The latest revival of Sunset Boulevard—glossy stark and aggressively meta – puts different shades of lipstick on a pig. “Shades” are black, white and red. ‘Pig’ is a musical that is perhaps one of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s better works, but remains a bloated, subtlety-free piece of pop melodrama. Director Jamie Lloyd and his chic design team immerse Webber’s adaptation of the 1994 film classic in a dizzying zone of inky surfaces and white highlights, all shrouded in incessant waves of stage fog. Soutra Gilmour’s fashionable costumes are also monochromatic, as is her sparse set design – essentially a cavernous camera obscura. When the threat of murder arises, lighting designer Jack Knowles floods the stage with scarlet color. Towards the end of the action (minor spoiler), fallen star Norma Desmond (Nicole Scherzinger) has a gothic vision: glowing olive skin, black silk panties and a neck full of blood. What’s remarkable about this boldly arranged palette is how it helps distract from the music.

Granted, I am one Sondheim man and Webber’s syrupy, homemade melodies and blunt power ballads – which require equally stunted lyrics –I was bored stiff. His musical stories are somewhere between operetta and English Music Hall; it’s turgid, repetitive, and allergic to nuanced characterization (not to mention real emotion). At least with Sunset Boulevardbook writers and copywriters Christopher Hampton and Don Black (talented professionals) had excellent bones to build on. Billy Wilder’s love letter to Hollywood was etched with poison pen, a spiky dance between satire and sympathy in the warped portrait of Norma Desmond, the silent film queen tipped from her throne by the talkies. Withdrawn and periodically suicidal, Norma resides in a celluloid Neverland, where she is forever young in moving images. When hapless screenwriter Joe Gillis (Tom Francis) accidentally drives into the driveway of Norma’s creepy mansion on the title street, a deadly game of mutual exploitation begins.

Besides bona fide Webber fans (apparently they exist), the big draw is Nicole Scherzinger, ex-Pussycat Doll and pop icon from the first decade of this century. The first glimpse we get of our leading lady is a visual trick: as the metal bead curtain parts during Webber’s crashing and surging overture, we think it is Norma spinning in the shadows at the edge of the stage. In fact, the figure is Hannah Yun Chamberlain, the strikingly beautiful dancer who portrays Young Norma. Chamberlain is essentially Scherzinger’s body double and reappears frequently, at one point dancing with her older self. (Remember The fabricminus green goo and spine splitting.) How appropriate: a stunt Norma for a stunt production.

Lloyd directs most of his actors to a tense, frontal, deadpan look. While Joe Gillis, Tom Francis (who gives Jeremy Allen White) simmers and paces, curled up, fists stuffed in pockets. It was a relief when Francis was allowed to sign; I started to wonder about his character. Gillis is bankrupt. Goons try to impound his car while he makes the rounds at Paramount, spying on Hollywood sharks and minnows. Perhaps to underscore the concept of Tinseltown as a place that feeds youth into a meat grinder, Lloyd casts the ensemble with young performers, a Gen Z phalanx of gritty choristers and supporting players.

Shortly after Joe washes up on Norma’s shores, he is accepted into her diva-wild universe full of secrets and lies. We meet a crazy German servant named Max (David Thaxton) and hear about a chimpanzee who recently died. There’s also Norma’s showy and overwritten screenplay about Salomé, which she wants Joe to slap before her big return to movies. When Joe asks how old the character is, Norma nonchalantly replies, “Sixteen.” Scherzinger looks great for her age, but can still smile.

In her Broadway debut, the leading lady grows with you. Unlike the audience members who screamed every time Scherzinger belted out one of Norma’s obligatory, overheated ballads (“With One Look,” “As If We Never Said Goodbye”), I went in with minimal expectations. Fortunately, Scherzinger controls her scenes – on stage and blown up to gargantuan proportions on the 27 x 23 foot LCD screen, fed with live video by actors strapped into camera units.

Scherzinger may start off hesitant and stiff, but soon she’s vamping and pouting at the camera like a giddy teenager with her first TikTok account. When Norma talks to Joe about astrology, she adopts a crazy Valley Girl singer. Is Norma aware of her eccentric excesses, or is it Scherzinger and Lloyd who comment on them? The anachronistic, self-deprecating gestures extend into the choreography. Fabian Aloise gives Scherzinger cheeky quotes from the synchronized movements of the Pussycat Dolls. Somewhere in my notes it says ‘Norma twerks?’ If it wasn’t a terribly old-fashioned thing to say postmodernthat’s how I would describe Scherzinger’s delightful pastiche.

There’s an obscene amount of eye candy to look at, including the excellent work of Francis and the ensemble with the Act II opener, which takes them (on video) through the guts of the St. James Theater and onto the streets in a virtuoso single tracking shot. The actual song “Sunset Boulevard” is so boring (“Sunset Boulevard / Frenzied boulevard / Swamped with every kind of false emotion”). But the live video sequence is breathtaking and makes fun of the show as Francis and the ensemble members prowl the street looking sexy and cool, accompanied by a man in a monkey outfit (shout out to the dead chimpanzee). Most of Webber’s hits had bizarre stage effects: Phantom‘s crashing chandelier; a giant flying tire Cats; Sunset Boulevard premiered with a mansion rolling out to the audience. Removing unwieldy set pieces from a Webber musical is like reading a Michael Bay screenplay for its urbane humor. Here Lloyd offers the perfect spectacle for our mediated, homogenized age: digital projection, dematerialized sets, uniform couture.

All that lush black and white video, the backstage winks, the stupid look in fuck-me boots – it’s pleasure. I never expected to enjoy an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. (Even this summer’s queer ballroom makeover Cats was, well, Cats.The surgical staging of Lloyd’s Camp combines form and content: it is the resurrection of a faded (kitsch) icon, a critique of the invasive camera, a cosplay of the BDSM rituals of celebrities and fandom. Just as Scherzinger inhabits Norma between giant neon quotes, the entire production seems to admit that the overall musical is nonsense. What happens when you dress up trash as art and hold a camera in its face? Twenty feet high, those faces – coolly sensual carved images – demand your abject adoration. It’s a thin line (movie screen thin) between glamor and horror. “We gave the world new ways to dream,” sings a delighted Norma. Lloyd finds new ways to give us nightmares; who wants to wake up?

Sunset Boulevard | 2 hours 30 minutes. One break. | St. James Theater | 246 West 44th St. | Buy tickets here