EGN NEWS DESK
A reimagining of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Sunset Boulevard,” starring Nicole Scherzinger as Norma Desmond, the lengthy forgotten silent film star who descends into insanity, was the large winner at this 12 months’s Olivier Awards, Britain’s equal of the Tonys.
The musical, which is able to open on the St. James Theater on Broadway this fall, was honored Sunday throughout a ceremony on the Royal Albert Hall in London with seven awards, together with finest musical revival, finest actress in a musical for Scherzinger, finest actor in a musical for Tom Francis, because the screenwriter who falls for Desmond’s charms, and finest director for Jamie Lloyd.
The variety of awards was hardly a shock. After the musical opened final fall, critics praised Lloyd’s stark manufacturing, particularly highlighting its modern twists that included utilizing cameras to zoom in on characters’ faces, then beam their feelings onto a display in the back of the stage.
Matt Wolf, writing in The New York Times, stated that Lloyd’s manufacturing belonged firmly “to the right here and now.” With this present, the director “takes a longtime musical by the scruff of the neck and sends it careering into the fashionable day,” Wolf added.
Sarah Hemming, in The Financial Times, was among the many critics to reward Scherzinger’s magnetic efficiency. “She’s not afraid to look scary or ridiculous,” Hemming stated, “however there’s additionally a strung-out vulnerability about her. And when she sings, she pins you to your seat with the harrowing depth of her supply.”
“Sunset Boulevard” beat a number of different acclaimed productions to the perfect musical revival award, together with “Guys & Dolls” on the Bridge Theater and “Hadestown” on the Lyric Theater.
A bunch of musicals and performs shared the night time’s different main prizes. “Operation Mincemeat,” a word-of-mouth hit a few weird World War II counterintelligence plot that’s operating on the Fortune Theater, gained finest new musical. While “Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” a prequel to the Netflix present, now on the Phoenix Theater, was chosen as finest new leisure or comedy play.
The finest new play award went to James Graham’s “Dear England,” concerning the English nationwide soccer staff, which transferred to the West End from the National Theater.
In the hotly contested performing classes, Sarah Snook (“Succession”) was named finest actress for “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” a solo present operating by means of May 11 on the Theater Royal Haymarket. Snook performs all 26 roles, typically interacting with recorded projections of her characters.
Before Sunday’s ceremony, some critics had anticipated the perfect actor award to go to Andrew Scott for a equally dazzling solo efficiency: a one-man “Vanya” on the Duke of York’s Theater. In the tip, the prize went to Mark Gatiss for his function because 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 labored on a Broadway present. Like “Dear England,” that play ran on the National Theater earlier than transferring to the West End.
