You Can Take Nicole Scherzinger Out of the Pussycat Dolls, But You Can't Take the Pussycat Doll Out of Norma Desmond

In Sunset Boulevard, discarded starlet Norma Desmond plots her comeback—pardon, her “return”—with a film she’s written about the vengeful seductress Salome. In traditional productions of the Andrew Lloyd Webber melodrama, Norma pitches her vision to screenwriter Joe Gillis with grand, operatic gestures, facial expressions loud enough for silent cinema and broad swishes of a caftan that matches the turban she wears like King Lear’s crown of weeds. Norma is moldering faster than the pages of her doomed script. Nothing at all like Nicole Scherzinger, who met director Jamie Lloyd’s proposal to take on the well-worn role with skepticism. “Honey, I’m a Pussycat Doll. I’m still good under bright lights.”

As she tells Broadway.com Editor-in-Chief Paul Wontorek on The Broadway Show, just days after officially making her Broadway debut, that about sums up how she felt about Lloyd’s “big idea.” But the fact that Scherzinger’s face welcomes a close-up only served Lloyd’s vision for a story that Broadway fans—and fans of Billy Wilder’s original 1950 noir film—think they know so well. At the St. James Theatre, where Scherzinger is reprising the role that has already earned her an Olivier Award, her “Salome” looks different than any other you’ve seen before.

“What kind of old-school dance do you want me to do?” Scherzinger remembers asking Lloyd in rehearsal for the number. “Oh, there’s no old-school dancing,” Lloyd said. “You’re going to do stuff you did in the Pussycat Dolls. You’re going to do you.” Instead of a fusty Norma, Lloyd wanted to see the triple threat with charm, humor and sex appeal for days that he hand-picked. “That’s the tragedy,” he explained. “You are so vibrant, you are so full of life, you’re more fit, more brave, more everything than ever. And the industry still just looks at your age and dismisses you.”

Scherzinger, 46, had overlooked that part of Norma’s story, initially writing her off as the “deranged faded film star” whose appetite for fame turns murderous. “When I read the script, it wasn’t at all what I had remembered in the film,” said Scherzinger. “I really connected with Norma. I really empathized with her and I really understood her on so many levels.” And then there were Don Black and Christopher Hampton’s lyrics: “I’m back where I was born to be,” “I’ve come home at last,” “We’ll give the world new ways to dream”—"I feel like they were written for me,” said the actress.

Most people know Scherzinger from her girl-group days, singing catchy hooks in pop hits like “Don’t Cha” and “Buttons”—staples at clubs and college parties in the early aughts. But all the talents she brought to the Dolls were honed in the theater. At 14, she booked her first professional job at Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival—a production of David Hirson’s French comedy La Bête. It was early 1993, as could be sussed from her choice of audition material. “I sang The Little Mermaid,” she chuckled, breaking into a verse of “Part of Your World.” “That’s all I had. I was so young, I didn’t know what I was doing. But obviously I convinced them that I was a little mermaid because I got the role.”

She went on to do another play at the Humana Festival, Jon Lipsky’s The Survivor: A Cambodian Odyssey, and her high school and college years were peppered with classic musical theater roles: Sarah Brown in Guys and Dolls, Julie LaVerne in Show Boat, Velma Kelly in Chicago, Tuptim in The King and I, Ti Moune in Once on This Island. “This is my tribe,” she said, nodding to the “beautiful, creative” theater people that first embraced her. “Then I moved to L.A., honey, and it was all gone from there.”

Wontorek now calls her an “overnight Broadway star,” though the fire in her Norma betrays the years she’s spent wondering, “Is it ever going to come?” Still, she allows, “The patience and the pushback and the pain was for a reason.”

The one mild, momentary letdown in her first Broadway experience—a thunderous arrival complete with mid-show standing ovations and viral TikTok trends—is the wardrobe. Once hopeful for head-to-toe leopard print, she finds herself barefoot in a (now-signature) black slip for all two-and-a-half hours of the show (“Can we throw in a white slip?” she joked to Lloyd). But a true star can make anything work.

“Our first preview—I was so excited and I’d never gone out and signed at the stage door,” she said. “So I literally went straight out, barefoot Norma.” It’s not a spoiler anymore that barefoot Norma is also bloody Norma, as you’ll see in her post-show photos with celebs like Demi Moore, Sigourney Weaver, Ben Platt and Lloyd Webber himself. Scherzinger admits, “Sometimes, I do greet people afterwards in blood." She claims it’s because of the time it takes to wash away the corn syrup concoction, which has turned her shower into a proper horror scene. But if there’s one thing a theater girl knows, it’s that when life gives you a plain, black slip, make it drama.