By Aline Mahrud

WORTH A LOOK?: ***1/2

WHEN?: Saturday 23 December (matinee), runs through 6 January 2024

What would Glenn Close think?

• Read on for reasons including how Scherzinger is miscast yet its direction is worthy of Broadway

Nominated 8 times for an Oscar without a win, Close was probably the actress most closely associated with this Andrew Lloyd Webber musical and the possibility of it becoming a film before this Jamie Lloyd (The Effect, National Theatre) production.

Close was 69 when we saw her at The Coliseum in 2016 play the fierce and deluded actress Norma Desmond, a silent film star whose fame faded with the introduction of the talkies, who hires writer Joe Gillis to work on her screenplay for her John The Baptist/Salome-inspired comeback.

We wrote then: ‘Close gives a five-star performance in what we would describe as a three-star musical of largely pedestrian Andrew Lloyd-Webber songs. She’s unforgettable as she enters to best song With One Look vamping it up to the max and heartbreaking as she returns to Hollywood with As If We Never Said Goodbye.’

We’ve returned to this production because former Pussycat Doll Scherzinger won the Standard’s Best Musical Performance against some serious competition and we wanted to see it for ourselves.

We never guessed from her pop career but Scherzinger is actually a brilliant musical theatre performer and stand-out song As If We Never Said Goodbye is the predictable showstopper here.

Unfortunately she’s 24 years younger than Close when we saw her definitive Desmond performance and so, while beautifully sung, Scherzinger’s is a Desmond that has too much to do physically to convince.

The production however is a triumph of apt extreme close-ups, camera and screen use, filmic lighting and is, we think, the most convincing of some truly stunning Lloyd productions we have seen including Lloyd Webber’s Evita at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre which, again, gave us a much younger lead than is conventional.

Unfortunately, where Evita has more than 1 memorable tune, for us Sunset Boulevard is Lloyd Webber at his most infuriatingly bland yet hugely popular.

The literal dripping blood and boldness of Lloyd’s production is fearless but exposes the score for the middle-of-the-road mush it always was.

There’s a strong supporting cast however and we enjoyed Tom Francis’ even more youthful Gillis, Grace Hodgett Young’s brilliant Betty Schaeffer, David Thaxton’s creepy butler Max and Ahmed Hamad’s (Standing At The Sky’s Edge, National Theatre) wronged Artie.

There’s a lot of Broadway transfer buzz about this production but we came away thinking that Scherzinger was brilliant but miscast, the show needs a completely new score but that its direction was definitely worthy of a US audience.

• Main picture via Facebook courtesy ATG
• Have you seen a Sunset Boulevard before and are what did you think of this production? Tickets
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