Scherzinger, Nicole

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    Backstage With ‘Sunset Boulevard’ and 3 Other Broadway Shows

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    Broadway stars make it look easy — hitting a high C, crying on demand, landing a complex turn with taps, doing all that as many as eight times a week. But behind the curtain, before a show, the groundwork is laid: the vocal cord steaming, the fight calls to ensure violent scenes can be staged safely, the visits and hugs and affirmations that put actors in the right frames of mind. We watched the preparations for four Tony-nominated shows — “Buena Vista Social Club,” “Sunset Boulevard,” “John Proctor Is the Villain” and “Oh, Mary!” — as their performers got ready to go onstage.‘Buena Vista Social Club’Photographed by More

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      2025 Tony Awards: George Clooney, Sarah Snook and Sadie Sink Among Nominees

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      The new musicals “Buena Vista Social Club,” “Death Becomes Her” and “Maybe Happy Ending” tied for the most Tony nominations, with 10 each.George Clooney, Mia Farrow, Sarah Snook and Sadie Sink all picked up Tony nominations on Thursday as Broadway began its celebration of an unusually starry season.In a robust season with 14 new musicals, three tied for the most nominations, with 10 each: “Buena Vista Social Club,” “Death Becomes Her” and “Maybe Happy Ending.” And Audra McDonald, who has already won a record six competitive Tony Awards, set another record: she picked up her 11th nomination for her role in “Gypsy,” making her the most-nominated performer ever.The nominations were announced at the end of the most robust Broadway season since the pandemic. Box office grosses are approaching prepandemic levels amid a bumper crop of 42 show openings. Several productions have drawn much-desired young audiences, and the season featured a mix of quirky and original shows alongside big-brand spectacle. But the industry faces challenges too: Ticket prices, especially for the hottest shows, have become out-of-reach for many, and fewer shows are turning a profit as the cost of producing has risen.The closely watched race for best new musical, bizarrely enough, features three shows concerning dead bodies: “Dead Outlaw,” which tells the story of a train robber whose corpse became an attraction; “Operation Mincemeat,” about a strange-but-true World War II British intelligence operation involving disinformation planted on a corpse, and “Death Becomes Her,” a stage adaptation of the film about two undead frenemies. The other two contenders are “Buena Vista Social Club,” about the group of beloved Cuban musicians, and “Maybe Happy Ending,” about a relationship between two robots.Hue Park, who wrote “Maybe Happy Ending” with Will Aronson, said the nominations affirmed a stunning turnaround for the show. “We had a very rough start, and we were not sure if the show would stay running,” Park said. “Being an original story, not based on famous IP, was the biggest challenge in the beginning, but at the same time for that reason the entire theater community has tried to support us, and that is one of the main reasons the show is still surviving and getting these nominations.”Three new musicals tied for the most nominations, with 10 each: “Maybe Happy Ending,” “Buena Vista Social Club” and “Death Becomes Her.” We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      After ‘Sunset Boulevard’ Malfunction, Nicole Scherzinger Sings With Bullhorn

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      The “Sunset Boulevard” star briefly entertained the crowd when “a technical malfunction on the sound side” forced the cancellation of a matinee performance.In one of those moments that is likely to become Broadway lore, the actress Nicole Scherzinger grabbed a bullhorn to sing “With One Look” from “Sunset Boulevard” when the sound system failed on Wednesday afternoon at the St. James Theater.The packed matinee crowd had settled into the seats and was awaiting the start of the performance, which had been delayed for unspecified technical reasons. When it became clear backstage that the issues could not be resolved, Scherzinger, the show’s much-praised star, was not going to send the fans home empty-handed.So Scherzinger, a former Pussycat Doll, grabbed a bullhorn, and took the stage to sing one of the show’s best-known songs.“When it became apparent they couldn’t do the show, it was her idea to go out and speak to the audience, so she and Tom Francis came out,” said Rick Miramontez, a spokesman for the show, referring also to one of Scherzinger’s co-stars. “She asked stage management for a bullhorn, and she gave them a performance of one of the show’s biggest numbers.”The show was then canceled, and audience members were given a letter offering them a refund.“It was very disappointing, because we booked this a long time ago,” said Emily Feurring, a nutritionist who was in the audience, “but it was also kind of exciting because it was a New York moment, and no one else will ever get that.”“It was very sweet in a way,” she added. “And we live here, so we’ll get to go again.”Miramontez called the problem “a technical malfunction on the sound side,” and said the show’s producers were hopeful, but not certain, that the Wednesday evening performance would proceed as scheduled.The moment is reminiscent of others in which Broadway stars have vamped for audiences when technical issues have forced delays or cancellations to shows, many of which are dependent on electricity not only for voice amplification but also for automated set pieces, projections and building safety.On Tuesday, Darren Criss, Helen J Shen and Dez Duron, three of the lead performers in the musical “Maybe Happy Ending” entertained the crowd with songs when a medical emergency in the audience forced a lengthy pause in that show.And earlier this year, at the first preview of the new musical “Redwood,” a mid-show delay was caused by an issue with the set’s LED screens. Idina Menzel, the star, spent the time fielding questions from the audience, which was filled with fans looking for stories about her experiences performing in “Wicked” and “Rent” and as a voice actor in the “Frozen” films.But these incidents go way back — in Atlanta in the late 1990s, an early performance of the Disney musical that became “Aida” had to be stopped because of a technical problem, and the cast did the rest of the show concert-style. More

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      With ‘Sunset Boulevard,’ One Look Wasn’t Enough

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      A bare-bones revival of the Broadway musical grew on me with subsequent viewings, and the additional details I noticed bolstered my reporting.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.Something I wish I had the chance to do more often as a reporter is to see shows multiple times, deeper into their runs — the “Notre Dame de Paris” musical, which I’ve seen seven times, and “The Phantom of the Opera,” which I’ve seen six times, come to mind.The first time I saw “Sunset Boulevard” in London last year, I was, to say the least, underwhelmed. Directed by Jamie Lloyd, the British minimalist, the revival of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical had no sets, all-black costumes and almost no props.I had seen neither the original 1993 musical, nor the 1950 black-and-white Billy Wilder film on which it is based. This is not an approach I would recommend for a Jamie Lloyd show; the experience was akin to watching a gender-swapped Shakespeare production with no concept of the original.But one thing did grab me: The outrageously ambitious title number, which is filmed live every night. In a six-minute sequence that begins backstage before spilling out onto the street, the screenwriter Joe Gillis (played by Tom Francis) contemplates the circumstances that led to him becoming the plaything of Norma Desmond (Nicole Scherzinger).“There’s no way that’s live,” someone sitting next to me said, as the audience watched the street sequence unfold on a towering screen at the front of the stage.But the actor had grabbed an umbrella as he headed outside — it was raining that night in London, as it often does — which seemed to give it all away.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      6 Minutes. 62 People. 1 Epic ‘Sunset Boulevard’ Sequence.

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      A group of young men and women, all dressed in black, marches down a busy street in the heart of Times Square. Walking in formation, they dodge parked cars, bicycles and pedestrians, as the man leading them belts out a song.“Sunset Boulevard, ruthless boulevard / Destination for the stony-hearted.”This ambitious scene from the director Jamie Lloyd’s Broadway revival of “Sunset Boulevard” hinges on a live tracking sequence that goes backstage and spills onto West 44th Street. It’s shown in real time on a massive LCD screen to the audience inside the St. James Theater, but passers-by — both unsuspecting and calculating — get a front-row view, at least during the number’s three-minute outdoor portion.“We’re sort of crossing our fingers a bit every night,” said Nathan Amzi, who designed the scene with Joe Ransom and Lloyd. Everyone, he added, “has to have laser focus to make it work.”Through rain, bone-chilling temperatures and the crush of crowds from neighboring shows, this scene, which takes 62 people to pull off, goes on.The title song, “Sunset Boulevard,” which is sung by the hapless young screenwriter Joe Gillis (played by Tom Francis), functions as a sort of dream sequence in the musical. The character contemplates the circumstances that led him to take up residence at a Los Angeles mansion as the boy toy of the faded silent film star Norma Desmond — and tries to justify them.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In ‘Sunset Boulevard,’ Nicole Scherzinger Is 23 Feet Tall

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      A fascinating Broadway revival of the bombastic 1994 musical blows it up even further.Despite Norma Desmond, who famously declares 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. Perhaps it is not so much an irony as an inevitability, then, that at the St. James Theater, where a revival of the musical based on “Sunset Boulevard” opened on Sunday, the pictures — live video streamed onto an LCD screen more than 23 feet tall — are so big they almost blot out the show below.But alas, only almost.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, the musical remains too silly for words. In that sense, and others, Norma would have loved it.Which isn’t praise. You will recall that Norma (Nicole Scherzinger of the Pussycat Dolls) is deluded: a washed-up silent film star who, in her 50-ish dotage, haunts a grand, ghostly Los Angeles mansion with only her grim manservant and a recently dead chimpanzee for company. By 1949, when the musical starts, she has barely left the premises for decades, let alone made a movie; still, she believes that she, and the silents, could achieve a marvelous comeback if only Cecil B. DeMille would direct her in the epic version of “Salome” she has written.The rest is madness. She conscripts Joe Gillis, a hunky, seedy, unsuccessful screenwriter, to polish her draft and, soon enough, other things. Joe (Tom Francis) seesaws between his luxurious life as Norma’s kept man and the more idealistic promptings of Betty Schaefer, an ambitious studio underling he at first brushes off as “one of the message kids.” Still, when Betty (Grace Hodgett Young) urges Joe to adapt a story of his called “Dark Windows,” they fall in love, while the servant, Max von Mayerling (David Thaxton), offers a dark window of his own into Norma’s modus operandi with men. (Razor and gun included.) None of this ends well, or rather it does not begin well, as the tale is narrated postmortem by Joe’s corpse.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.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Hollywood Is Heading for Broadway (and Off). Here’s a Cheat Sheet.

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      New York’s stages have long drawn talent from Hollywood, but this is shaping up to be an exceptionally starry season. Why? Producers have determined that limited-run plays with celebrities are more likely than new musicals to make money. And some musicals are also hoping big names will help at the box office. Here’s a sampling of stars onstage this season.This Fall★ ON BROADWAY ★Mia Farrowin ‘The Roommate’Farrow, who made her stage debut when she was 18 and had a breakout role in the 1968 film “Rosemary’s Baby,” thought she was happily retired until she read the script for this Jen Silverman comedy about two women with not much in common other than their living quarters. Now, at 79, she’s returning to the stage, opposite the three-time Tony winner Patti LuPone, for what she says may be the last time. Now running at the Booth.★ ON BROADWAY ★Robert Downey Jr.in ‘McNeal’One of Hollywood’s most successful stars, Downey has a bevy of superhero movies under his belt (he played Iron Man) and an Oscar for “Oppenheimer” (he was the antagonist, Lewis Strauss). He’s making his Broadway debut in a new Ayad Akhtar play, portraying a famous novelist with a potentially problematic interest in A.I. Now running at the Vivian Beaumont.Clockwise from top left: Nicole Scherzinger, Katie Holmes, Jim Parsons, Adam Driver and Mia Farrow (center).Photographs via Associated Press; Getty Images; Reuters★ ON BROADWAY ★Daniel Dae Kimin ‘Yellow Face’Talk about meta! This is David Henry Hwang’s play about a play about a musical, sort of. Kim, known for “Lost” and the rebooted “Hawaii Five-0,” portrays a playwright named DHH (get it?) who mistakenly casts a white actor as an Asian character in a Broadway flop inspired by his own protests against the casting of a white actor as a Eurasian character in “Miss Saigon.” Previews begin Sept. 13 at the Todd Haimes.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Sunset Boulevard,’ Heading to Broadway, Wins Big at Olivier Awards

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      The musical, which stars Nicole Scherzinger, won seven awards at Britain’s version of the Tonys. And Sarah Snook won best actress for “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”A reimagining of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Sunset Boulevard,” starring Nicole Scherzinger as Norma Desmond, the long forgotten silent movie star who descends into madness, was the big winner at this year’s Olivier Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys.The musical, which will open at the St. James Theater on Broadway this fall, was honored Sunday during a ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall in London with seven awards, including best musical revival, best actress in a musical for Scherzinger, best actor in a musical for Tom Francis, as the screenwriter who falls for Desmond’s charms, and best director for Jamie Lloyd.The number of awards was hardly a surprise. After the musical opened last fall, critics praised Lloyd’s stark production, especially highlighting its contemporary twists that included using cameras to zoom in on characters’ faces, then beam their emotions onto a screen at the back of the stage.Matt Wolf, writing in The New York Times, said that Lloyd’s production belonged firmly “to the here and now.” With this show, the director “takes an established musical by the scruff of the neck and sends it careering into the modern day,” Wolf added.Sarah Hemming, in The Financial Times, was among the critics to praise Scherzinger’s magnetic performance. “She’s not afraid to look scary or ridiculous,” Hemming said, “but there’s also a strung-out vulnerability about her. And when she sings, she pins you to your seat with the harrowing intensity of her delivery.”“Sunset Boulevard” beat several other acclaimed productions to the best musical revival award, including “Guys & Dolls” at the Bridge Theater and “Hadestown” at the Lyric Theater.Sarah Snook in “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” a solo version for which she won best actress at the Olivier Awards. Snook plays 26 roles in the show.Marc BrennerA host of musicals and plays shared the night’s other major prizes. “Operation Mincemeat,” a word-of-mouth hit about a bizarre World War II counterintelligence plot that is running at the Fortune Theater, won best new musical. While “Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” a prequel to the Netflix show, now at the Phoenix Theater, was chosen as best new entertainment or comedy play.The best new play award went to James Graham’s “Dear England,” about the English national soccer team, which transferred to the West End from the National Theater.In the hotly contested acting categories, Sarah Snook (“Succession”) was named best actress for “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” a solo show running through May 11 at the Theater Royal Haymarket. Snook plays all 26 roles, often interacting with recorded projections of her characters.Before Sunday’s ceremony, some critics had expected the best actor award to go to Andrew Scott for a similarly dazzling solo performance: a one-man “Vanya” at the Duke of York’s Theater. In the end, the prize went to Mark Gatiss for his role as the revered actor and director John Gielgud in “The Motive and the Cue,” a play by Jack Thorne that dramatizes the fraught backstage relationship between Gielgud and Richard Burton as they worked on a Broadway show. Like “Dear England,” that play ran at the National Theater before transferring to the West End. More

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      Nicole Scherzinger to Star in ‘Sunset Boulevard’ on Broadway in the Fall

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      The revival, birthed in London, is a radically reimagined version of the 1993 Andrew Lloyd Webber musical based on a 1950 Billy Wilder film.Jamie Lloyd’s radically reimagined revival of “Sunset Boulevard,” in which Nicole Scherzinger plays the faded film star Norma Desmond, will come to Broadway this fall after a rapturously received run in London.Earlier this month, the revival was nominated for 11 Olivier Awards, including best musical revival, best actress in a musical for Scherzinger and best director for Lloyd. The Broadway production is scheduled to begin previews Sept. 28 and then open on Oct. 20 at the St. James Theater.The musical, a dark thriller based on a 1950 film by Billy Wilder, features music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and book and lyrics by Don Black and Christopher Hampton; Glenn Close starred in both previous Broadway productions, in 1994 and 2017. (The stage role was originated by Patti LuPone in London; the film starred Gloria Swanson.)Lloyd, a British theatermaker, has carved out a distinctive niche by staging starkly spare productions of classics with a focus on psychological drama. The new production, which ended its London run in January, is stripped down in many ways — two songs have been cut, there is no grand staircase or turban and Scherzinger doesn’t even wear shoes.“It’s much more about the psychological and emotional journey as opposed to huge, elaborate sets,” Lloyd said in an interview. “It’s very much a kind of psychological chamber piece.”The show, set in midcentury Los Angeles, is about a forgotten star of the silent film era who latches onto an aspiring young screenwriter in the hopes of rebooting her career.Scherzinger, 45, has had a varied entertainment path — as a musician, an actress and a television talent show judge. The critic Matt Wolf, reviewing the London production for The New York Times, called this “a career-defining performance” for Scherzinger; the New York production will be her Broadway debut.“I guess I’ve been waiting for this my whole life,” Scherzinger, who studied theater in high school and college, said in an interview. “I can’t believe that it’s finally about to happen.”Scherzinger, who was born in Hawaii and raised in Kentucky, said she was eager to have another go at the role in the United States. She said she will set aside the script for a few months — she just spent three weeks visiting with her grandparents in Hawaii — before reimmersing herself in the character.“I’ll be back in America, my home, and I’m going to want to try and up my game even more,” she said. “There’s certain places I can make stronger choices, and I’m excited to play around with that to see where it can go — it’s great to be able to explore even more and go deeper.”Scherzinger, who said she has committed to nine months in the role, will be joined on Broadway by her three Olivier-nominated co-stars, Tom Francis, Grace Hodgett-Young and David Thaxton. More