim was sniffing around the property, but was dissuaded from the effort by Wilder himself, who felt the project was ill-suited to musical theater and could only be mounted as an opera. Broadway super-producer Hal Prince eventually obtained the rights, and first enlisted Andrew Lloyd Webber in the 1970s; Lloyd Webber played with a few ideas over the subsequent decade before tabling the project. In the early 1990s, Lloyd Webber decided to pursue the property on his own and recruited a revolving door of lyricists to pull the play together before settling on Black and Hampton. The casting of Norma Desmond proved similarly contentious, with Patti LuPone, who originated the role during development, being thrown aside for Glenn Close. (LuPone would go on to sue Lloyd Webber for the slight, eventually naming the pool paid for by her legal windfall in his honor.)

The vision for this 1990s-era version of Sunset Boulevard, directed by Trevor Nunn—who had previously collaborated with Lloyd Webber on Cats (1981) and Starlight Express (1984)—was, essentially, to transpose Wilder’s film to the stage. If anything, the show veered toward hyperrealism, with monolithic sets swept aside to reveal even more extraordinary showcases. The production opened with a replica of the Paramount arch, which was then replaced by the massive wall of a soundstage, itself whisked away to reveal the stage within. The Desmond mansion, the central set, was a cavernous affair so extravagant it earned an applause break upon reveal (at least as attested to by the taped performance available at the New York Public Library Theatre on Film and Tape Archive). In the final set piece, Norma descends the stairs wearing an extravagant beaded dress with an ostentatious headdress. Lloyd Webber and Nunn saw Wilder’s bet and raised it, cranking up the heat on the film to a point of gilded excess.

There are clear parallels between Lloyd Webber’s treatment of Wilder’s film and his treatment of the Gaston Leroux novel that became the stage smash The Phantom of the Opera (1986). With its elaborate staircase, Norma’s den resembles a subterranean lair, and the pipe organ only adds to the gothic atmosphere. Thus, Norma is reimagined as something like a classic Universal monster, and the climactic forced removal of her wig becomes a grotesque trauma for both character and audience along the lines of the removal of the Phantom’s mask. The only catch—here, the horror is a woman turning 50. Generously, we could say that this is Norma’s horror more than ours. As Joe Gillis himself sings just prior to his slaying: “Nothing’s wrong with being 50 / Unless you’re acting 20.”

But as flashy as its set design might have been, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Trevor Nunn’s vision was ultimately stodgy, with little in the way of electrifying stagecraft. The show’s title number, a barn-burning soliloquy from Joe, was delivered standing by a chair. In what passed for visual excitement, he would pace around it, or sit down. Thrilling stage work this was not.

Jamie Lloyd’s interpretation is something else entirely. The casting coup of Lloyd’s Sunset Blvd. is former Pussycat Doll Nicole Scherzinger, who stars as Norma Desmond, and won a Tony for the performance last month. In place of costuming and prop work, Scherzinger’s talents are laid bare. Clad in nothing but a black slip—Lloyd’s governing principle being a radical minimalism—she tears into songs like “With One Look” and “As If We Never Said Goodbye” with a voracious ferocity that’s entirely in keeping with the character.

Lloyd’s barren staging offers an explicit rebuke to the unnecessarily elaborate previous version. The choices might seem to blow a raspberry at the revival’s source material, but the only thing being lampooned is the excess and lack of imagination in Nunn’s 30-year-old staging. In general, Lloyd takes the material ruthlessly seriously, even as he enlivens the show with occasional bursts of comedy (Joe and Norma dance anachronistically on New Year’s Eve while Max von Mayerling pops a desultory confetti cannon). Where Nunn opened with Joe’s corpse suspended above the audience—a drowned body viewed cinematically from below—here we have a bare stage and a body bag, which is unzipped from within to reveal Joe (played by Tom Francis), narrating his story from beyond the veil. 

Lloyd’s bare stage will never be filled by anything so magisterial as a facsimile of Norma’s mansion. In fact, it will never be filled with anything but human bodies and the occasional chair. Every choice in this production seems designed to promote a Brechtian alienation effect. To this end, Lloyd has removed everything we associate with stagecraft, be it sets, props, or costuming, and in the process manages to draw the viewer deeper into the show’s narrative effects. Lloyd presents the story devoid of even the most seemingly essential props—no, Norma isn’t hiding a gun under her slip—with costuming changes so minimal that they occur only when absolutely demanded by the script.

The big question prior to this production was how they would handle the car chase. The first-act chase sequence is narratively essential to Wilder’s story, though there’s no particular need to recreate it faithfully onstage. (Lloyd Webber’s one-time collaborator, Tim Rice, had idly suggested a version that began with Joe’s arrival at the mansion and told the story entirely from Norma’s perspective.) But Lloyd Webber, with Black and Hampton, chose to reenact the car chase in vivid detail, saddling any prospective director with an albatross of a scene. In Nunn’s staging, Joe and his pursuers slipped behind the wheels of entirely realistic cars and mimed driving while noir footage was projected on a screen behind them.

In place of this most literal of staging choices, Lloyd simply makes use of his ensemble’s bodies. This is the staging style of the show—rather than set changes, it is the actors’ bodies that determine flow and mood. In this case, the dancers’ movements connote tumult and fear, all before introducing the device that will come to define this staging: when Joe picks up his steering wheel, it’s mounted with a camera, which simulcasts a close-up image of his face onto a massive screen behind the ensemble.

Lloyd deploys the camera frequently throughout the show—appropriately enough, given both the story’s cinematic roots and its thematic entanglement with Hollywood. The effects are never less than striking: virtually any time Norma’s butler Max (David Thaxton) speaks, he does so with his face towering above Joe’s. And when Max screens Norma’s old movies, we see the face of one actress portraying young Norma (Hannah Yun Chamberlain) overlaid with Scherzinger’s own emotionally wracked visage. Eventually, the device overstays its welcome, and its effects wear thin—by the time of the soaring duet “Too Much in Love to Care,” I found myself wishing the scene were playing out onstage rather than backstage with cameras capturing the moment. Rather than live theater, the event becomes a sort of overpriced simulcast. Yet it’s difficult to begrudge Lloyd this indulgence when the cinematic effects are so resonant elsewhere.

Nowhere are those effects more powerful than in the entr’acte and the beginning of Act II. As the audience returns from intermission, the onstage screen comes alive, revealing Tom Francis (seemingly both in and out of character as Joe) in his dressing room. From here, he begins moving down the stairwell of the St. James Theatre, the camera either following close behind or walking ahead. Francis passes through a gauntlet of Easter eggs for the Sunset Boulevard faithful: Thaxton is seen in seeming prayer to the Pussycat Dolls; a visit to Scherzinger’s own dressing room reveals her in a classic Norma Desmond gown and turban, while a Chekhovian gun—one destined never to be seen onstage—is placed conspicuously nearby; and Francis mugs by a cardboard cutout of Andrew Lloyd Webber (which looks, for a fraction of a second, like it could be a cameo from the man himself) and then, at the sequence’s uproarious height, passes a cast member in head-to-toe chimpanzee costume. The message seems clear: here, we will give audiences everything we’ve denied them elsewhere. In Act I, the corpse of Norma’s deceased chimp companion was left to the imagination (by contrast, Wilder revealed a limp paw, falling from a casket, while Nunn placed an entirely lifelike dead ape onstage). But now, Lloyd delivers not merely a chimp but a cheeky one. 

The buzzy energy generated by the entr’acte tour of the theater only crests as Francis continues walking—into the lobby. It seems he might be primed to burst through the auditorium doors and walk down the aisle onto the stage, a familiar enough trick. But this production has something else on its mind. Instead, Francis steps outside the theater and performs the entirety of the show’s title song on the streets surrounding the theater’s West 44th Street address. While the music surges, the most powerful themes in Lloyd Webber’s score on full display, Francis circles the building, traversing a full city block, the ensemble falling in behind him to create a Lloydian mass of bodies in space, heightening the dramatic force. By the time the cast does appear through the fire exit, the applause break from the keyed-up audience is liable to be as explosive as it was during the matinee I attended earlier this year.

In directing the show, Lloyd at times plants his tongue in his cheek, yet he stages Joe’s death with a sort of blunt authenticity, the moment’s impact heightened by the outbursts of levity that have preceded it. Norma’s attack on Joe is preceded by a blackout, with each of her successive gunshots coming as a spasm of light in the void. Each time we glimpse Joe, there’s more blood on his bare chest. There’s a sense that something primally violent is happening—that a trembling and vital spirit is being snuffed out. The effect tops the climaxes of both Wilder’s and Nunn’s visions of the story, and in a production stacked with smart choices, it finally cements Lloyd’s production as one for the ages.

If there’s one real loss in Sunset Blvd., it’s the fact that the Brechtian bareness of the staging doesn’t allow for Norma’s regal staircase descent. Instead, Scherzinger’s Norma enters the empty stage in her familiar slip and speaks simply and frankly to all of us out there in the dark. It’s a strange choice on some level—Lloyd has a massive ensemble at his disposal, so where are the police photographers? By removing them, the story’s denouement becomes abstracted, and Norma’s entreaties remain suspended in some nonliteral dreamscape. It’s a missed opportunity for a dramatic and memorable tableau. 

And yet: Here we have a stark reimagining of one of the great images in cinema. A woman descends the stairs, regal and mad. Jamie Lloyd chooses to finish his production by showing Norma facing the same thing we all must face eventually: the dark.

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Featured image: Sunset Blvd. production photo by Marc Brenner.