Sarah on theater

[July 2025 retrospective, 1 of 2]

I see a lot of theater & I mostly hang out with people who don’t, so I get asked a lot, “What should I see?” For some time, my default answer has been “Sunset Boulevard” and I haven’t really thought that hard about it. Now that it’s closing in a week, I need to jot some things down so I can remember why that was the case.

I don’t think it’s my favorite musical of the current crop (probably “Cabaret”) but I do think that it’s just such a moment. It feels clear to me that this is the current production that will feel most memorable to talk about in 30 years, having updated its material in a way that seems both definitive and uncopyable.

I also, uhh, really liked watching it. The songs are full-bore Baron Lloyd-Webber earworms. The choreo is wild. (People really be running around in circles.) There’s some really staggering visual imagery on display. (More on that later.) There’s a very important walk! It’s hard to pick out any weak links among the principal cast—Diego, Grace, David, Tom, and, of course, Nicole.

If you buy that it matters and that people are actually making measured judgments—it doesn’t and we aren’t, but—this year’s “Best Actress, Musical” Tony was quite an exciting race. With all due respect to Mses. Hilty & Simard (& Shen), there were three genuinely viable choices that, to me, reflected different values. Audra McDonald (“Gypsy”) was the juggernaut in the primo role combating narratives of voter fatigue and the exact necessity of the production. (Seven would be a lot! LeBron James will commiserate with you.) Jasmine Amy Rogers (“Boop!”) was the triple-threat virtuosic upstart who was irreplaceable and essential to an otherwise mediocre show. (She would have been my pick!) But “Tony Award winner Nicole Scherzinger” just has such a pleasant ring to it.

And isn’t that just so? It’s not wrong to love a great story. (Theater is about storytelling!) Audra’s had her moments and Jasmine will have hers. Nicole didn’t feel like she was supposed to be here & it remains to be seen whether she’ll be here again, but the stars really aligned for her and she capitalized on the opportunity. The first fabulous thing about her portrayal of Norma Desmond is how eerily it echoed her own career arc. There’s really something to it—the first time I saw her on a poster for this thing, I scoffed at that washed-up Pussycat Doll.

I’m certainly not scoffing now. The second, even more fabulous thing is that she earned every one of those standing ovations; she was genuinely wonderful in the part, and nobody can take that from her. She completely sledgehammered my (and many others’) impressions of who she was and what she could do, and, in doing so, wrote herself into the mythos of the Great White Way. Hers was the story of the ‘24-‘25 season, and that is something to celebrate, indeed.

[July 2025 retrospective, 2 of 2]

The strongest case against Nicole Scherzinger’s Tony campaign was already inside the house.

It’s definitely not convenient for Nicole’s narrative that 1.) she wasn’t performing a full schedule, 2.) the show works just about as well with a replacement playing Norma, and, indeed, 3.) there was a persistent undercurrent in the discourse, especially among devoted repeat viewers, that Mandy Gonzalez Tuesdays may have been the best days to see “Sunset Boulevard.”

After all, isn’t that an intuitive result? Nicole’s got pipes but hadn’t previously distinguished herself as an actor, whereas Mandy has been a 25-year Broadway stalwart with long tenures in infamously demanding principal roles (Elphaba, Angelica, et al). I don’t want to stake out a position here, really—I enjoyed it most the first time with Nicole, but I’ve also told people unreservedly that they weren’t missing anything going to a Mandy show, even as that felt gently contradictory.

The point is that there’s an argument that Nicole wasn’t even the Best Actress in her own Musical and it’s not trivial to dismiss it. I think what it really attests to, though, more than anything, is the overall strength of the production. What Jamie Lloyd and team did here is such a crazy way to highlight the talents of anyone with the chops to perform the role, in ways both intuitive and not. It’s a classic with Nicole and it’s a classic with Mandy—there’s no contradiction to square away.

It starts with that giant screen, of course. Being blown up to 23 feet is an awfully effective way to magnify an acting performance; it allows the performers in “Sunset” to convey things with their eyes in ways that are typically hard-to-impossible in the art form. This is enhanced by the simple costuming and minimal sets, which leave you nothing to look at but the performer. But there’s more—a few months ago, I met a musician in the “Sunset” orchestra at Bar Centrale and he told me (with some frustration, since it’s harder to calibrate his playing) that this production makes the unorthodox decision to place speakers in the pit, projecting up and out from center stage and enhancing the “belting” effect. And who knows what else they might be doing? The entire audiovisual experience has been carefully tailored to amplify the lead as much as possible, even in ways that we don’t realize.

What makes this production so great is the astute recognition that this material can support these kinds of gonzo tricks. For another show, it would feel shoehorned in and baldly emotionally manipulative. But for this? “Sunset Boulevard” is about a movie star who declares, “I AM BIG. IT’S THE PICTURES THAT GOT SMALL.” The camera angles projected on that screen and the lighting thereof give the unmistakable sensation of a movie running behind the performers. Even if you can’t precisely articulate what it’s all supposed to mean, it still feels true enough to the story that we can suspend disbelief and relax the critical lens. And when it comes to compelling theater, isn’t that, like, the whole ballgame?

As great as Nicole and Mandy’s respective performances may be—and make no mistake, preferences aside, they’re both great and both key parts of the story of this production—the strongest case against recognizing either of them is that their ability to blow you away here is really owed to the brilliance of Jamie Lloyd’s decision to cross this conceit with this material. It’s just a great fucking show, and I’ll miss it very much. Bravo. Brava. Brava.

Just wanna register how great the cast recording is for “Sunset.” I wish more of them were recorded live. That’s how the songs were meant to be heard, and it takes me back in a way that a studio recording never will.