Theater the size of New York

In praise of Sunset Boulevard, and spectacle

Go see Sunset Boulevard.

I did on Wednesday night. It is a strange and messy thing. But what it is, most of all, is a theatrical spectacle the likes of which you can only find — at least in the U.S. — in New York City.

Musicals are not what usually draw me to the theater. My preferred fare is straight plays, long and painful if possible. In that department, what New York gives us are the highest quality theatrical dramas you can see anywhere. (A plug here for the very fine Our Town, with Jim Parsons, at the Barrymore Theatre; I cried, more or less, start to finish.)

But there is something different about seeing the rare show (almost always a musical) that just couldn’t or wouldn’t be put on anywhere else — one that involves a magnitude of audacity and such feats of production that only New York can accommodate.

This struck me several months ago seeing Cabaret. The entire physical plant of the August Wilson Theater has been redesigned as the Kit Kat Club, and an elaborate pre-show swirls through the rooms and bars that have been built around the auditorium to create the feel of a Weimar-era nightclub. The performances themselves — in particular, when I was there, Eddie Redmayne as The Emcee — were perfectly over the top. Only in New York (domestically speaking) would producers make this kind of bet, and only here would audiences flock.

The same could be said of the recent, short Encores revival of Ragtime. Here the innovation was a lack of adornment in producing this sprawling (and previously over-produced) musical — relying instead on performers (particularly Joshua Henry) whose power blew the roof off of the large City Center theater and made for a deeply emotional performance at the scale of opera. There were multiple standing ovations throughout the show. It is hard to imagine pulling something like this off anywhere else. (Even here, the sheer size of the cast might make the economics of a full run impossible, but it would be a gift to Broadway.)

But Sunset Boulevard, working with the weakest material of the three, managed to reach the greatest heights of spectacle. The stark sets and costumes — all blacks and whites in a barren space with close-up video projected onto a massive screen — are mesmerizing. Nicole Scherzinger as the forgotten star Norma Desmond breaks the sound barrier with her performance, both figuratively and, in her show-stoppers, more literally.

It’s all stark, loud, mad. Tom Francis (who I can’t help but observe would have won the Jeremy Allen White lookalike contest in a walk), is excellent as down-on-his-luck writer Joe Gillis, cynical and noir and fatally trapped. The show’s title song, delivered as a set piece in which Francis and other cast members walk through a half dozen dressing rooms and then around the block, all captured by camera and projected onto the stage’s screen, makes almost no sense and is fantastic.

That’s my take on the whole thing. Lots of stuff doesn’t work. We are notionally in 1949, except everything feels 2024, except for the exchanges between Gillis and studio assistant Betty Schaefer, which are caricatures of 1949. I had difficulty understanding way more than my usual share of lines, and it’s not just because I’m getting older. Even the staging of climax, if you aren’t familiar with the plot, is lacking in some basic clarity, and at one point you are effectively blinded for ten seconds or so by a lighting cue — but also, it was wild. In general, the material itself is strange (and thin), and Jamie Lloyd and his cast doubled down, finding the outer boundaries of weird. Damn the torpedoes! — along with logic and coherence. They just went for it.

I couldn’t look away, not for one second. The sheer imagination of the production was as staggering as its execution. I walked out of the St. James Theater in bewilderment and awe, invigorated with the feeling: this is why I live in New York.