‘Sunset Boulevard' Starring Nicole Scherzinger Wins the Tony Award for Best Musical Revival
The production, which began performances at Broadway's St. James Theater last September and is scheduled to run only until July 13, is the brainchild of its director, Jamie Lloyd, a 45-year-old British auteur who prioritizes dialogue and psychological depth over furniture and props. Lloyd's production first ran in London's West End, where it won last year's Olivier Award for best musical revival.
The show proved to be a star vehicle for its leading lady, Nicole Scherzinger, who in her 20s achieved fame as the lead singer of the Pussycat Dolls, and then spent years as a judge on television talent shows before landing this role, which has reintroduced her, at age 46, as a powerhouse performer.
In the musical, Scherzinger plays Norma Desmond, a onetime star of silent films who has vanished from the limelight but delusionally dreams of returning to the big screen. The show, set in Los Angeles in 1949 and 1950, is based on a 1950 Billy Wilder film; Lloyd Webber wrote the stage production's music, while the book and lyrics are by Don Black and Christopher Hampton.
The original Broadway production won seven Tony Awards, including best musical, in 1995. That production starred Glenn Close, who returned to play the role again in 2017 in the only previous Broadway revival of the show.
The current production is characterized by its heavy use of technology adapted from filmmaking and its minimalist, modern aesthetic. The actors are dressed mostly in black and white; Scherzinger performs much of the show barefoot, and she and her co-star, Tom Francis, end the show drenched in blood.
Because the story is about, and set in, Hollywood, Lloyd opted to integrate and interrogate cinematic devices — much of the onstage action is filmed by performers holding movie cameras and is projected onto a huge screen behind the actors. One of the production's highlights is a coup de théâtre at the top of the second act, when Francis, playing a writer named Joe Gillis, performs the title number while walking through Shubert Alley and along 44th Street, with the action visible to audience members onscreen.
The revival is being produced on Broadway by companies controlled by Lloyd (the Jamie Lloyd Company) and Lloyd Webber (Lloyd Webber Harrison Musicals), and by ATG Productions, which operates the theater where the show is playing, and by Gavin Kalin Productions. The show was capitalized for up to $15 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission; it has been selling more than $1 million worth of tickets most weeks, but it is not yet clear whether it will recoup its capitalization costs.
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Martin Luther King III speaks at the 2020 'Commitment March: Get Your Knee Off Our Necks,' at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 2020 in Washington, DC, on on the 57th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s March on Washington, and his 'I Have A Dream' speech in 1963. (Photo by) Getty Images 'Sometimes the clothing manifests the ideology,' my friend Josh Johnson said to me. We were sitting in a law firm conference room in what was once a Studebaker dealership, a beautiful historic building owned by my friend Bob Cox, who gave us the space to have a complicated conversation. I had been wanting to explore some rather complex ideas related to the tense political situation we are all living through right now. Johnson is an education and activist, and as long as I have known him he has been working to improve our community. His tireless efforts include work with our local public radio station, WFSU, and he'd interviewed me earlier this year for his show The Warehouse, a series of weekly conversations with people in our area working in the arts. Johnson teaches high school and college courses and he's the CEO of 621 Gallery, a nonprofit arts programming and exhibition space that is something close to the last bastion of an arts center in Florida's mostly arts-free capital. Very seriously, our city leadership has almost no interest in saving our tiny arts district, which was decimated by tornados last year. It's a part of town right near Florida Agricultural & Mining University, one of our nation's many exceptional Historically Black Colleges and Universities. So please know, when I say we don't have a performing arts venue or city art museum, I am not being hyperbolic. But that is a different conversation. I asked my friend to have a conversation about what apparel means to resistance, because regardless of political persuasion, I believe that we dress in a manner that reflects our beliefs. Everyone is divided right now, it feels important to examine why and how, the nuances seem particularly important. Flower Power by Bernie Boston for the now-defunct newspaper The Washington Evening Star. Taken on October 21, 1967 / protester George Harris placing a carnation into the barrel of an M14 rifle held by a soldier of the 503rd Military Police Battalion (Airborne) The Washington Post via Getty Images I started with a hard question. I asked him about the extremes we see in images of ICE agents and the communities they are arresting, the way their unofficial store bought face coverings impact the way we see them, the way that regardless of opinion about the need for what they are doing, the look of the ICE agent almost instantly became ubiquitous in American culture. 'The famous picture in the 1960s,' Johnson continued, 'of the young man who was a part of the flower we power movement sticking the flowers into the barrels of guns. The soldiers juxtaposed against him did highlight who was who and which sides were which.' In the protest photograph the distinctions are clear, and perhaps that explains part of why the image remains powerful after so many decades; it is clear who is good and who is bad. This sort of simplicity, the absolutes of black and white, are rarely reflections of the real world. There probably isn't anything in existence that doesn't exist in grey scale, and when we are making decisions about who is who, thinking in degrees makes everything exponentially complicated. This was not always the case. Without judgement about whether the casual nature of clothing worn to protests today is a good thing or a bad thing, it is objectively true that the clothing worn to protest, historically, was a much more formal affair. 'A lot of the time,' Johnson said, ' activists are dressed exactly like their opponents. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who had a deep problem with Bull Connor in the 1960s, you can't find very much difference in the way that those two men were dressed. They're both in suits of their time, ties of their time, shirts of their time, shoes, whatever. Sometimes that juxtaposition gives weight to the activism. I do not think that those points are either mutually exclusive or are necessary because sometimes it just happens how it happens.' Josh Johnson, educator, arts advocate and activist. Courtesy of Joshua Johnson I have been feeling like when I watch or read the news, increasingly there seem to be examples of cultural identity in dress, and through a media lens, it is hard not to worry that those divisive visuals are being exploited for attention. There is a lot of money involved in Americans hating or fearing communities that look different than their own. 'It's a Cultural tribalism,' Johnson said. 'Cultural Tribalism is something that either separates people within a culture or groups people together to show the distinctions of culture. Many times, this is a helpful thing or a point of pride for cultures. The poncho and the sombrero is something that an authentic indigenous Mexican man or woman is proud of. The dashiki is something that an indigenous Ghanaian is proud of.' While preparing for our conversation, I'd found Daisy Maldonado's article in Vogue about young Mexican Americans using traditional dress as a form of resistance. I asked Johnson what he thought about this, and like the educator he is, his answer was an analogy. 'As a journalist,' Johnson told me, "I had the grand pleasure at the beginning of this year to interview Roy Wood, Jr. And in one of his routines he says these very overtly political things that are wrapped up in comedy. He goes off in a very real moment and says, and I'm paraphrasing here, that sometimes it is incumbent on us to fall back and believe what people are saying. That their experience is really happening and us not having to critique that experience as being right or wrong.' Joshua Johnson and Roy Wood, Jr. in February of 2025. Courtesy of Joshua Johnson 'As a man and not as a journalist,' Johnson said, 'I believe that a return to culture is always a healthy thing for an individual. Not only does it secure that individual's knowledge of themselves, it also exposes other people to a way of life that is just simply beautiful, no matter who you are. Culture cannot inherently be bad when we're talking about people. Now, there are obviously visceral and terrible things about all cultures, all cultures come with good and bad, but culture cannot be inherently bad. I think a return to cultural garb can only signify a good thing. As a non-political statement, America is an experiment based on the idea that cultures will come together. So, anything that's the antithesis of that seems anti-American.' I asked Johnson if he felt like, in any way, there was a look specific to activism. And while my question was clumsy he understood the root of it and that was the question my friend answered. 'The uniform of activism is something that has been talked about and debated,' Johnson told me, 'you really have to boil it down to the fact that an activist doesn't look any specific way. However, we would be glib to think that whether it's Chairman Fred Hampton from the Black Panther Party, or whether it's some foreign dictator, that counter-cultural apparel adds to the seriousness of an activist.' A Make America Great Again Hat; photo illustration from June 23, 2025 in London, England. (Photo by Peter Dazeley via Getty Images) Peter Dazeley I've been trying to deal with the hyper awareness I've noticed in myself when I encounter someone wearing a red hat in public. I want to understand that response. 'Whether we like them, love them, hate them, despise them, their existence is an organic representation of populism,' Johnson said. 'Sometimes populism is the type of populism we like. Sometimes it's the type we don't like. That's the nature of populism. What populism is always going to do is give us very organic things of that movement. Going back to the hats, it wouldn't be possible to organize and facilitate anything counter because it wouldn't be organic. Some people might want a counter uniform, that can only happen if another movement arises in response and comes equipped. But that's the beauty of populism. You can't manufacture it. Now, don't get me wrong, you can do things to co-opt it. But the feelings and the sentiments and the loyalties that will allow people to want to wear something has to be natural and organic. It has to come from a place of either deep passion, deep feelings, or deep aggrievement.' All of the public discourse right now does feel emotionally driven, and to some extent that is rational. It makes sense that we would have strong feelings about the state of the world. The world is scary and the general state of the planet feels a lot less stable than it did not long ago. Josh Johnson speaking at an Art District revitalization effort he spearheaded after building a coalition of local arts organizations. Courtesy of Joshua Johnson Johnson still remembers his debate team coach, Ms. Sears, and the music she would play on team road trips. Johnson credits his coach and the experience with opening his ear to music he might not have otherwise discovered. Teachers like Ms. Sears inspire their students to grow up and find vocations instead of careers. Mentors are vital to anyone seriously interested in learning, to people growing or developing anything. But the relationship is good for the mentors too, I don't think we talk about that enough, how mentoring is symbiotic by nature. How mentoring is a closed loop system that teaches self-regulation. 'Joining that debate team was the start of my life,' he said to me. 'It was my baptism. It was an outward expression of an inward change.' One of the many great things about America and American culture is how we, most of us anyway, allow teenagers to try on identities during this developmental stage. It's simple to divide kids up by cafeteria tables in content for a screen, but in the real world, students are much more empathetic and sensitive to the needs of others than they were when Josh and I were students. Greta Thunberg, then a teenager,speaks at the 'Fridays For Future' Denver Climate Strike on October 11, 2019 (Photo by) Getty Images I asked him about his work as an educator and how he saw his students reacting to all the forces he and I were discussing. Josh and I are both millennials, but all generations get castigated for their perceived faults as they near their majority. I was curious about their response; of course it was related to music. 'I teach college level kids and I teach older high school level kids,' Johnson told me, 'the high school seniors in dual enrollment classes. The time when people start to begin figuring themselves out.' 'People are trying on their identities to see what fits and to find out what feels comfortable for them,' he said. I love this quote, 'a good educator shows you others. A great educator shows you yourself or brings you back to yourself.' So, if somebody walks in my classroom, no matter which classroom it is, wearing the t-shirt of a band, whether it's Nirvana, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, S.L.Y and THE FAMILY STONE, the Eagles, whatever, there's a resurgence in the band t-shirt. The music shirt stamps a person as cool, because it makes you look like you've got this seasoned taste that you maybe shouldn't have. It propels you into the zeitgeist as being one of the cool kids. I want to turn that on its head. I'll say, I'll give you extra credit if you can name two or more songs from the band that you have on your shirt. A hundred percent of the time, they can't name one song.' Sly Stone of Sly And The Family Stone posed in London on 16th July 1973. (Photo by) Getty Images This surprised me a little, but probably because I own far too many obscure tees that I wear in hope of someone appreciating the niche interest. An entirely different sort of conversation than my friend was describing. Was it about the graphics from the album covers or tours? 'They like the idea of people thinking that they like Nirvana, because Nirvana is cool,' Josh said with a smile. 'But when they can't name a song, two things happen there. First thing is they don't get the extra credit. The second thing is, now they live in a world where they're aware that people might converse with you about who you think you are or the identity that you're trying on. So if you're smart, you'll learn a little of the context of what comes with the uniform, not just put on the uniform. If you're going to wear a S.L.Y and THE FAMILY STONE shirt, maybe you ought to listen to If You Want Me to Stay or Family Affair , so that at least you don't make a fool of yourself and have to prove the identity that you're trying on.' The last question I asked my friend was enormous, but after such heavy contemplation, I wanted to be certain that we both left ready to return to our respective work. So I asked him what he felt was worth working for, above and beyond all else. He grinned before he answered me. Educator, arts advocate and activist, Josh Johnson. Courtesy of Joshua Johnson 'The cheap answer,' Johnson said, 'which I don't want to give you, is everything.' Josh and I first became friends when we bonded over a mutual desire to find ways to help our community be better for more members of our community. So I smiled right back at him and gave him the space to complete his thoughts. 'Access has always been the most important thing in all of my work,' Johnson told me, 'education, activism, politics, art and culture... To me it has been nothing but a pursuit of challenging the notion that some people should and some people shouldn't, or vice versa. That doesn't matter, I think everybody should have the same access. I do believe that access is the greatest education because it's oftentimes exposure.' 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