A group of young men and women, all dressed in black, marches down a busy street in the heart of Times Square. Walking in formation, they dodge parked cars, bicycles and pedestrians, as the man leading them belts out a song.
“Sunset Boulevard, ruthless boulevard / Destination for the stony-hearted.”
This ambitious scene from the director Jamie Lloyd’s Broadway revival of “Sunset Boulevard” hinges on a live tracking sequence that goes backstage and spills onto West 44th Street. It’s shown in real time on a massive LCD screen to the audience inside the St. James Theater, but passers-by — both unsuspecting and calculating — get a front-row view, at least during the number’s three-minute outdoor portion.
“We’re sort of crossing our fingers a bit every night,” said Nathan Amzi, who designed the scene with Joe Ransom and Lloyd. Everyone, he added, “has to have laser focus to make it work.”
Through rain, bone-chilling temperatures and the crush of crowds from neighboring shows, this scene, which takes 62 people to pull off, goes on.
The title song, “Sunset Boulevard,” which is sung by the hapless young screenwriter Joe Gillis (played by Tom Francis), functions as a sort of dream sequence in the musical. The character contemplates the circumstances that led him to take up residence at a Los Angeles mansion as the boy toy of the faded silent film star Norma Desmond — and tries to justify them.
For this production, Lloyd wanted to take a cinematic approach. (Think of memorable tracking shots like Kirk Douglas’s walk through the trenches in Stanley Kubrick’s “Paths of Glory.”)
Amzi and Ransom, both experienced cinematographers, coordinated logistics for the show’s original run in London. That included eliminating any perceptible lag time in the video feed, ensuring Francis could hear both himself and the 18-piece orchestra on a noisy street, and plotting a route timed to avoid crowds from neighboring shows letting out.
Staging the number for Broadway presented new challenges. There would now be a street to cross, new neighboring shows to coordinate timing with and a taller theater — seven levels, versus the three at London’s Savoy.
But they did have one constant: Shayna McPherson, an ensemble member in London and New York who captures each performance.
The six-minute sequence requires McPherson to walk down those seven flights of stairs — sometimes backward — as well as to navigate the uneven pavement and various other obstacles outside the theater. All the while, she must keep shots perfectly framed while holding a heavy camera rig; a millimeter on her one-inch viewing screen can make a difference of a foot on the theater’s nearly 25-foot-tall LCD screen.
“I have an inner monologue that’s just like, ‘Keep going, keep going, keep going,’” McPherson said.
Lloyd, who had Jessica Chastain walk through a loading dock door of the Hudson Theater for his 2023 Broadway revival of “A Doll’s House,” had wanted to incorporate an Old Hollywood look.
To create the 1950s aesthetic, Amzi and Ransom opted for hard physical filters that are attached to the camera lens. They use both a mist filter, which adds a soft glow around light sources, and a yellow filter, which enhances the contrast of the black-and-white cinematography.
The retro vibe continues into the staging of the number, which begins in Francis’s dressing room, where a TV is playing the 1950 Billy Wilder movie on which the musical is based. Then the camera pans to Francis drinking tea, and the scene takes off from there.
The indoor portion of the walk is filled with more than 20 Easter eggs, including a life-size cutout of the musical’s composer, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and a man dressed as a chimp, the beloved pet Norma buried in the first act. There is also an image of Nicole Scherzinger, the actress and former Pussycat Doll who plays Norma, taped to the dressing room mirror of David Thaxton, the actor who plays her character’s devoted butler.
Francis also stops by Scherzinger’s dressing room, where the actress, her hair in a turban (a nod to Gloria Swanson’s Norma of the movie) is writing “Mad About the Boy” (a nod to Noël Coward) on her mirror in bright red lipstick. A gun rests ominously on her table.
Then, just when it appears as if Francis is going to head back onstage to sing the title number, he exits onto the street.
The setup for the three-minute outdoor section, in which Francis sings the title number, begins about 15 minutes beforehand. Metal barriers are placed in the street to stop traffic, and a team of eight security guards, along with front-of-house staff members, starts directing people to clear a path.
There are two routes Francis can take, depending on what time performances of surrounding shows let out on a particular night. Both courses take him into Shubert Alley, but each has him crossing the street at a different point to minimize disruptions from the crush of theatergoers.
But what if there is, say, a blizzard? The number is always performed live, Lloyd said, though there is a secret route that keeps the actors inside the theater.
“That’s only for the worst-case scenario,” he said. “It’s never been used.”
There is also the street noise to contend with. Francis needs to transmit clear vocals amid the chatter and sirens. For this task, the production’s sound designer, Adam Fisher, turned to a headset microphone that’s very “good with rejecting ambience.”
Occasionally, the orchestra’s feed cuts out, and Francis has to rely on his own internal metronome to stay in sync with the music.
But Lloyd likes the hiccups that crop up. “It shows the audience that this is really on the edge,” he said.
Finally, Francis crosses the street back to the theater, now flanked by the other performers, including Drew Redington, wearing the chimp costume.
A spotlight follows them as they enter the theater to raucous applause.
“It’s a breath-of-fresh-air moment,” Francis said. “It’s like, ‘We lived to tell the tale another day.’”
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