Sunset Boulevard album review – step forwards, Alan Williams

Can you mourn the absence of a West End production? Often I catch myself wishing I’d revisited Jamie Lloyd’s iconoclastic Sunset Boulevard, led by Nicole Scherzinger. With its latency-free video (Nathan Amzi and Joe Ransom) and electric choreography (Fabian Aloise), it all seemed to fly by in a bewildering flurry during the Savoy Theatre opening night last autumn.

Thankfully, the pangs of loss are somewhat soothed by the new album release, coinciding with the production’s glorious Broadway premiere last weekend.

Rather than a highlights package, recording in an often artificial studio setting, the team has decided to take a full live recording from the Savoy and mix the album based on what is actually experienced by punters. What you get, as a result, is a sense of raw authenticity – the echoing, vibrant sense of performance within a specific space. It does almost feel like a radio play – kudos to sound designer Adam Fisher.

It’s also a love-letter to the brilliance of music supervisor and director Alan Williams, diving headfirst into Andrew Lloyd Webber’s much-cherished score and orchestrations and finding new hints of gold. What emerges is a strong case for Sunset being considered one of the Cats and Phantom composer’s best works. Top five, surely (Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita complete the quintet?).

The triumphs here are manifold: a kaleidoscopic “The Car Chase” – where the gargantuan “Sunset Boulevard” motif rears its head for the first time like a beast rising from stormy waters – worlds away from the playful prancing of the orchestra in “The Perfect Year.” Even the magical concoctions in “Norma In The Studio” (with a hint of glockenspiel?) prove as seductive when in album form.

A recording also allows supporting performers to get that slightly longer moment in the spotlight: the gritty notes and heartbreaking infatuation of David Thaxton‘s baritone appear in “The Greatest Star of All”, while Grace Hodgett Young‘s infectious tearaway romantic streak comes through in “Too Much In Love To Care”, pitted against the gutsy steel of “Girl Meets Boy”. It’s still astounding that this show was her professional stage debut.

Then you get to Tom Francis, blasting through Lloyd Webber’s score and Don Black’s lyrics with his world-weary cynicism, riding rollercoaster melodies with note-perfect clarity. It’s amusing to think that some of his “Sunset Boulevard” performance was recorded while he was pushing past boozing stragglers at the Coal Hole pub on the Strand, next to the Savoy.

It all comes together in six minutes of magnificent aural beauty in “As If We Never Said Goodbye” – the dancing woodwind tiptoeing around Scherzinger’s vocals in the early verses, faint hints of a delicate smile on Scherzinger’s intonation giving way to an avalanche of colossal notes by the number’s climax. She seems to slide from playful, childish consonants to rasping, haggard breaths – paradoxically juvenile and worn in the space of a single sentence.

This has been Scherzinger’s first album release in a decade – she’s come home at last.