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Why didn't Broadway love SUNSET BLVD? | Review roundup of the revival starring Nicole Scherzinger
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Mickey Jo
So I've been doing this thing now where every time I talk about a Jamie Lloyd show, I bring the ring lights further in so you can actually see them. But I'm also like, does this just look better? Can we discuss the fact that the New York Times loved this show, same production of this show, same principal cast, and then didn't love the Broadway transfer? The only difference is that it was in New York. Did the New York Times simply not like New York? Is that a question we now have to ask ourselves? Oh, my God. Hey, welcome back to my theatre themed YouTube channel. My name is Mickey Jo and I am obsessed with all things theatre. Truly, deeply obsessed. Which is why I'm about to spend the next hour of my life reading through like 10 to 30 reviews of a Broadway production I have not yet seen. I have, however, seen it twice when it was here in the West End. I am talking about the brand new revival of the musical Sunset Boulevard. It has just had its official opening night at the St James Theatre in New York on. On Broadway. But earlier this year, and right at the end of last year, it was running at the Savoy Theatre in the West End. It was a huge success over here. It was not universally praised, but it was largely critically praised and it made a significant impact among audiences and the theatre community, allowing it to go on to win multiple Olivier Awards, including Best Revival of a Musical, Best Director, Best Leading Actor, Best Leading Actress, and more. I think there were more. I believe there were more. Both productions have starred Nicole Scherzinger in the role of Norma Desmond, a role previously played stage by the likes of Glenn Close, Betty Buckley, Patti LuPone, Elaine Page, Diane Carroll and more. And she has been joined on either side of the Atlantic by Tom Francis, rising star Tom Francis, as well as rising star Grace Hodgett, Young and Olivier Award winner David Thaxton. Now, the show itself is the adaptation of a Billy Wilder film, an old Hollywood film which starred Gloria Swanson as the reclusive, faded silent screen star Norma Desmond. It was musicalized by Andrew Lloyd Webber after Sondheim and Kander and Ebb both either said no or failed to do so. With the lyrics by Don Black and Christopher Hampton. It was first seen on Stage in the 1990s and has been revived a couple of times, both in the West End and on Broadway. Interestingly enough, every Broadway production of Sunset Boulevard there has ever been started in London first and then went there. But those productions previous to this most recent one have been noted for their lavish sets, their grand costumes, their turbans, their staircases, their cars on stage, their swimming pools, their, you know, thorough design elements. Although interestingly enough, in finding the reviews for this production just now, I accidentally stumbled upon Ben Brantley's review for the New York Times last Time It Was on Broadway, in which he immediately noted that the set even then was more stripped down. Nothing compared to this later version. But evidently the way that things have been heading and the minimalist aspects are just one of the many changes in this latest version of the show. The casting reflects a slightly different approach, the costuming and of course, the extensive use of onstage cameras and this giant video screen. All of which have guarantees that this production of Sunset Boulevard has certainly made an impact. But did Broadway's critics take to this production as positively as the West Ends did at the end of last year? That is what we are going to take a look at in today's new video. If you enjoy this video and you want to see more theatrical commentary, reviews of my own, as well as theatre going vlogs and interviews here on my channel, make sure you are subscribed with the notifications turned on. You can also find me on all major podcast platforms, as well as Instagram, TikTok and the app formerly known as Twitter as MickeyJoTheatre. And because in this video we are talking about critical responses and the inherently subjective nature of theatrical productions, I desperately need to know what you think as well. Let us know what you think of this revival of Sunset Boulevard. But you have to have seen it at some point. I'm sorry, I don't make the rules. You cannot possibly hope to really appropriately appraise a piece of theatre unless you have experienced it in person. That's not three seconds of a bootleg or a trailer, or you've seen the production images or you've watched him walk around outside the building while singing the title song. Yes, that is a thing that happens if you have seen the show this production, either in the West End or on Broadway. Comment down below and let us know what you thought. It has not been universally beloved. It has still been a little bit divisive. Not everyone likes this new stylistic approach, but it's also been very popular with a lot of people who wouldn't necessarily call themselves fans of the original production or Angelo Dwebber shows necessarily, which arguably is exactly what Jamie Lloyd wants to do. But we're going to get into all of that as we read through today's reviews. So let's take a look at what Broadway thought of Sunset Boulevard. Sunset Boulevard can't reach my laptop. Okay so on balance, there are many positive reviews here. There are also many mixed reviews. A comparison that's being made a lot is the recent revival of Cabaret, which was received very differently in the West End and then subsequently on Broadway after transferring. Both productions originated in London. Very successful, very award winning here. Went over to Broadway expecting the same response. Cabaret did not get that same response. Neither quite has Sunset Boulevard, but not to the same negative extent. Let's begin by reading the much talked about review by Jesse Green in the New York Times, who is himself much talked about. This is being touted as a mixed review. He calls it a fascinating Broadway revival of the bombastic 1994 musical, which blows it up even further. And he notes that despite Norma Desmond having famously declared in the film Sunset Boulevard that it's not her but the pictures that got small, the opposite is true on Broadway these days. In musicals especially, video and projections have grown ever more dominant. Tell that to the play that's coming in this season. The Picture of Dorian Gray at the Music Box Theatre features even more screens than this one does with Sarah Snook. I can't wait to see and hear what they think of that one. He goes on to say. Perhaps it is not so much an irony as an inevitability. Then that at the St James Theatre, where a revival, the musical, I've told you this already, live video streamed onto an LCD screen more than 23ft tall are so big they almost blot out the show below. But alas, only almost. Knife twist. For despite many fascinating interventions by the director Jamie Lloyd and his technical team, and the fact that it is based on one of the greatest of movies, he likes that the musical remains too silly for words. Twist, twist, twist. In that sense, and others, Norma would have loved it. Which I personally would put above the marquee. That's the pull quote, I think, from this, however, he clarifies, which isn't praise twist, you will recall that Norma is deluded. A washed up silent film star who in her 50th dotage haunts a grand, ghostly Los Angeles mansion with only her grim manservant Root and a recently dead chimpanzee for company. Why? You gotta mention why you gotta bring up the chimp. The chimp barely features in this gah, yadda yadda, yadda, yadda, yadda, yadda, telling us about the plot. Interestingly enough, he contextualizes the rest of this review by telling us about the film, which you know, you gotta have to do. I'm not. A lot of critics are gonna go into this kind of depth on the source material and kind of evaluating it at that stage. And like, I mean, when you're reviewing a revival, it's one thing and a necessary thing to go back to the original production, but it's quite another thing to then go back from that and question why that even exists in the first place by looking at the film. So Jesse Green says the 1950 film directed by Billy Wilder stands at a wry remove from these tawdry proceedings with a cool appreciation but no embrace for human pathos and the hysteria of Hollywood dreams. Norma is a drama queen, Joe a gigolo, Betty a simp, and Max a goblin. We know nothing of their emotions beyond what their actions show us. A musical cannot work that way. Opening their mouths to sing characters are all emotion. Perhaps that's why Stephen Sondheim and later the team of Kander and Ebb abandoned attempts at adaptation. In fact, Sondheim evaded it because Billy Wilder told him personally he thought it ought to be an opera because it's about a dethroned queen. Sondheim agreed and so never did it. Lloyd Webber, I guess, said nah, which is exactly what Jesse Green tells us about next. And he does devote a lot of time to talking about the material, which you still have to do in a revival, like the material still has to be there. Lloyd Webber's music, some of it quite stirring, at least, delivers the largeness and fragility of Norma's self regard in songs like With One look and as If We Never Said Goodbye, which of course are the two musical highlights of the score. But the lyrics, often accented on ridiculously wrong syllables, are fatally awkward. And the book, softening everyone in the process of giving them leg motivations, turns Wilder's worldliness into kitsch. I have to believe that Lloyd, who has directed exceptional New York revivals of Betrayal, A Doll's House and Cyrano de Bergerac, knows all this. Indeed, his production feels like a response to the problems of the 1994 musical and, wherever possible, a distraction from them. Is the material campy? Make it campier? Is the mise en scene clunky? Get rid of it. Is the music bombastic? Bomb the audience's ears with it. And I will give it to him again that this is an interesting question to pose. And Jamie Lloyd's relationship to the material is something that does get, you know, called into question in these responses. Is this a director trying to fix a version of the show? Is he just trying to illuminate it in a new way? That's always kind of been paramount in his mission statement is just trying to bring out truth from the thing and from a third party perspective, those could look like exactly the same thing. Trying to, like, overwrite a previous version and change its oddities and its problems and its flaws, and trying to just bring out, you know, the best of it and trying to unearth the gems of humanity and, and emotion and, and honesty. The same choices can be interpreted both ways. Moving on to the performances, Green says this is all at its most intense in Scherzinger's exciting, yet exceptionally weird and counterintuitive performance. Those are not words I've heard associated with it thus far. That a stunningly Youthful woman of 46 is playing a character said to be about a million years old is the least of it. Gloria Swanson in the movie was only 50. In fact, Patti was a similar age when she first did it in London. Nor are we meant to take it literally that Scherzinger is barefoot throughout the show and wears only a slinky slip dress. Well, I'm glad that he got that one. This is a stripped down Norma, which you might well argue is no Norma at all. And I disagree wildly, Billy, wildly with that statement because it's, it's an exposed normal, and I think we see so much truth there. Scherzinger's casting has been called into question since day zero on this, since it was announced that it was happening. They were like, she's too gorgeous, she's too glamorous. We can't possibly believe her as a haggard old woman. Which, you know, with Glenn Close playing the role decades apart, is kind of the direction that the perception of Norma Desmond had been moving in. As Jesse Green notes himself, that has not always been the interpretation of the character. She is in her 40s in this production rather than her 50s. There is a change in the script, but there's a lot to be said about Hollywood then and Hollywood now and how they treat women who dare to age above 40 and, you know, continue to work because the same misogynistic standards are still perpetuated. And if a woman isn't too old for a role, apparently she's too young. Apparently she's too glamorous. Apparently she's too stunningly youthful. You'll notice we haven't really talked about her acting performance or her extraordinary vocal performance before. We've talked about how she looks as Norma Desmond. In fact, this entire paragraph, after calling her weird and counterintuitive, goes stunningly youthful, barefoot, costumed in a slinky slip dress. And re examined in that context. A little bit weird. He goes on to say that her characterization is more demented even than Glenn Close's in the original production and the 2017 revival. If sometimes a zombie, at other times, Scherzinger makes each gesture feel like a semaphore flag, ornately choreographed for people on land, from a ship at sea. Scherzinger's singing is likewise gestural, poised, aimed and detonated syllable by syllable, fiercely drilled and smartly deployed, which I think was complimentary. But the result is that you are aware at all times, as if this were Brecht, of the performance as a performance, not as a characterization. And I wonder if that's to the benefit of contemporary audiences, who I find are increasingly bad at suspension of disbelief. There is so much commentary on authenticity in casting and all sorts of other things. And I think when it's with celebrity as well, we never truly leave behind our perceptions of them. With Lea Michele in Funny Girl, I think this came up as well. We don't really forget about the context of the performance that we entered the theater with. The same with Eddie Redmayne in Cabaret. Certainly when stars take to the stage, they bring that baggage with them. And so better to play into it, as Scherzinger does under Jamie Lloyd in this production, which is what we go on to talk about next. The production's many meta Easter eggs, the Pussycat Dolls and Lloyd Webber himself are referenced. Do the same thing, taking some of the gas out of a gassy show, but in the process pandering to the audience. And this show shows you a live camera feed outside of the theater, which hasn't been mentioned yet in this review. Shockingly so. It's, you know, it's. It's pretty clear that they're not trying to maintain any kind of an illusion of narrative. This is exposing the fact. I mean, you can see the cameras on stage, you can see people holding the cameras. We. We know that we're looking at something different here. We are not immersed in storytelling in the same way. And he doesn't actually spoil the surprise of that Act 2 moment necessarily as much as allude to it. He says the opening of each act includes beautifully executed surprises that set new standards, as perhaps Sunset Boulevard is best suited to do for filmic theatricality. The lighting by Jack Knowles is startling throughout. The singing, too, is excellent. And even better, two of the tackiest songs, the Ladies Paying and Eternal Youth, have been cut. I wish more were twist, twist, twist. But here is the wounding. I can't help feeling that Lloyd's talent and that of his designers, let alone Scherzinger's, would be better lavished on better material. And this I find so interesting. The revival is not like Cat's the Jellicle Ball this summer, a completely new way of looking at a Lloyd Webber musical. It's a completely new way of not looking at one. And I have a bunch of thoughts about that commentary because I think as joyous and brilliant and inspired as Cats was, and as wonderfully as it paid attention to its material in the same way I think Jamie Lloyd did with this production of Sunset Boulevard, they both have extraordinary attention to detail. Cats did not fit its new mold fully. There were still moments throughout, like I said in my review, despite loving it, where you had to divorce yourself from really listening to the lyrics because otherwise it would make clear to you that what you were seeing did not quite make sense. Because they still talk about feline behavior even though what we are seeing is queer Manhattan ballroom culture. And Sunset Boulevard has moments of that as well in terms of the time where it's set and we see anachronistic things. But I think it brings so much out of the text. I don't agree that we are not looking at the show. I have seen Sunset Boulevard previously and I felt connected to moments of it far more in this production because, you know, there's a lot of features of the original material that divorce me from it emotionally. Those long Hollywood scenes with all of these other characters who do not matter substantially to the plot was suddenly riveting in this version there are duets with Joe and Betty. Bored me to tears before that became my favorite parts of the show here. Now we are going to move on and read some different reviews other than this one New York Times one. But what I want to take a look at first is the New York Times review that was written when the show was playing at the Savoy Theatre in London. Because while we understand that, you know, newspapers employ different critics and everyone responds to things personally, it does feel like a bit of a discrepancy for the same outlet to share such different perspectives on something. And in 2023, the New York Times made this a critics pick, with Matt Wolfe saying a stripped back revival in London brings the classic musical into the present day and gives Scherzinger a career defining performance. He called it daring. And where Jesse Green spent about half of his review talking about the context of the production, he does this simply in an opening sentence by saying the 1993 Angela Tober musical Sunset Boulevard is about a former screen star's descent into madness. We're done. That's all the explanation that Matt Wolf gave, he later said. I can't imagine another London show generating comparable buzz this season. And truthfully, nothing else did. I mean, there wasn't that much of the season left, but nothing else did. He credited maverick director Jamie Lloyd's tightly focused, stripped back aesthetic. He said purists may balk at a Sunset Boulevard without the visual splendor of Norma Desmond's baroque Hollywood palazzo, as we have previously seen on stage and in the original 1950 feature film. But Lloyd's streamlined approach has a power of its own. Scherzinger finds a predatory allure in the character that is both captivating and chilling. Now, interestingly enough, this one also talks about Scherzinger's age. Norma, who was 50 in Billy Wilder's classic film, is now said to be 40 and was in her prime at 17. Showbiz discards personalities even earlier now, and Scherzinger, 45, who first came to prominence in the 2000s girl group the Pussycat Dolls, has a shivery command over a part that requires her to plunge headfirst into psychic abyss. But for all its nods to the past, this Sunset Boulevard belongs to the here and now. There's not a whiff of nostalgia to the production, which takes an established musical by the scruff of the neck and sends it careering into the modern day. The other thing about this review is it does nod to many more of the cast and creatives than Jesse Green devoted time to in his other New York Times review that would come later. Nathan Amzi and Joe Ransom's video design pulls off a real couple with the Act 2 sequence that is detailed here. Though followers of the Belgian director Eva Van Hove will recognize the technique of folding celluloid into the theatre, that is correct. Jamie Lloyd did not invent taking cameras outside and streaming into the auditorium. The prevailing intensity extends to the choreographer Fabian Alouise's tightly drilled ensemble, which suggests a writhing, restless mass of Hollywood wannabes, doesn't it just? In any case, I think we can agree that that that prior New York Times review just under a year previously had a very different response to the same production. Now, the New York Times does not issue star ratings, so they don't have to embarrass themselves by showing a discrepancy there. But the London one feels like a five and the New York one feels like a three. But like I said, we are going to move on. We're going to go from the New York Times to the New York Post, I think, with Johnny Oleksinski, and we're going to see what he thought. Now, he had already seen this production in the West End, which I dare say he may mention here. Now, the New York Post does do star ratings, but they rate out of four, which drives me a little bit mad because half of the time he uses half stars. That would only correspond to a whole number out of five system. Anyway, I don't know that he has any say over this, but it's a conversation I'm not going to stop having. His headline is Nicole Scherzinger Stuns in Scorching Brilliant Broadway Revival. Four stars out of four stars. He says age is just a number, right, Norma? And he calls Sunset Boulevard Broadway's most exhilarating show in years. And that will go above the marquee. So much energy, freshness and unrelating intensity. That's a word we're going to keep hearing, courses through the veins of director Jamie Lloyd's startling production of Angela Dwebber's musical from beginning to end. You'd swear it was brand new. I agree. And adrenaline pumps through our bloodstream anytime. The extraordinary Nicole Scherzinger, making her wondrous Broadway debut, wails a note. And with that, her Tony Awards campaign begins. In fact, it's already begun. But Mr. Oleksinski is really teeing her up there. She's otherworldly, as that reclusive has been. Norma, a revelation. And when the former Pussycat doll belts Lloyd Webber's stirring ballads with one look and as if we never said goodbye, as Hayes dreamily swirls behind her, the audience all but levitates. A review like this is what we call a love letter. The entire production leaves you breathless. We're transfixed from the moment the giant video screen, this staging chandelier, descends from the rafters bearing the image of actor Tom Francis, his dangerous eyes as struggling screenwriter Joe Gillis drives towards his doom. Thus far, not much has been said about Francis. I mean, he is, as everyone is in this production, eclipsed by the extraordinary performance of Scherzinger, who not only does an awful lot, but does it very well. But he did win the Olivier for Best Leading Actor in a Musical. And offstage, he is also very talked about because of everything that he does at the start of the second act, which you can read about in other places if you don't know what I'm talking about. I talk about it in my. My own full review of the production, which you can go and watch here on YouTube. And I've also talked about some of the drama that's come into that conversation recently in a more recent video here on my channel. But what does the New York Post review make of the lack of set? Call it no Set Boulevard. He wittily says the director has tossed out the grand mansion with its endless staircase and left just a couple of chairs, sometimes no chairs, and they sit on the floor. There's no 1930s Hollywood lots and sound stages. Scherzinger wears a silky black dress instead of a turban and form concealing shawl. The lady's paying has been cut good and anachronistic dances a la the robot have been added. Norma, desperate to be half her age, sometimes speaks like she's filming an Instagram reel. He's referring to a vocal fry moment that she does and gets a laugh with. There are several anachronistic moments like this. Interesting inference, actually, that it's a nod to her trying to appear younger. I think it's all just a part of the contemporary celebrity culture that is being married to this production. A sensual dancer, young Norma Hannah Yun Chamberlain tickles and tortures Norma with memories of her glory days. I'm glad that Hannah has had a mention here. She was also part of the London cast. I think she's wonderful. Choreographer Fabian Eloise's movement ranges from alluring to chaotic. It's a lot, but some way, somehow it all works magnificently. Then we have much discussion of the dynamics of the characters and the narrative. Praise for lighting designer Jack Knowles and then some words for Tom Francis, smouldering and velvet voiced in his Broadway debut, walks away with the musical's biggest talker at the top of Act 2, a feat involving video cameras, fresh air and a mountain of logistics. Truly, so much going into this moment. If at any point you think it's not incredibly complicated, you are wrong. It's thrilling, tremendous fun and will infuriate some people. It wouldn't be Broadway after all if somebody wasn't whining about videos. And I think we can all agree that when it comes to whining about videos, especially in the context of Angelo Toba musicals, I also, I also know a thing or two about that. But the show belongs to the Titanic. Scherzinger, who makes an especially proud and feral Norma. I mean, I think Mr. Oleksinski's love of her performance is the most evident thing in here. He ends by saying lloyd webber's back on 44th street with a bona fide new stage star, and it seems fitting, but Alongside that as well, an extraordinary amount of praise for this production, for its creative choices, for really everyone involved. So, having read mixed and positive, let's take a look at a negative review and I think the Wrap. Yes. Robert Hoffler for the Wrap was not a fan. He called this revival both minimal and excessive. Again, no star rating, as is the Broadway style, Mr. Hoffa says the director of the new revival of Angela Dwebber's Sunset Boulevard takes the final line from Billy Wilder's noir classic I'm Ready for My Close up and repeats it ad nauseam. The line is spoken only once on stage at the end, but from the opening of Jamie Lloyd's ridiculously foggy and overwrought production, this director gives us close ups of not not only of all the principal actors, but every chorister as well. What's wrong with the fog? What's his beef with fog? Did this band fall once? What's happened here? Putting a video camera, open parentheses, s, close parentheses, which pierces the grammar of the sentence on stage and having live actors taped so that their faces can be magnified on big screens has become the most tiresome directorial crutch of this century. The musical Sunset Boulevard opened Sunday at the St James Theatre after a run in London, and the camera work is so overused, it can only be hoped that it inspires a moratorium on utilising such recording devices in the theatre. Why? Because everyone else enjoyed it. Why on earth would that do that? If anything, this is going to inspire more cameras on stage. I'm very sorry to tell you, Mr. Harfler. All those close ups take our attention away from what's happening elsewhere on stage. I think they focus the eye. I think, listen, I'm gonna be so intrigued as to how the Picture of Dorian Gray is received because we had them very close together here in the West End as well. I also reviewed that here on my channel and the use of cameras felt very different there because it didn't feel quite as precise and intentional and even more so in Opening Night, even more so in that also in Evita, a revival of Evita, another load popping musical at the Leicester Kerf that also used cameras on stage. In none of those other three productions that all used cameras did, I feel it was anywhere near as intentional, as focused and deliberate as the camera work that Jamie Lloyd has directed with Nathan Amzi, with Joe Ransom as video designers in Sunset Boulevard. It is so extraordinarily clear and precise and it allows you to see the show the way the director sees it. And that is such a gift. I remember seeing Her Lies Love on Broadway and standing for it first and then seeing it from the mezzanine and thinking to myself so clearly, oh, this is how the show has been created. And I now see it through the lens that I think it was envisioned with by the creative team. I think you had to sit in the mezzanine to really appreciate the whole thing and then have a different experience while standing. Jamie Lloyd offers everyone in the house the opportunity to see the show the way that he sees it and the way he wants it to be seen via this camera. It is not a distraction. You have to look at it. If you go in hating cameras on stage, you're gonna hate this show. And I think that's what's happened here. I'm sorry to say, but it's the next sentence that irks me because he says the close ups take our attention away from what's happening elsewhere on stage. They also expose a lot of things we should not be noticing. Those elements include the ugly around the jaw mics, the tape that secures those mics to an actor's neck, the actors sweat, and also their acne. It is quite a youthful cast and whatever fantasy world you want to live in, it's not reality. If your entire evening at the theatre is wounded and pierced and ruined because you can see someone sweating, then buy worse seats, sit further back, don't clean your glasses before you arrive, or stay at home and listen to the radio. If seeing imperfections on the face of a of a youthful cast is going to offend you that much, don't bother to leave your home or, I don't know, go to an opera and sit in the back row. In this revival, Norma is now 40, not 50. Her hair is straight and long. She wears a simple black dress. I would love for one of these reviews, and I'm certain we'll get to one eventually, that talks about her talent before it talks about her appearance. Because for the love of goodness, and you can talk about both, but always, always contextualize first with this is how she looks on stage. For me, the big surprise of this Sunset Boulevard is Scherzinger's outrageously campy, over the top performance. Like so much of this revival, it is both minimal and excess. When Scherzinger sings, she comes up with drag queen gestures that haven't been seen since Susan Hayward lip synced I'll plant my own tree in Valley of the Dolls. I feel I just got older reading that sentence. She's also horny When Gloria Swanson's Norma invites William Holden's Jo McGillis to spend the night in a bedroom above her garage, it is not obvious that she's on the make. Was he called Joe McGillis in the film or is he just misquoting this character name? He's Joe Gillis now. In any case, Scherzinger, on the other hand, delivers the invitation with such Cruella de Vil lust that she gets a big laugh from the audience. What a shame. The audience laughed. Do the producers know? Should we write to someone? It's not just her exaggerated line readings, it's that she's being taped in close ups, so we see her bulging eyes and lips, her flicking tongue. This normal wants to be serviced by Jo so badly that when she sits down to spread her legs wide, Scherzinger forgets for a moment that this musical is Sunset Boulevard, not Cabaret. I hate when lines like that are written in reviews. I know I'm finding nothing to enjoy about this and I'm really not on the side of this critic, but I hate when they say, oh, the actor forgets that they're supposed to be doing this. No, she's been directed and she's following direction and she won an Olivier Award for doing that. She won multiple awards, in fact, in the West End for this performance. She forgets that it's not Cabaret. Is there a certain level of leg spread that you're allowed to do in Sunset Boulevard and that you're allowed to do in Cabaret? Is it like, oh, more than 45 degrees and suddenly it's Fosse? Like, what on earth? A former Pussycat doll? You're gonna hear that constantly, I'm afraid. Scherzinger has the vocal chops to make showstoppers of with one look. And as if we never said goodbye, the sound pouring out of rock stadium sized amps at the St. James is much like that of the Pussycats. Lush, loud, homogenized and processed with excessive reverb. But that's not enough. When Scherzinger sings, she's suddenly enveloped in a billowing fog. It's a not so subtle reminder that this story is set in smoggy Los Angeles. This man does not like fog, nor the Pussycat Dolls, necessarily. And if he's finding any comparison between their music and the way she's singing in this show, I'm impressed. In fact, Lloyd Webber has had quite a year here in New York City. Critics went wild over a new production of his feline show Cats that set the musical at a drag contest. It's not a drag contest. It's Ballroom Cult, for goodness sake. I remained unimpressed because the songs in the book remained the same. Dreadful. This man is not fun, I think, is the problem that we're having here. And both Cats and this Sunset Boulevard, in my humble theatrical opinion, are fun. And this man is not fun. I realize we've got to this point in the commentary without me talking about my own feelings for Sunset Boulevard, though I think they have become clear through my analysis of these reviews. I gave it a five star review with a long video review here on my channel that you're welcome to go and watch afterwards, where I break down the production. If you haven't seen it and you're intrigued by all of this commentary and you want to know more about it, I'm quite descriptive in how I talk about the choices and the aesthetics and all of that stuff. And I've worn this little five star review hat to remind you of my feelings about it. That is Mickey Joe Theatre merchandise that you can buy at my live shows. Now, as reluctant as I am to return to this review, I do want to pull your attention towards the final sentences. After Norma shoots Joe at the end, she's suddenly covered in blood. Spoiler alert. Did I miss something? Has she used a knife instead of a gun? Or did she sneak in a little quickie with Joe's corpse before it fell into the pool? Which, you know, not a bad inference, actually. I think that's quite a fun idea for this production. But my interpretation of it always was that she literally just devoured his heart in a figurative and literal sense. I mean, we see the literal manifestation of the figurative idea because he has blood on his chest, she has blood coming from her mouth. That is kind of where I took that. But the audience understands well enough that he's dead, she's killed him, she's covered in his blood, and she's at a point of such psychosis she can't even comprehend that. And that's really all we need to know for this story to work. Because this story is not being literally realized on stage. And he knows this. He's just being, I struggled for a kind adjective, facetious. Let's go with that ending. Weirdly, with a question, he writes, and why is Scherzinger suddenly channeling Sissy Spacek from Carrie to that and to the rest of this review, I reply, I just don't know what to tell you. Let's return to one of the other ones that is sort of classified as a mixed review. Because I find those the most interesting and Sarah Holdren has written about this for Vulture, and I'm desperate to read a woman's perspective on Sunset Boulevard and Nicole's performance in particular. Sarah writes, nicole Scherzinger is gargantuan and almost feral. She begins by noting that the composer Lloyd Webber and the director Jamie Lloyd might seem like an odd couple first glance the literal baron of musical melodrama and the heavily tatted working class raised stripper down of classics. If you read that sentence too fast, it looks like Jamie Lloyd is a working class stripper. But despite their divergent aesthetics. You can say that again. Despite their divergent aesthetics, both director and composer are Lloyd's in search of effect. Isn't that true? They want an audience breathing hard and they trust that feeling hard will follow. Thinking hard is a distant third priority. Putting a slightly finer point on it, Sarah says, both these blokes rubbed me the wrong way. It can be difficult to feel unalloyed excitement for the parade of male auteurs produced by Europe and the UK directors with piles of accolades and severe stylistic signatures whose work lands on Broadway or at the Park Avenue armoury or the Shed like a flash bomb. It may as well be purpose built to dazzle Americans with the wonders that can be produced with actual government funding and a lasting apprentice to master pipeline, at least where promising young men are concerned. I okay, if that is to be a sweeping critique of the British theatrical establishment, Jamie Lloyd has been nurtured by some institutions with government funding. This particular production obviously did not come from that background. True enough, he has worked and honed his craft at the Donmar Warehouse and at the National Theatre. I don't think that's a criticism to be made so much as it just feels like a jealous resentment, I'm sorry to say. And our country and our government do not support and platform theater the way that they ought to. But a certain amount of government funding for the arts is not a thing to criticize or necessarily portray as inherently misogynistic, I feel. But speaking in the third paragraph of this review about the actual show that it's reviewing, Sarah writes, I dared myself to come into Lloyd's revival of Lloyd Webber's 1993 mega musical Sunset Boulevard with a wide open mind, I can tell. And this production is indeed remarkable, at least on its charged up, sweat slicked surface. If you spend any time at all following the hypes and hysterias of theatre and its accompanying Twitterverse, which I guess is now called an X verse, it will hardly Surprise you to hear that this sunset is more of a solar flare. Ever since blurry phone videos of Scherzinger barefoot and wraith like in a bias cut black slip dress, oh, and covered in blood, started flooding social media last fall, musical theatre kids of all ages on this side of the Atlantic have been panting for her gory close up. When I saw the show, the house at the St. James was practically vibrating. Lloyd Webber, Barnum at his core, would approve. So would Norma. I don't know why the enthusiasm of young people, finally, for a piece of contemporary theatre for a musical revival of all things, and, you know, for the life that that's found on social media. I don't know why any of that is being portrayed in a negative light. I truly don't. And I think for all the conversations we can have about critics feeling out of touch or disconnected from audiences, the telltale sign is when you start to read reviews that are clearly bothered by how enamored people in the theatre are. Like, I can't tell you how many times I've read a critic writing about not having laughed once, but being surrounded by fits of hysteria and not taking that as the indication that they are not the target audience for this particular comedy or something like this. Honestly, that isn't to say that Holdren's review is entirely negative. She goes on to say Scherzinger's ravenous performance provides a great part of the adrenaline, but the show's also jolted into new life by the collision of the spartan lloydiverse with all the plush and purple of Lloyd Webber's score. And then I'm having to skip so many sentences because we're just talking about the way Lloyd Webber writes generally in the way he's been written about previously and his aspirations to Puccini. The music throbs and flourishes. So does the stage, loaded up with gondolas and chandeliers. Not again, not in this production. Lloyd, true to form, runs the other way. He and his collaborators, the setting costume designer Sutra Gilmour and the lighting designer Jack Knowles, and video designers Nathan Emsey and Joe Ransom Crafter spare, echoing dungeon girded by Towers of LEDs. This kind of seeming minimalism is its own circus trick, costing, as it does, millions of dollars, which I'm happy to have acknowledged because I've seen a lot of comments calling this cheap, calling this, you know, money grabbing. And someone even laid the blame at the feet of Lloyd Webber, saying, Lloyd Webber's just bringing Sunset back and doing it as cheaply as possible and like bringing A bus and truck tour to Broadway. Nothing about this is a bus and truck tour. This is an extraordinarily expensive production that Lloyd Webber himself had very little creative say on because he is less involved as a producer these days. And on a Jamie Lloyd production, Jamie Lloyd is the driving creative force. Not even the producers. Speaking of the use of video on stage, which is an interesting feature of all of this conversation, she says Amzi and Ransom use live feed camera rigs manipulated by the actors to fill a massive moving wall panel that backs the set or floats ominously above it with lurid close ups. Perhaps you've tired of this device and perhaps you haven't, but at least here it functions to keep the movie and the idea of movies alive in the space, which I could not agree with more, and that's kind of the first time we've read this here is the idea of video design being used to represent the inherent relationship between this musical and, you know, the world of Hollywood, the world of cinema. No one has, as of yet, from what I've read, leaned into that metaphorical relationship quite as much as I did in my previous review when I talked about Norma being a character that is trapped inside of the screen. In her mind, she can't escape from the silver screen where she was fully realized and now without it isn't a real person. So that is the way that we meet her and that is the way that the story is told by a screenwriter. But this, you know, talks around the same idea. Sunset Boulevard is, in essence, a Greek tragedy that unfolds when ultimate cynicism meets uttermost fantasy. Lloyd begins by theatricalizing the immovable object of Joe's disillusionment before introducing it to Norma's unstoppable force. Oh, I like that. Okay, Joe. Wonderfully sung and played with a compelling veneer of masculine numbness by Tom Francis. That's a great way of describing his performance as well. A compelling veneer of masculine numbness. Can no longer see any of Hollywood's color or charm, so neither can we smart. The stage is as empty as both his spirit and his pockets. A nihilist vacuum ready for a dangerous flood. Hurricane Norma doesn't colorize Jo's world after all. She'd have no desire to. The ambition still consume her years after the height of her stardom. All lie in the Hollywood of silence and desaturation. Oh, when Sarah Holdren gets going and actually talks about the show that she's reviewing, it's great. It is poetry. She dreams in greyscale. Boy, does she dream and sing about it a lot, but she does bring light, shadow and torrents of atmosphere along with her. The gambit of her casting works. The resonances are real and clearly not lost on her. When she lets rip, as in her ceiling shakers with one look and as if we never said goodbye, rolling clouds of haze pour across the stage and Robert Hoffler has has an aneurysm obscuring everything but her. This is Norma's world, just as we've seen Joe's. She lives in a permanent spotlight and in Lloyd's rendering, on a literal cloud. Brilliantly put, brilliantly understood paragraphs. Here, then dedicated to the nuance of her performance, she charges headfirst at the famous lines, delivering them with a cavernous boom. She's not dignified. She's so big that she seems to be ripping her own seams. But she's also got a wily little sense of humor, a giggly, contemporary coded bounce and wiggle that comes out especially when the cameras are around. It's surprisingly funny and also tinged with sadness. Here's a woman who may have lost the better part of her mind, but not the part that's entirely aware of how the kids are telegraphing sexiness these days, even as those kids have no idea who she is. And the pop singer in Scherzinger can also do a thrilling range of things with her voice. There's nothing classical in the way she bites into the songs. She simply devours them, ricocheting between vulnerable tremblings and voracious howls. And then my favourite sentence, Lloyd mics the bejesus out of his shows. Oh, you don't get a lot of bejesus in reviews these days. The results are mixed. Yes, it's exciting for Scherzinger to be able to go internal, her breathy whispers beamed into our ears. But on the loud end, the organic power of her voice is eaten by the amplification. And then, contrary to what we just read, Sarah Holdren likes the ending of the play. On the other side of the scale, she says Fisher and Lloyd are able to release something animal in the horror of the play's bloody finale. I won't spoil the details of it, but it's not just a straightforward matter of firing Chekhov gun between retina burning flashes from Knowles that suggest something altogether grislier than a gunshot. Something with teeth. I agree. Sarah Holdren. I agree. And then finally, finally, words about David Thaxton, who I think is giving the subtlest, most careful, most intelligent, most brilliantly crafted performance in this And I mean, Scherzinger is sensational and extraordinary, but David Thaxton, I think incredibly underrated as Matt and Sarah Holdren seems to agree. She writes that he is fantastic in the part, building a sturdy arc all the way from comedy. He starts by channeling Lurch and the massive underlit close ups on his face wouldn't be out of place in Young Frankenstein to fully felt melodramatic revelation. His role lies in gothic territory that could simply play as camp, but Thaxton gives it real ache and agony. She doesn't love Grace Hodgett Young as much she writes, though Young has a clear, lovely voice and an appealing matter of factness about her. Neither Lloyd nor the show seems very interested in Betty's B plot. Maybe because it's girl next door. Sweetness and rationality feel one beside the play's central house of horrors. Finally, we talk about the production. Running on its ability to stun Frances much tick tocked live recorded adventure through the bowels of the theatre and out onto 44th street at the top of the second act during the title number is a legitimate rocket spectacle as cocaine jolt. My takeaway from this is I never knew Sarah Holdren was this active on social media. My goodness. There's no doubt that Lloyd's sunset dazzles in the beholding, though the farther you walk away from it, the more you may find yourself feeling like poor Joe Gillis, remembering the thrill but no longer able to feel it somehow both stirred and empty. Hooray for Hollywood. You know, there's something great about this review because you can't quite pinpoint where it stands. It's not telling you to go and buy tickets. It's not telling you it's great. It's not telling you it's terrible. It's really just an interpretation. It's an artistic response as much as anything else. I don't know if it's a review as we sort of understand them to be, but it's. It's almost something even better than that. And I do feel that it's only this slightly jaded perspective on the theater makers responsible that is keeping Sarah Holdren from really having enjoyed this show. But as usual, when we do these review roundups, we are beginning to get to the point that everything starts to sound slightly similar. Let's read through some highlights of a couple more positive reviews. Variety liked it. Scherzinger astonishes in Jamie Lloyd's remarkable Broadway staging. Her architectural cheekbones reflect the glare of the spotlight and her eyes disappear as she contorts her features into A mask of perverse pleasure. She seems for a moment to be inhaling not oxygen but motes of light. This is a critic and an audience member who has become so enraptured by a performance that they are. That they are noticing those kind of details and that they're having this spiritual response to it. That's something we like to hear. That's the difference between someone watching something in a detached way and someone engaging with it faithfully, which I think it's the responsibility of the critic to do. Is that easy to do multiple times a week for years on end? No. No, it isn't. Variety calls this the latest in the British director's series of provocations. His 2023 Dolls House Revival plays Jessica Chastain at the center of a minimalist stage and concluded with her opening the stage door to walk out onto the New York street. But where a doll's house whispered Sunset Boulevard howls. Group dance numbers choreographed by Fabian Aloise become a rollicking, violent spectacle. Lighting designer Jack Knowles manipulates our sense of reality by alternating between glaring, obliterating spotlights and inky darkness. Jack Knowles getting a lot of praise in these. I wonder if a Tony Award beckons. Later in the review, it says Lloyd flips the weaknesses of the original production into strengths. The songs that previously seemed like filler material are bulked out with angular, crisp dancing and now registered as Christa Kerr about the cruel vicissitudes of Hollywood. And the small circle of characters feels more dimensional than ever, with strong supporting turns by David Thaxton as Norma's devoted, threatening butler, and Grace Hodgett Young as the winsome, ambitious studio employee Betty Schaeffer. Good for you. Grace Hodgett Young. It's among the most remarkable aspects of Scherzinger's performance that she creates space for Tom Francis, the appealing and gifted actor playing doomed writer Joe Gillis. That, I think, is another shrewd observation, and I'm glad that we take the time to acknowledge the supporting cast in this. She is extraordinary, but she's not the only person on stage. I quite like the way that their relationship is written about here. Joe doesn't love Norma, but as elegantly carried across by Frances in what ought to be a breakout turn, he loves the role he can play for her. He may be writing one screenplay with Norma and another with Betty, but the poor dope's magnum opus is the story of his life, one in which he's the ultimate nice guy. Unfortunately, Norma has a few notes on Joe's ending. Oh, this is a fun Review. See, we can write fun reviews without having to be mean. I know that's the easiest way to have fun in a piece of criticism is to just be shockingly cruel. But it doesn't have to be. We finish by saying, in its diva forward, astonishingly unabashed embrace of pure drama and elemental emotion, the framing looks like the way a Hollywood filmmaker would envision a career making Broadway turn. It feels like the role Norma and Scherzinger both were born to play. That's high, high praise. And it transports us into Norma's mind as we finally see the way that Norma sees herself. I agree. This is what I have been saying. Who else do we have? Time out liked it. Adam Feldman liked it for Time Out. They also do star ratings. They do it out of five. He gave it four. He says Lloyd's approach may sound academic, but in practice it is often thrilling. The original production was famous for the lavish success of its set and costumes. As I mentioned before. Here, by contrast, such a Gilmore set is mostly blank space, and she costumes the cast in basic modern black and white streetwear, sometimes with athletic socks pulled high, which I did have a little bit of a problem with. Truth be told, when the ensemble performs Fabian Aloise's sharp choreography, it looks a bit like an updated Gap ad. Not wrong, not wrong. Even Norma just wears a satiny black slip. You wouldn't notice because it's not like every single person. And listen, they're allowed to. They're allowed to comment on it because it's the one costume she wears in the show. But it is entertaining to read all of these back to back, like the shocking black dress. Jack Noll's excellent lighting and the video designed by Nathan Amzi and Joe Ransom fill out the scenes with ample film noir atmospherics and help Lloyd shape the staging for maximum narrative and emotional impact. Not for nothing has the title been shortened to Sunset Bloovered, which is a good point, a little bit of a criticism of the original material here. With the major exception of Norma's big moments, Lloyd Webber's score is heavy on filler. This comes after a sentence where they talk about the libretto having been judiciously pruned and polished, and the exhibition of two lesser songs, the Ladies Paying and Eternal Youth, is worth a suffering. Repetitive jazz leitmotifs fill out the score like Hamburger Helper as we wait for Norma's two beefy Don't Cry for Me Argentina style solos, but she makes these moments worth the wait and then some. Nothing's wrong with being 40 unless you're acting 20, says Joe. And Scherzinger spends some of the show riffing playfully on the notion of an aging pop star on social media. Exactly. Exactly. What is happening? After bragging that no one could play her like I can, the her in question being the teenage Salome, she turns to an onstage camera and silently mouths the word period with a T on the end. Babbling about her astrologer, she slips into the California vocal fry of a Kardashian. Exactly what she's doing. Exactly. Adam Feldman and I have the same interpretation of these references. Then we have a little bit about how Scherzinger looks on stage. Terrific looking, but then with a close up, showing the baggage she carries under her eyes and then her being returned to full luster when she returns to Paramount Studios, bathed in warm light for what seems like the first time in this chilly and shadowy show, she is radiant. And I am always surprised by how often this show can be interpreted as a woman who is alternately, like, not hot enough and then just hot enough and like, used to be hot and like, that's what this boils down to for some people. More praise for Nicole. More praise for Nicole. I haven't really yet heard the thing other than talk for the original material that takes this from a five to a four. But then again, you know, that's still what you're hearing and seeing on stage is the material. So ultimately a great revival of a flawed musical. Can that ever be a five star, or is it always fated to be at most a 4? Sunset Boulevard is obsessed with reproductions. The bravura sequence that opens the second act, captured live in a single camera shot, finds Francis singing the heck out of the loungy title song, Both backstage at St. James and outside on 44th Street. See, timeout was not afraid of spoilers. Part of what makes this revival so absorbing is that you don't always know where to look at the actor on stage or the same actor live on screen. The giant images tug at your eye. You sometimes can't help choosing them over the small, real person who is actually there in this revival itself. A kind of reproduction that doesn't feel like a gimmick or a distraction. That's the perspective on it here. It's a new way to see an old dream. And I think that is what is happening with a lot of these reviews, is that just even putting a camera and a screen on stage is inherently divisive. And so that's one of the factors that is really splitting opinion here. Have they seen More of it in New York than we have in London. I don't know. Certainly this year alone, like I said, we've already had Sunset Boulevard, Dorian Gray opening night, the Evita in Leicester. We are seeing it frequently now. It's happening a lot. Romeo and Juliet, again by Jamie Lloyd, did that in the West End. We are getting a lot of cameras on stage. And yet that didn't seem to be to the detriment of the critical response of Sunset Boulevard in London. It didn't seem to offend British critics as much here. The other thing that I think is emerging slightly in these reviews, if I can be so bold as to say so, is that there has been a historic distaste for Andrew Webber among specifically the theatre critics of New York. And I don't wish to just wrap all of this in a neat little bow if they just don't like Andrew that much. But it's also, you know, anecdotally what I've been told when this was winning over audiences in London, at the same time as people were a little puzzled by the last ever Sondheim musical, it was mentioned to me that if I were to ask, I think it was Jesse Green of the New York Times, which one he thought was the better show, his head might combust. And you can go and watch my video talking through the reviews of Here We Are that I thought were overinflated, based on the Sondheim of it all and it being the last ever Sondheim. And I think this has the opposite effect, where the Lloyd Webber of it all is still dragging it down a little bit. And that's not because there aren't legitimate criticisms to be made of the material. But I feel as though there are many critics still entering the St. James Theater with preconceptions and with a grudge, almost, to put it a little more bluntly, about, you know, the idea, the notion of a successful Android Webber musical on Broadway. A lot of them were happy that Phantom finally closed now with Cats and this, you know, they don't know what to think now. I don't know how many more different things we are going to read. It's. It's really many of the same inferences in a bunch of different places. Frank Scheck from New York Theatre Guide suggests that audiences should revise their expectations accordingly and they'll have a good time as long as they don't expect to actually see, you know, Sunset Boulevard again. I would say this is not and has never been a musical about stairs. I've said it Before I'll say it again, he gave it three stars out of. Of five. Let's make this the last one that we read and find out a little more about why. Forget directing, he says. What Lloyd is really a master of is self promotional branding. I who hurt this man? The production, starring former Pussycat Doll singer Nicole Scherzinger, is bound to prove divisive. With purists howling at the radically stylized minimalist reinterpretation and others likely to be thrilled by the undeniably striking full throttle staging, this critic is firmly in the former camp, even while admitting that the show is wildly entertaining on its own bizarre terms. Unlike the massive sets of the original production, which depicted, among other things, former movie star Norma Desmond's baroque Hollywood mansion, Sutra Gilmour's set design consists of little more than the occasional chair. Not that you'll be able to even see those, considering how much stage fog is unleashed. Did these critics. Did Mr. Shrek and did I say Shrek? Did I mean Sheck? I meant Sheck. Did Mr. Scheck and Mr. Hoefler go on the same night and spend the entire intermission complaining to each other about how much fog was on stage? Because I just feel like that's what happened here. If that's not what happened, I'm happy to be proven wrong. What I. Not once did I see this production and think, you know what? That's far too much fog. Are they. What's the why? Why? And don't even try to figure out the timeline. Scherzinger at age 46, seems much too young for the role. I know Swanson was only a few years older, but still. But still what? You are a critic. You are a critic writing a professional review of this production, and you're going to say, I just think she's too young for it. I know, I know that factually she's not. But still, your issue here is not that she is too young, it's that she looks too young. It's that your perception of her is too young. Young. Your interpretation of a woman who is, you know, too old to be considered glamorous, too old to be considered professionally viable, does not align with what you are seeing here because you think she's too hot. Like, what. What is this? I would go as far as to say that's a little bit gross, actually. This is a production that challenges you to look beyond that and ask different questions about these characters and about Hollywood. And this is. That's, that's past this critic buy. I feel he also talks about the car race sequence featuring a giant close up of Francis's sweaty face. He says the staging reveals Lloyd working hard, oh so hard to impress us with his ingenuity, including his by now familiar shtick of having the performers address their gut dialogue not to each other, but directly to the audience. That hey, I'm directing here approach is most strikingly demonstrated in the title number, in which we see live video footage of Francis walking around backstage as his fellow castmates engage in such behaviour as discreetly snorting coke, posing with a life size cutout of Android Webber. Got that? If. If I knew this sentence was this long, I wouldn't have started. I'm sorry to all of you. And in Scherzinger's case, writing the phrase mad about the boy in red lipstick on her dressing room mirror. We made it. We got through it alive. Then he walks out of the theatre onto 44th street and dramatically performs the song surrounded by menacing looking bodyguards and NYPD officers. Your tax dollars at work as New Yorkers and tourists whip out their cell phones to film the bizarre spectacle. It's an impressive feat of logistics and an undeniable coup d'theatre. But what the hell it has to do with Sunset Boulevard is anybody guess? An utterly beautiful and spectacular missing of the point. The point being this entire thing framed from his perspective, the entire thing being as metatheatrical as it is, and he knows this. This critic was not born yesterday. I have to believe that this is a professional theater critic who knows what he is talking about and who, if he saw these same devices featured in a play, would engage with them in a more honest way. But that's just not happening here. Because he has preconceptions, because he has prejudices, because he has feelings about the original production, because he has feelings about, I don't know, because it being a British composer, a British director. I don't know what is going on here, any or all of the above, because he has feelings about Nicole Scherzinger and Tom Francis's demonstrated hunkiness by his frequently stripping down to black boxer briefs. I'm not going to read any more of this review because it's making me irritated and uncomfortable, frankly. But what I think is disappointing really, from some of these reviews is the refusal and the sort of unashamed refusal to engage with this show on its own terms. And true enough, like Jamie Lloyd is not the first person to use these techniques and he uses them in a lot of other things. And had I seen Romeo and Juliet first and seen this second, I might have been a bit more jaded about it and I might not have embraced it in the same way. And perhaps that's the reason that younger theatre goers who are newer to this kind of stylised direction are more excited about it. That's something we definitely have to acknowledge. I don't think it's a case that British theatre just has lower standards, because some of the most celebrated work from recent years on Broadway, including last year's much critically celebrated best revival, Merrily We Roll along, also came from London. But that one, interestingly enough, was not a particularly huge hit in London. It didn't sell all that well, so it wasn't going. And it was. There was 10 years then before it made its way to Broadway. It wasn't arriving with this weight of expectations of, oh, they loved this in London. And I think that's a factor sometimes as well. And, you know, again, this is just anecdotal, but I feel as though sometimes if something is a big hit in London, Broadway critics arrive at their press performances going, well, we'll see about that. They don't like to be told what they should expect before they've seen it. They don't like to feel pressured into loving something. So they look for the problems. They look for too much fog on the stage, too much sweat on the face, these ridiculous little things. When this is, in so many ways, I believe, such an extraordinary production. But those are my thoughts. And theatre is inherently subjective, which is why we read through these reviews in the first place. I don't think there's anything else that we can glean, particularly if there's another very interesting review that you have read, let me know in the comments. Something that brings a different perspective or talks about different things and maybe share it in the comments section as well as, Please, please, sharing your own thoughts. I would love to hear from all sorts of theatre goers with all sorts of different experiences and different perspectives. What do you think of this particular revival of Sunset Boulevard? Whether you saw it in the West End or on Broadway, Obviously it's the Broadway transfer we're particularly talking about here, but let me know. You can go check out my full thoughts on it in my full video review. I may be getting to see it again in the next few weeks because I am headed back to Broadway. Make sure you're subscribed. Turn on the notifications so you don't miss my upcoming content. In the meantime, I hope you've enjoyed the video and I hope that everyone is staying safe and that you have a stagey day for ten more seconds. I'm Mickey Jo Theatre. Oh, my God. Hey, thanks for watching. Have a stagey day. Subscribe.