Broadway-bound ‘Sunset Boulevard’ and star Nicole Scherzinger win big at London’s Olivier awards
Theater
JILL LAWLESS April 15, 2024
A radical restaging of Hollywood film noir musical Sunset Boulevard was the big winner on Sunday at the London stage Olivier Awards, taking seven trophies including
best
musical revival and
best
actress for American star Nicole Scherzinger.
Soccer-themed state-of-the-nation drama Dear England was named best new play, while Sarah Snook and Mark Gatiss were among the acting winners.
The complete list of 2023 Tony Award winners
Scherzinger was rewarded for her performance as fading silver-screen star Norma Desmond in a flashy revival of Andrew Lloyd Webbers Sunset Boulevard, three decades after the musicals 1990s debut. Her co-star Tom Francis won the corresponding
best
actor prize as a struggling screenwriter fatefully drawn into Desmonds 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. Its due to open in New York later this year, and Lloyd predicted it would take Broadway by storm.
Scherzinger said that when she was growing up in Kentucky,
she “
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 World War II. The show began life in a tiny theater in 2019 and has moved to progressively larger venues, gathering accolades along the way.
Stranger Things: The First Shadow, a dazzlingly staged prequel to the Netflix supernatural series, was named best new entertainment or comedy.
What does a mega episode of Stranger Things look like onstage? Inside The First Shadow
The Oliviers the U.K. equivalent of Broadways Tony Awards
are
celebrated a bumper year for new shows in the West End, which is finally bouncing back from the COVID-19 pandemic. Several winners lamented the soaring cost of theater tickets as well as cuts to arts education that are squeezing working-class people
talent
out of theatrical careers and theater audiences.
If you dont tell a kid to go and see a show theyre not going to develop that habit, theyre not going to get that experience, said Dear England playwright James Graham, who grew up in a small mining town. So I am really worried.
But the mood was largely celebratory as Ted Lasso star Hannah Waddingham presided over an exuberant ceremony at Londons Royal Albert Hall, opening the show by belting out Anything Goes alongside the London Community Gospel Choir. The show was peppered with performances from several of the nominated musicals, including Guys and Dolls, Hadestown and homegrown hit “The Little Big Things.”
The prizes, which recognize achievements in theater, opera and dance, were founded in 1976 and named for
the late
actor-director Laurence Olivier. Winners are chosen by voting groups of stage professionals and theatergoers.
Snook the scheming Shiv Roy in Succession beat a talented field including Sarah Jessica Parker and Sophie Okonedo to take the
be namedbest
actress in a play statuette for The Picture of Dorian Gray, an adaptation of Oscar Wildes cautionary fable in which Snook plays more than two dozen characters.
Backstage, the Emmy Award-winning Australian performer said the solo stage show was so much harder than doing TV.
Ive never done anything harder than this, said Snook, who said shed asked herself why am I doing a 60,000-word monologue with an 8-month-old baby? She revealed shed learned her lines for the play during filming of the final season
series
of Succession at night while breastfeeding her daughter.
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Gatiss co-creator of the BBC TV series Sherlock won the
best
actor trophy for playing theater great John Gielgud in The Motive and the Cue, Jack Thornes play about the struggle to mount a 1964 production of Hamlet with Richard Burton.
Gatiss recalled that Gielgud had considered awards ceremonies vulgar.
Im very, very thrilled to be in such wonderfully vulgar company, he said.
Gatiss beat Dear England star Joseph Fiennes and Andrew Scott, who had been the favorite to win for the solo show Vanya. The Anton Chekhov adaptation by Simon Stephens took the prize for
best
revival.
Will Close won
was named best
supporting actor in a play for his performance as footballer Harry Kane in Dear England.
These theater veterans made their final exits in 2023
Haydn Gwynne, who died in October, was posthumously awarded the
best
supporting actress prize for her final stage role in When Winston Went to War With the Wireless,” about the early days of radio in Britain.
Awards for supporting performances in musicals went to Amy Trigg for The Little Big Things and
Jak Malone
for Operation Mincemeat.
The show ended with a tribute to the National Theatre, which turned 60 in 2023 culminating in a star-studded cast singing the anthem Youll Never Walk Alone.
