First thing’s first, since this is what has elicited the most comments on social media, this Norma is not fifty. She’s forty. The line has been changed. So now you know. It does create issues, though—the rest of the cast is incredibly young, and mostly fresh out of drama school with hardly any credits. Tom Francis, who plays Joe, sings superbly and has great stage presence (and I’m sure this performance will lead on to many bigger and better things for him), but, as he’s so young and fresh-faced, can you really buy him as a jaded, tired Joe Gillis who has already tried a million times to make his Hollywood career work without success?
If the audience reaction is anything to go by (mostly a standing O, with a lot of whooping and cheering), I will be in the minority when I say that I felt this was an unsuccessful production. I didn’t loathe it, but it’s not one I would want to revisit either. I suspect the critics will adore it and say that it breathes new life into the show and that they will trot out clichés such as ‘reimagined’, ‘unveils the dark heart lurking beneath the work’, ‘transforms the show into a masterpiece’ and such like. I don’t agree.
For all the talk of reimagining, there is little new or inventive here. If you have seen any of Jamie Lloyd’s recent productions then you can imagine precisely what this is going to look like and your mental images will be proved correct. Think Cyrano de Bergerac or the Regent’s Park Evita, with a young cast, T-shirts and gleaming white sneakers, and a monochrome, bare aesthetic. It’s the same here, and to be honest I’m kind of tired of it. Can he try something else? He certainly used to. I loved his Piaf and Passion from years ago. Every recent production has looked the same, and had the same disregard both for the text and for accommodating audiences unfamiliar with the work. I’m afraid the predictability of the aesthetic meant that Act 1 was a bit of a snoozefest for me dramatically, save that the orchestra (which I have to say was superb, along with the excellent sound design) meant I was immensely enjoying the music. The show is still set in its period, although that leads to multiple inconsistencies (an example is when Betty finishes ‘Blind Windows’ – which I swear in Act 1 had been called ‘Dark Windows’ like in Wilder’s film – on what appeared to be a Macbook Pro or something similar).
So you’d better know your Sunset before you see this, or you will be confused (albeit not as confused as you would have been had you not seen Evita before Lloyd’s production of it, in large part thanks to the fact that Sunset has a robust book indebted to that magnificent screenplay, whereas Evita has no book and relies on a director to fill in the gaps, which Lloyd did not do at Regent’s Park). As everyone predicted, there is no set (save for a video screen at the back that is tilted at an angle), and there are no props on stage (the aforementioned Macbook is in one of the filmed sequences). The text has been revised to accommodate this absence, as there is no ‘staircase of the palace’ and, since there is no chimp being buried either, Joe has to recite a speech about the chimp…which to me seems to betray the rule of showing rather than telling. The lack of any visuals other than the cast themselves though does mean this assumes prior knowledge of the show – for instance, I don’t know how anyone is supposed to know what is going on when Joe says ‘it looks like six very important pictures’ given the lack of physical screenplay that Norma has written. Relationships are not particularly clear either unless you know the show, as a large chunk of the show has the characters directing their lines in Brechtian fashion to those out there in the dark rather than to each other.
This production has made far more extensive changes to the score and lyrics than any other. The irritating (and frankly trashy) ‘The Lady’s Paying’ and its grating reappearance as ‘Eternal Youth’ in the second act have been exercised—neither are missed, though the spoken lines Norma delivers to explain Joe’s change of dress seem rather hastily and clumsily added. There is new underscoring to accompany it. ‘Too Much in Love to Care’ has been reworked slightly so that its climax with the kiss (for which there is a new musical build-up) happens before the end, with the song then winding down after that ( think ‘All I Ask of You’ ). ‘With One Look’ has had the keys altered again from the instrumental section onwards. This means Nicole’s version is neither the London original nor the LA version. Instead, the orchestral climax after ‘…still out there in the dark’ has had its key lowered (I didn’t like this as that is one of my favourite moments), so that Nicole can then take that key forward for a big finish without the Glenn Close-style modulation. I wasn’t convinced. There were numerous lyric changes; none of them was an improvement (save for those that had been done for the Coliseum revival). ‘Girl Meets Boy’ and its reprises were entirely rewritten so as to be no longer recognisable lyrically. Part of me wonders whether this was the solution to what was never a problem in the first place as regards the Hollywood rule of the 1950s not to have a screenplay where black people are taken to a restaurant—I don’t see why this can’t be said so as to highlight (and remind the audience of) the racism endemic in the system of the period, instead of airbrushing history to skirt around the issue. Bizarrely, ‘Let’s Have Lunch’ has reverted to its Sydmonton title, ‘Let’s Do Lunch’.
I mentioned a tilting video screen. That was another aspect that I didn’t think was novel. Basically just think of Ivo van Hove’s short-lived revival of West Side Story, with actors on stage using cameras that film video that is then shown on the screen in big, shaky close-ups (the recent revival of A Chorus Line at the Leicester Curve, which is being put on tour later this year, did the same). I have little patience with this when it is overused, and it was really overused here. So much so that entire scenes (particularly the ones with Joe and Betty) happened entirely on the screen and not in front of us (I guess the actors were backstage somewhere as they weren’t even on stage at these points, where you begin wonder what you’ve paid money to see). It added to the Brechtian alienation, so you did not invest in any of the characters’ relationships, but I begin to wonder what the point of that Verfremdungseffekt is, since there was nothing about the production that seemed to me to be trying to expose a hypocritical, rotten underbelly of a studio that churns through stars. If anything, the whole production – with its constant self-referencing, attempts to ‘sex up’ the material (to the point where Nicole’s Norma not only makes frequent and apparently parodic sex faces to the camera that are then blown up onto the video screen, but she also makes orgasm noises during the Salomé sequence), and Instagram aesthetic (not dissimilar to Lloyd’s Evita) – seemed to go in precisely the opposite direction by embracing and affirming value in what is hip today but will be passé in a decade.
The Brechtian elements were inconsistently used, though, such that I never knew whether we were within or without the narrative of the story, or in some alternate universe altogether. As the ‘Entr’acte’ played, live video was fed to the screen of Tom Francis (rather than Joe himself) leaving his dressing room, saying hello to other actors, and making his entrance. Random stuff was included that generated laughs from the audience, such as a guy in a monkey suit lounging about backstage, and David Thaxton (rather than Max) staring at images of Nicole Scherzinger in provocative poses in his dressing room. So somehow at that point we are outside of the story in self-parodic mode. Then the title song arrives and it is no longer poking fun at itself, but neither is it within the narrative either. 99% of the song is delivered from outside the theatre, with Joe (or rather Tom Francis) singing it as he does a walkabout of the immediate vicinity of the theatre and pointing at posters of the show, only to arrive in the auditorium to deliver the final notes. The audience went wild, but surely this is simply due to novelty factor (and it’s not novel in the sense that this has been done in other contexts, like the Oscars). But singing a song on the streets of London does not evoke the LA Joe is talking about, and the effect simply distracts the audience from what are quite crucial points he is making in his song about the nature of Hollywood and why he has decided to sell out. And again, if I’m in the theatre, I’d rather have the performers in front of me in the same room rather than somewhere else entirely.
That doesn’t mean there weren’t any highlights or inventive parts for me. I did really rate how Joe’s death was staged. It’s not clear what the weapon was (given the lack of props), but we were plunged into darkness and loud noises succeeded each other in syncopation with ‘white outs’ from the lighting, almost out of a horror film. Norma and Joe then appear bloodied at the end (and in the curtain call). It was effective. I also rather liked having Cecile B DeMille as a shadowy, silhouetted figure (think of some of the shadow effects in Citizen Kane that were appropriated by Hal Prince in Evita) who appears only on the video screen. The shadow looms over Scherzinger’s Norma, suggesting her powerlessness and insignificance in relation to the monolithic and faceless studio system.
Some staging choices were a little excessive and added nothing, such as having ghosts of Norma (à la Follies) appearing at various moments. This was most distracting when they then performed bizarre choreography during the final sequence.
If the standout performer was Tom Francis as Joe, this was for his stage presence and voice. As I said, I think he’s a little young to be Joe Gillis and he will make a better one in ten years’ time. Nicole’s Norma didn’t really exist until Act 2. Act 1 was Nicole playing herself, or some kind of caricature of herself or the Pussycat Dolls. There was no engagement with the text and no attempt to portray a faded star of silent screen. I therefore assumed we were going to have a Norma-less Sunset, but suddenly Norma did unexpectedly appear in Act 2, if weakly. There was an attempt to channel Norma Desmond, rather than Nicole Scherzinger, in ‘As If We’d Never Said Goodbye’ and in the descent into madness. But by then it was too late to really buy it. The vocals were fine, if a little overpoppy at time, but her rendition of spoken lines was completely out of character and sounded more Valley Girl than anything else. David Thaxton was surprisingly muted as Max but I suspect he had a bad night, and strangely he seemed to be vocally struggling when it camed to Max’s high notes in ‘The Greatest Star of All’. I do rate him, so I can only assume it was an off night for him. The rest of the cast were forgettable and there were no portrayals of any characters as such. This production is about its aesthetic and its surfaces only. Which is why I find it self-contradictory. On the one hand, it wants to distance us from both the level of the narrative and from identifying or empathising with any characters, yet, on the other, it is not doing this in the service of intellectual engagement, since its superficiality simply mirrors, rather than exposes, that of Hollywood.
All that said, if you simply want to hear this score played very well by a first-rate orchestra with crisp sound design, then you should go (and consider closing your eyes). While it was "only" 18 players, it sounded almost as lush to my ears as the 50-piece in the Coliseum revival, and better than at the Adelphi (and certainly far superior to the unrehearsed 28-piece orchestra that totally messed up the score at Alexandra Palace not so long ago).