Variety:
"Scherzinger plays both to the audience and the camera with elaborate knowingness. She’s at least as arch as the character, but since Lloyd rarely lets her relax it’s hard to empathize. That’s a problem too for Francis’s Gillis, who is so busy being sour and hardbitten that it risks monotony. It’s near impossible to see what Grace Hodgett Young’s excellent Betty sees in him."
The Guardian:
"Meanwhile, characters are inscrutable and we cannot access their emotions. Lloyd employs the same overt non-naturalism as in his revival of The Seagull, so actors often speak directly to us with understated expressions. Where the technique hypnotised us then, it feels distancing now. Joe (Tom Francis) seems like a cypher, deadpan for too long."
iNews:
"Her performance is big on ethereal aura, melodramatic arm gestures and hair-swishing, but she is less skilled at suggesting any interesting interiority for Norma."
CityAM:
But her Desmond struggles to find emotional depth, instead leaning heavily into the script’s meta tendencies, especially in the first half, too often making a laugh out of a line rather than seeing it through with resonant acting.
The Times:
"At the start of Act Two, we see Tom Francis, as the doomed screenwriter Joe Gillis, make his way from his dressing room to the stage, passing through corridors before he enters the auditorium via a door in the stalls. It’s clever, yes, but to what purpose? And all the little in-jokes...only serve to undercut the show’s tragic aura. It doesn’t help, either, that Scherzinger, who, at 45, cuts a seductive cat-like figure, plays Norma less as a monarch in exile and more like a hyperactive Morticia Addams."