STAR-CROSSED

“Sunset Blud.” and Romeo Juliet,” on Broadway.

- HELEN SHAW

Nicole Scherzinger is Norma Desmond in Jamie Lloyd ’s cinematic production.

In Billy Wilder’s ur-camp masterpiece “Sunset Boulevard,” from 1950, Gloria Swanson plays Norma Desmond, an aging grande dame of silent film, who slides from self-regarding eccentricity into homicidal delusion. Intent on a comeback, Norma has seduced a young screenwriter named Joe Gillis (William Holden), but, when both he and the studio reject her, she swerves into a permanent dream. “All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my closeup,” she famously purrs to a wall of crime-scene photographers, her face smoothed f lat with grease and powder. In the film, Gillis still narrates—though he’s just been shot dead, like Jay Gatsby, in the pool.

Andrew Lloyd Webber débuted his musical adaptation of “Sunset Boulevard” (co-written with Don Black and Christopher Hampton) in 1993, returning to the dark sensibility of his then recent mega-hit, “The Phantom of the Opera.” Webber might have felt on familiar ground. The Phantom and Norma are both attention-hungry spiders in glittering lairs; both are fantasists whose faces, either twisted or simply aging, become their obsessive focus.

Faces—gigantic, black-and-white ones—are certainly the main scenery of the director Jamie Lloyd’s souped-up and stripped-down “Sunset Blvd.,” newly transferred from London to the St. James (after winning seven Olivier Awards), and starring Nicole Scherzinger, onetime lead singer of the Pussycat Dolls. Casting a gleaming Scherzinger as the fading Norma is deliberately counterintuitive: a burlesque dancer, she twerks her way through Fabian Aloise’s club choreography barefoot, wearing only a black negligee. Everything— the “reality” of 1949 and even Norma’s supposed decrepitude (she’s meant to be, like, fifty)—will have to exist in the imagination.