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For veteran theater director Jamie Lloyd, implementing opening credits — another meta layer to “play with levels of reality” in his new Broadway reimagining of “Sunset Boulevard” — was never part of the plan. But late one night during the development process for the West End version, it came to him.
“It was actually only when I was at the theater that I had that idea. It was just seeing the shot of Joe on the screen in the space,” Lloyd tells Variety over Zoom as he reflects on the musical’s evolution. “Somehow, when we did that, it made sense of the whole thing.”
The sequence in question begins as the show’s down-on-his-luck protagonist, Joe Gillis (Tom Francis), faces an “act of desperation.” He gets chased in his car by two finance men and eventually stumbles across Norma Desmond’s (Nicole Scherzinger) old home. Then Andrew Lloyd Webber’s iconic music swells to match the credits.
“When we get to the big crescendo of that score, we needed to deliver something that visually matched the scale of the music,” Lloyd says. “Our scenic designer, Soutra Gilmour, brilliantly designed the screen so it tilts toward the audience so it’s just not vertical, as we often see in a stage space where there’s a flat screen. It starts to angle towards us, feeling more forbidding and more immersive.”
When viewers begin watching the show, they may not realize that the production effectively starts in an empty black box. Revealing the screen, then, marks the “instigating moment” of Joe’s bent-up frustration as he holds the camera, attached to a steering wheel, and his face projects on the screen. “We’ve made a big point, dramaturgically, in really amping up his kind of desperation and frustration. But it wasn’t just that he was kind of bitter and having a rough time. It actually felt like he was at a breaking point,” he adds.
The exact visual look is crucial to establishing the larger theme of Norma’s relationship to the silver screen. To pull off the brief flash of Norma on the big screen, Lloyd and his team began developing a working upstage studio, out of sight from the audience, to shoot the live footage.
“All the lighting units, all the cameras, all the equipment is practical — there’s nothing in that empty space that is decorative,” Lloyd says. “Some of these shots would take hours to set up in a movie, and the fact that we’re doing this live every night is really a technical accomplishment from the entire backstage team.”
Since the whole production plays with levels of reality, including quippy references to Scherzinger’s time in The Pussycat Dolls, this sequence allowed them to create the feeling of a “fever dream.” Lloyd continued: “There’s this acknowledgement that we are all sitting in the St. James Theatre, watching a musical, and we’re watching the actors play these roles. And we can’t, in any way, pretend that this isn’t the case. But that gives us this idea of: Where does Norma Desmond begin and where does Nicole Scherzinger end?”
Nodding to this in the actual making of the production, Lloyd says, allows them to “expose the mechanics of filmmaking and theater-making.” That also comes into play during Joe’s live walk-around, which opens the second act and has been one of the show’s biggest talking points.
Made possible by the collaboration of 62 people, the sequence tracks Joe as he belts “Sunset Boulevard” and walks around the streets of New York. Since ensemble member Shayna McPherson operates the camera following Joe, Lloyd gives kudos to the “symbiotic” relationship the two actors formed.
“Anyone can pick up an inanimate object, anyone can pick up a puppet — but to breathe life into that puppet, to give it a soul, is a different kind of instinct. And Shayna absolutely does that with the camera. She connects to the depths of the scene,” Lloyd continues. “On the street, she’s able to confidently navigate anything that might unexpectedly occur, like a huge crowd of people coming out of ‘Hell’s Kitchen.’”
To account for changing weather conditions and safety hazards, Lloyd and the team have four potential back-up routes they can pivot to at a moment’s notice because their communication is “so specific and exact.”
While the main route takes Francis to Shubert Alley and back to the theater, the second route takes Tom in a straight line up 44th St. on the way to Times Square, which has been used occasionally. Then there’s Plan C, which uses the interior of the building and has Tom only go out to the front briefly, where the ensemble meets him.
But Plan D, which stays completely inside the theater, is reserved for real emergencies and “truly extreme weather.” To date, it has never been used.
“That’s what I love about it — it’s an amazing collaboration where you’ve got everybody in that building working towards one goal,” Lloyd says. “There’s always this sense of achievement that none of us take for granted. This sense of ‘Wow, we’ve done it again.’ That’s what gives it purpose and electricity every night.”
English (US) ·