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Director Jamie Lloyd On How ‘Sunset Blvd.’ Goes For The Jugular, ‘Evita’ Rocks And ‘Godot’ Was Keanu Reeves’ Midnight Dream – The Deadline Q&A
The Broadway director has some surprising productions coming up.
JAMIE LLOYD: I had been listening to Sunset Boulevard, so it’s not like it came completely out of the blue, and we had done a production of Evita at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in London, and it was one of the greatest summers in my life, and I really enjoyed working with the team to reinvent the show and you know, come at it from a different point of view, and it was a real challenge. So, in the pandemic, I had this real desire to do it all over again with another of his shows, and that’s when I started listening to a number of his works, and Sunset seemed like the obvious one, particularly clear when I had this dream of seeing this big white screen and this figure in a slip covered in blood, and of course, realized that that was, indeed, Nicole Scherzinger from the Pussycat Dolls, and thought to myself, she’s got to play Norma Desmond, which, as you can imagine, is quite a kind of startling thing to think about first thing in the morning during a pandemic, but here we are. Read the script, and look at the words, and try to forget what you know about the show and anyone who’s played the role in the past, and just imagine that it’s a brand new show, and she just fell in love with the music, and she fell in love with the words, and you know, it’s very clear to me that Nicole would have a very deep connection to the role of Norma, because, like Norma Desmond, she has been incredibly famous as an international star and then was kind of dismissed and almost kind of belittled and laughed at, and certainly never taken seriously as an artist.
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