In 'Sunset Boulevard', Nicole Scherzinger is 23 feet tall

Despite Norma Desmond, who famously declared in “Sunset Boulevard” that it wasn't her, “pictures that are short,” the opposite is true on Broadway these days. In musicals in particular, video and projection have become increasingly influential. Perhaps it's not so much an irony as an inevitability that, at the St. James Theater, where a revival of the musical based on “Sunset Boulevard” opened Sunday, the images — live video streamed onto an LCD screen 23 feet tall — are so large that they almost obliterate the show below.

But alas, just about.

Despite many interesting interventions by director Jamie Lloyd and his technical team, and the fact that it is based on a great film, the musical remains too silly for words. In that sense, and others, Norma loved it.

Which is not a compliment. You'd think Norma (Nicole Scherzinger of Pussycat Dolls) is deranged: a worn-out silent film star who, in her 50-ish dotage, haunts a grand, haunted Los Angeles mansion with only her creepy servants and a recently deceased chimpanzee. for the company. By 1949, when the musical began, he had barely left the premises for decades, let alone made a movie; Still, he believes he and the Silents can make a great comeback if only Cecil B. DeMille directed her in his epic version of “Salome.”

The rest is madness. He hires Joe Gillis, a timid, timid, unsuccessful screenwriter, to polish his draft and soon other things. Joe (Tom Francis) sees his life of luxury as Norma's keep man and the more idealistic promptings of Betty Schaefer, an ambitious studio under which he initially departs as “one of the message kids”. Still, they fall in love when Betty (Grace Hodgett Young) begs Joe to adapt one of her stories called “Dark Windows,” while the servant, Max von Mayerling (David Thaxton), offers a dark window of his own in Norma's manner. operandi with men. (Includes razors and guns.) None of this ends well, or rather it doesn't start well, as the story is told by the postmortem of Joe's corpse.

The 1950 film directed by Billy Wilder departs from this unsettling proceeding, with a chilling appreciation but not embracing the human pathos and hysteria of the Hollywood dream. 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 doesn't work that way. Opening their mouths to sing, the characters are all emotional. Perhaps that's why Stephen Sondheim and, later, Kander and Ebb's team abandoned attempts at adaptation.

But with Andrew Lloyd Webber to write the tune and Don Black and Christopher Hampton to pen the lyrics, where angels feared to tread, Wilder's critique of camp was turned into an overblown celebration instead. Lloyd Webber's music, some of it quite stirring, conveys the immensity and fragility of Norma's self-esteem in songs like “With One Look” and “Like We Never Said Goodbye,” with their nervous first choruses and bellowing finishes. But the lyrics, often comically mispronounced, are fatally awkward, and the book, softening everyone in the process of giving away their obvious inspiration, turns Wilder's worldliness into kitsch.

I have to believe that Lloyd, who directed the exceptional New York revivals of “Betrayal” (with Tom Hiddleston), “A Doll's House” (with Jessica Chastain) and “Cyrano de Bergerac” (with James McAvoy), knows all this. In fact, his production feels like a response to the musical issues of 1994 and, wherever possible, a distraction from them. Is the material campy? Make it campier. (There are numerous eye rolls in the audience.) Is the scene wrong? get rid of (Sutra Gilmer's set is evocative without ever representing a real place.) Is the music bombastic? Bomb the audience's ears with it. (Adam Fisher's sound design appears to include microphones in the actors' guts.)

It is the most intense of Scherzinger's exciting yet exceptionally strange and counterintuitive performances. A stunning young woman of 46 playing a character said to be “almost a million years old” is the least of it; Gloria Swanson, in the movie, is only 50 years old. Nor do we want to take it literally that Scherzinger is barefoot and wearing only a slinky slip dress throughout the show. (The all-black-and-white outfit, even in black-and-white movies, is Gilmour's.) This is a stripped-down Norma, which you might argue isn't Norma at all.

Yet the characterization is intensely baroque, even more seductive than Glenn Close's in the original production and the 2017 revival. If sometimes a zombie, at other times Scherzinger makes every gesture like a semaphore flag, choreographed rhetorically from a ship at sea to people on land. Precisely what silent movie acting is all about, Lloyd goes to great lengths to emphasize the effect, offering extreme close-ups on a huge screen of a face, a moo, a glycerine tear. (Excellent video design and cinematography by Nathan Amzi and Joe Ransom.) Scherzinger's singing is similarly gestural: structured, targeted and bursting syllables, fiercely drilled and smartly placed.

But the result is that you are always aware, as if this were Brecht, of performance as a performance, not as characterization. (Still, in London, Scherzinger won accolades and an Olivier.) Many of the production's meta Easter eggs—noted Pussycat Dolls and Lloyd Webber himself—do the same thing, taking some of the gas out of a gassy show but pandering to the audience in the process. While Scherzinger offers imitations of various contemporary vocal styles, her Norma becomes a woman who is in the game, the last thing an oblivious creature could be.

Still, there is joy in submitting Lloyd's brutality to a submissive show. Francis, as Joe, does shutdown-cynical-corpse very well. There are beautifully executed surprises at the beginning of each act that set new standards, as perhaps “Sunset Boulevard” is best suited for filmic drama. Jack Knowles' lighting, like an arena show for your amygdala, is all over the place. The singing is also excellent, and even better, two techie songs (“The Lady's Paying” and “Eternal Youth”) are cut. I would have been more.

But I can't help but feel that Lloyd's talent and the talent of his designers, let alone Scherzinger, would be better enjoyed in better material. Making “Sunset Boulevard” a hit again — the original Broadway production ran for two-and-a-half years, grossing more than $100 million — isn't so much a feat as a stunt reviving a dead chimpanzee. (Yes, it happens.) Not a revival like “Cats: The Jellyfish Ball” this summer, but a whole new way of looking at Lloyd Webber's musical; It's a whole new way to look at one. Waste! It almost makes me sad to cry a 10-foot tear of glycerin.

Sunset Boulevard
Through July 6 at the St. James Theater in Manhattan; sunsetblvdbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes.