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Andrew Lloyd Webber never thought he’d get Nicole Scherzinger to Broadway.
“I always remember when she did ‘Don’t Cry for Me Argentina’ on a TV show some years ago,” Lloyd Webber told me during an hour-long sit-down.
After her performance on that 2013 ITV special, “Cats” director Trevor Nunn excitedly rang him up and said, “That’s the best it’s ever been.”
“He was right,” Lloyd Webber said. “And that was the moment where I thought we’ve got to get her into the theater.”
A year later, the former Pussycat Doll was belting out “Memory” at the London Palladium as Grizabella in “Cats.” But her Broadway contract didn’t work out. She was always being booked as a judge on TV singing contests.
Nine lives, er, years, went by, and then the outre director Jamie Lloyd (known for Ibsen — not singin’ or dancin’) approached the composer with a strange idea — Scherzinger should play Norma Desmond, the has-been Hollywood star, in “Sunset Boulevard.”
“And I said, ‘Well, good luck!’,” Lloyd Webber, 77, remembered. “‘If you get her to the altar, I’m going to be the happiest person in history.’ And he did.”
She’s unforgettable in the show at the St. James — bold, beautiful, petrifying and revelatory.
A week ago, the starkly reimagined production deservedly scored seven Tony Award nominations, including for Best Revival, the indomitable Scherzinger, her exciting leading man Tom Francis and director Lloyd.
“It is darker and, I think, it’s also deeper,” Lloyd Webber said of his totally different 1994 musical.
The composer of “Jesus Christ Superstar” and “The Phantom of the Opera” is collaborating with Lloyd again this summer on a production of “Evita” in London at the Palladium starring Rachel Zegler.
The director, who successfully uses live cameras and screens in “Sunset,” wants to pull a similar trick with “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina.” But so far, he’s faced backlash from local politicians.
“Do you know what Jamie wants to do with ‘Evita’? And the council won’t let us,” Lloyd Webber tantalizingly dangled.
“With ‘Evita’ in London, when he does it this time — the Palladium has a balcony outside,” he went on, suggesting Zegler could sing on it.
“It might mean crowds will gather on the street.”
Uh oh — the Brits can’t have that.
Here in carefree New York, his delightful “Cats: The Jellicle Ball,” which I adored last summer downtown, has not yet secured a Broadway house for a planned transfer. However, Lloyd Webber is confident it will find a home soon.
“I think it will come in next season,” he said. “Everybody seems to want it. The Nederlanders have got nothing for it, but, you know, the other two, [the Shuberts and ATG].”
And then there’s “Masquerade,” the immersive (and shorter) version of “Phantom of the Opera” coming to West 57th Street. Several small groups of about 60, a source said, will be taken into the bespoke venue per day — a la “Sleep No More.” There have been construction delays, but don’t be surprised if you see one of the longest-running Phantoms back in the mask.
However, Lloyd Webber’s not content with simply carting out the old hits.
He recently created a new company with producer Michael Harrison called Lloyd Webber Harrison Musicals to free himself up from the business side and make more music of the night.
“I came to the conclusion at my age now that I’ve got to only do composing,” he said.
So, Lloyd Webber is hard at work on a new musical (his 22nd) of the 2006 film “The Illusionist,” which starred Edward Norton as a Vienna magician. He’s completed a draft of what he calls “an opera.”
“[We’ve] done a reading, sing-through as it were, with just us and a couple of singers around a piano of the whole thing. And now it’s at the point where one, I think, starts to deconstruct it,” Lloyd Webber said of the show which will also be directed by — who else? — Jamie Lloyd.
“If there was a theater available, and if Jamie wasn’t doing anything else, and I haven’t got the other bits and pieces, I mean we could go into rehearsal this coming September or October. But we won’t.”
Lloyd Webber said one hold up is a big illusion in the show “that we’ve got to get right,” so it will require six weeks of rehearsal instead of the usual four.
“I think we could be up and going by next September,” he said of a 2026 West End run before hopefully Broadway.
Two years ago, when Lloyd Webber’s “Bad Cinderella” closed, it ended an unrivaled streak: For 43 years, he always had a show running on Broadway.
Plenty of people counted him out. But now, to quote the most famous song from “Sunset,” “everything’s as if we never said goodbye.”
English (US)