"She Is a Force": Getting Nicole Scherzinger Her Momentum Back
With the coveted Patti co-sign secured, next stop: the Tonys.
“She is a force.” That was Patti LuPone’s much-publicized review of Nicole Scherzinger’s performance as Norma Desmond after LuPone made her eagerly anticipated appearance in the audience at Sunset Boulevard last week, the second revival of the critically polarizing Andrew Lloyd Webber musical that made its way over to the Great White Way in October. I saw the show days later and am entirely aligned with LuPone’s coronation — this performance simply can’t be missed — and that got me thinking: Scherzinger deserves her well-earned Tony. Is it hers for the taking? Complicated.
Last month, the speeding train destined to land the former Pussycat Dolls frontwoman her first-ever trophy on the occasion of her Broadway debut came to a screeching halt over a thoughtless Instagram comment. Now with the dust having settled a bit, and with Patti LuPone’s glowing (and necessary) review for a role she originated, I thought it was time to scurry on up to the St. James Theatre (coincidentally the same theater that earned LuPone her last Lead Actress Tony Award for the 2008 revival of Gypsy) to try this production on for size and answer, for myself at least, the pressing question: Is Nicole Scherzinger back in the running for Lead Actress? The answer, again for myself at least, is yes. (“I mean she never really wasn’t,” as T. Kyle McMahon pointed out on the latest episode of Legends Only.) But let’s get into the show, the controversy and the dissipating fall-out to assess.
Some necessary context: Bizarrely for a Rachel Berry-type like myself, I went in completely unfamiliar with the source material. I’d never seen the 1950 noir film starring Gloria Swanson, and somehow evaded the subsequent Andrew Lloyd Webber musical’s Original Broadway Cast soundtrack at the height of my crippling showtune addiction. I know just about every other Lloyd Webber musical and am a religious Glenn Close obsessive (I even endured Hillbilly Elegy), and yet! I’m not proud. It’a sickness, I now realize, overlooking a work as extraordinary as this one. Having now seen the show, I live with a regret I might never shake in knowing songs like “With One Look” and “New Ways To Dream” weren’t a part of my car ride playlist in my teens. But when we know better, we do better, and so here we are.
A Tony Award is simply not enough of an accolade for what it is Nicole Scherzinger conjures for this performance. There’s a term in sports that I googled — ”leave it all on the field” — and that’s very much what Scherzinger does here, emptying the entirety of her tank and managing to crawl into spaces in the vicinity to extract other resources of energy from which to give even more. I think Patti LuPone said it best (when doesn’t she?) in articulating that she left the theater “energized” by Scherzinger’s performance. I felt that, unable to sleep when I got home, instead trying to commit as much of this performance to my memory as I could. (Thank goodness there’s a soundtrack already released.)
Here is LuPone’s full review (which can be heard in audio form, thanks to NY1’s Frank DiLella, in case you’re a drag queen reading this and are preparing your inevitable lip sync):
"I went in with trepidation because I have strong feelings about the show — not what happened to me in the show, but the show, period. I loved this production! I thought Nicole and Tom [Francis] were stunning. I thought Nicole was unbelievable. She broke my heart. She is a force. I thought the cast was fantastic. The lighting. The use of the filming was something that I questioned because I don't know where I am; am I at a movie or am I at the theater? This worked brilliantly. The whole thing. The whole thing! I was energized when I left the theater. I loved it!”
This production manages to deconstruct the source material in a way that actually reengineers what I think is a somewhat flimsy show (though I could argue underrated if my arm was really twisted) and turns it into a character study of what happens when the powerful yet delusional become defanged and the enablers and grifters who step in for their own gains. Like the conversations highlighting the political allegory of Wicked being especially prescient in our current landscape, I think there’s much about Sunset Boulevard that remains topical, even if I think there are fewer Norma Desmond-types today thanks to the Ryan Murphy and Mike White-types of Hollywood who understand that not all stars are ephemeral and fleeting; some just need continually watered.
And while I believe this production deserves Lead Actor for Tom Francis, Supporting Actress for Grace Hodgett Young and Supporting Actor for David Thaxton in addition to Best Revival, Best Director, etc., it’s really Scherzinger’s performance that anchors this show, and thus she needs to be rewarded. And while she’ll no doubt have competition from Audra McDonald in Gypsy (reviews for that performance are embargoed until the show opens on Thursday, but here’s my less-than-glowing review from a preview performance I attended), it’s not unrealistic that Scherzinger’s positioning as a first-timer could curry favor over McDonald earning a seventh statuette. That said, the opposite could be true, and Tony voters could be eager to extend McDonald’s title as the most decorated Tony Award-winner in Broadway history.
But can Scherzinger edge her out? It’s impossible to quantify how realistic it ever was that the voting body would be swayed by headlines about Scherzinger that have nothing to do with her performance. Despite this, some theater critics indicated the possibility was real. “Well, the Best Actress Tony race just got a little less competitive,” TimeOut’s Adam Feldman tweeted in the aftermath of hat-gate. Again, it’s hard to calibrate the impact, both initially and whether or not any bad blood she inspired will last now that other and more sizeable controversies have come and gone.
Can she? Remains to be seen. Should she? Look, Nicole Scherzinger deserves that Tony. This is the kind of performance that the Tony Awards are built for. Not to be dramatic, but I think it would be a blight on the art form of musical theater to overlook a performance as keyed in and sublime as this one. You simply don’t get performances at this level every season, let alone every decade. In fact, I think it was LuPone’s performance in the aforementioned Gypsy that was the last time I felt this rhapsodic. All this to say, I hope that Scherzinger’s values (which remain unclear, mind you) don’t muddy her chances of taking home this signifier of a job not just well done, but a job done at a level nearly out of sight, it’s so high.
A force, as Patti said. She really is.