‘Sunset Boulevard’ shines
Broadway-bound U.K. musical picks up seven trophies
A radical restaging of Hollywood film noir musical “Sunset Boulevard” was the big winner on Sunday at the Olivier Awards, taking seven trophies including best musical revival and best actress for American star Nicole Scherzinger.
Soccer-themed state-of-thenation drama “Dear England” was named best new play, while Sarah Snook and Mark Gatiss were among the acting winners.
Scherzinger was rewarded for her performance as fading silver screen star Norma Desmond in a flashy revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Sunset Boulevard,” three decades after the musical’s 1990s debut. Her co-star Tom Francis won the corresponding best actor prize as a struggling screenwriter fatefully drawn into Desmond’s orbit.
Jamie Lloyd took the directing trophy for the technically innovative production, which melds live video with the onstage action, and also won Oliviers for sound and lighting design. It’s due to open in New York later this year and Lloyd Webber predicted it would “take Broadway by storm.”
Scherzinger said that when she was growing up in Kentucky, “I always wanted to be a singer and do musicals.”
“I dreamed of so many roles I wanted to do and, honestly, this role, Norma Desmond, was not one of those roles,” she said. “But God works in mysterious ways.”
The prize for best new musical went to “Operation Mincemeat,” a word-of-mouth hit based on an audacious real-life espionage operation that deceived the Nazis during the Second World War.
“Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” a dazzlingly staged prequel to the Netflix supernatural series, was named best new entertainment or comedy.
The Oliviers — the U.K. equivalent of Broadway’s Tony Awards — are celebrating a bumper year for new shows in the West End, finally bouncing back from the COVID-19 pandemic.
The prizes, which recognize achievements in theatre, opera and dance, were founded in 1976 and named for the late actor-director Laurence Olivier.
Snook — the scheming Shiv Roy in “Succession” — beat a talented field including Sarah Jessica Parker and Sophie Okonedo to be named best actress in a play for “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s cautionary fable in which Snook plays more than two dozen characters.
Gatiss — co-creator of the BBC TV series “Sherlock” — won the best actor trophy for playing theatre great John Gielgud in “The Motive and the Cue,” Jack Thorne’s play about the struggle to mount a 1964 production of “Hamlet” with Richard Burton.
Gatiss beat “Dear England” star Joseph Fiennes and Andrew Scott, who had been the favourite to win for the solo show “Vanya.”