The Sunset Boulevard Election Connection October 22, 2024 I went to the opening of Sunset Boulevard Sunday. The New York Times hated it: Despite Norma Desmond, who famously declares in the film “Sunset Boulevard” that it’s not her but “the pictures that got small,” the opposite is true on Broadway these days. In musicals especially, video and projections have grown ever more dominant. Perhaps it is not so much an irony as an inevitability, then, that at the St. James Theater, where a revival of the musical based on “Sunset Boulevard” opened on Sunday, the pictures — live video streamed onto an LCD screen more than 23 feet tall — are so big they almost blot out the show below. But alas, only almost. For despite many fascinating interventions by the director Jamie Lloyd and his technical team, and the fact that it is based on one of the greatest of movies, the musical remains too silly for words. In that sense, and others, Norma would have loved it. Which isn’t praise . . . The Daily Beast and most others loved it: [The] audience, to varying degrees of whooping, standing, hollering, and applauding — well, lost its damn mind. It wasn’t just Scherzinger mega-fans in thralls of ecstasy. As Norma and as herself, Scherzinger ignites multiple blazes of originality, mischief, wit and drama in the stupendous revival of the classic Andrew Lloyd Webber musical (St. James Theatre, booking through July 6, 2025). The show—with book and lyrics by Don Black and Christopher Hampton—transferred laden with awards from London’s West End and opened on Broadway Sunday night, directed with a magnificent witch’s brew of winking satire, absolute dead-seriousness, and stark elegance by Jamie Lloyd. Lloyd’s show is a meta-piece of theater in the most pleasurable, least grating of ways—based on Billy Wilder’s classic 1950 movie, it is its own homage to the power of movie-making using the most inventive of theatrical techniques that in other productions (video design and cinematography are by Nathan Amzi and Joe Ransom) can be intrusive and annoying. Here they are vital additive, witty, and complementary, and marry theater- and film-making gorgeously. The shadows of film noir and the stark beauty of black and white photography and movies assume a striking immediacy of animated light and shadows right in front of us. . . . The clamorous ovation at the end of this superlative show—the perfect mix of bombastic and restrained, the most fun a tragedy could ever be—says it all. It is not the usual Broadway standing ovation: polite and dutiful. It is not even the appreciative and happy standing ovation: heartfelt and feelgood. This is something else. The whooping and applauding goes on and on, a wave upon wave of loud appreciation, no one in any rush to stop or leave. I loved it. The connection to the election is simply the way two people, or sets of people, can see the same thing so differently. To me, to many of you — and to people as diverse as Mike Pence, Dick Cheney, Bernie Sanders, Mitt Romney, Taylor Swift, Willie Nelson, Mary Trump, his former top general, his former chiefs of staff, his former press secretaries, and so many more — it’s screamingly obvious that America should not return to power a vulgar, lying, adjudicated rapist and convicted felon awaiting trial in three more-serious federal felony cases . . . who, after nine years, has a secret “concept” of a plan to improve health care, who publicly sides with Putin over the FBI, who won’t release his tax returns or medical records, who killed the immigration bill that would have fixed the border problem, and who sat watching TV for 187 minutes brushing off all pleas for help as his nation’s Capitol was under attack. Are you kidding me? And yet there are tens of millions of good Americans who love their country, love his show, and hope to see four more years of it. (And would it be just four? Term-limited autocrats find ways to extend their run. Donald, Jr., anyone?) Beating a demagogue backed by billionaires and by Putin — who murders journalists and opposition leaders and tens of thousands of Ukrainians to get his way — is no slam dunk. Hard as it is to fully grasp when daily life goes on as usual (did you remember to pick up hamburger buns? start the dishwasher? put out the trash?) but the threat to us “enemies within,” to freedom of the press, to America’s ideals — and to the world order at large — is real. And Democracy, once lost, is nearly impossible to restore. Help! And yes, money can still be used effectively. We’re gonna win! NEWSFLASH Former FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt has joined WheelTug’s board of directors. Presumably, he thinks WheelTug has potential.