Nicole Scherzinger Mixes “Sunset Blvd.,” Pussycat Dolls Songs: Review

If only we could hear Norma Desmond stand up and sing: Don’t you wish your girlfriend, that little tart Betty Schaefer, was hot like me?

It doesn’t happen in Nicole Scherzingers current run of shows, which included a diversion stop Thursday night at Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown LA The Show songs stayed in their corner, and the Pussycat Dolls oldies stayed in theirs. It was a show with a bit of a split personality, with musical theater numbers dominating the first three-quarters and flashy pop performed by her ex-girl group taking over the final stretch.

But it didn’t feel like an impossibly wide gap. Even as Scherzinger sang two bravura songs from the stage musical that brought her back into the limelight in a big way, “Sunset Blvd.,” you were reminded that that Broadway/West End show was retooled a bit when she starred in it so that Gloria Swanson was a very distant memory, and so you had to think of Norma Desmond not as a badass but as a woman of a certain age who is very much HOTTOGO. And it worked.

Meanwhile, there’s the FOMO the LA theater community has been suffering from not getting a local broadcast of Scherzinger’s performance in “Sunset” on Broadway. Naturally, many Angelenos headed east to catch her in that Tony-winning turn in late 2024 and early ’25. “You were everything in ‘Sunset’!” shouted the man in front of me, which is perfectly fine to shout at a diva performance where everyone is just a little too mature to shout something about mom. So the full house probably consisted of about one-third jet-setters who already knew how spectacular her “With One Look” would go, and two-thirds less privileged locals who until now had only been able to guess.

As the “Sunset” segment unfolded in the middle of her concert’s second act (the show that is “what got me here today,” as she told the audience), “With One Look” was really just the warm-up. The number that followed, “As If We Never Said Goodbye,” was the money song, the one that seemed to resemble Barbra Streisand’s own cover of the Andrew Lloyd Webber neoclassic. Throughout it, I could feel some of the people around me seeming anxious for the song to end – not because they really wanted Scherzinger to stop singing, but because they were literally on the edge of their seats, barely able to bear to jump up for the inevitable standing ovation. I felt their twitches.

And not long after the peaky, dress-clad handsomeness: Pussycat Doll’s “Buttons” and the unveiling of a slim, buttonless catsuit to match. Because why not? Scherzinger is clearly favoring her stage actress side these days, but she’s still got the chops to indulge in some throwback choreo, or cardio, from back in the day.

This isn’t a full tour for the singer, but the last of three shows taking place in some of the world’s most famous venues – Royal Albert Hall, Carnegie Hall and now (the day after she was honored at Variety’s Power of Women LA event) Disney Hall. It’s easy to imagine her taking it further down the road, if she doesn’t book another theater gig or do a residency. Would it attract a wider spread of fans, in other cities, who might be drawn to come just for the Dolls’ stuff or just for a night of standards? Possibly, but she’d probably leave everyone happy in the end, either way.

Thursday’s show certainly announced its primary intentions early on, with Scherzinger belting out a faithful rendition of “Don’t Rain on My Parade.” It’s a bold way for a singer who hasn’t been known primarily for being in the theater arena for so long to begin with — perhaps too bold, to declare that Streisand’s turf is her terra firma, too. Her version was great, for what it was, but not a particularly imaginative or reinvented choice. From there, she loosened up a bit with the perennial Halloween/R&B favorite “I Put a Spell on You,” which brings in some good vegetation. “Diamonds Are Forever” was an excellent choice of movie song to include (Amount have previously explained it as best Bond theme of all time), and it was wise that she paid proper tribute to the originator, but the question remains of how difficult it is to out Bassey Shirley Bassey. (She’s at least a dozen times more capable of pulling it off than poor, miscast Doja Cat at this year’s Oscars.)

In the end, Scherzinger came up with the first song that really became associated with her, with some chan-tooozy banter to set it up: “You guys look so good, I think I can ‘stickwitu’ forever. It reminds me of a song…” Hey, us too. The detour into Pussycat hit territory was just a moment for the moment, indeed a trailer for the show’s finale. But there was something about it that seemed to put her on a surer footing, even as she returned to the scene filming perennials. A medley of Sondheim’s “Losing My Mind” and “Not a Day Goes By,” which seem to have coalesced in the interpreter’s mind somewhere around the turn of the century, offered a good teaser for the mind-numbing possibilities of the “Sunset” material to come later.

And then, for her pre-intermission closer, Scherzinger tackled “Cabaret’s” biggest number, “Maybe This Time,” the patron saint of songs for losers everywhere. She wouldn’t fit in a modern “Cabaret” production where the leading lady has to play it as an untried waif, but she sure would have killed the role back in the day when everyone seemed to be doing it as skillfully as Liza. In the end, she sacrificed feelings for a camp time, but that was okay. Walking back to the kind of bedside table where she kept her water bottle and Kleenex, Scherzinger crouched down in a strange way – was she working off a cramp? — and then reappeared with something behind her back. “Maybe this time,” she belted out, pausing for effect… out come her two biggest trophies, in each hand…. “I win!” She referred to them as her friends “Laurence and Antoinette”, as in, of course, an Olivier and a Tony.

Pause Thoughts: Either you love this kind of breezy, broad (in every sense), old-school show-biz stuff — long clattering interludes included — or you don’t. Anyone who doesn’t have the same nostalgic longing for veteran actresses holding court with one-woman shows might not be blamed for opting out. But Scherzinger is working from a great tradition with this, and there aren’t many others of her generation who fill the void, at least with her profile coming from the pop side and the chops to work it on the theater side. She feels more born into this than she was into being a 2010s pop tart… although she was a good enough actress to pull that off too. Being an Interscope sexbomb definitely didn’t allow her to casually walk around the stage making some off-color remarks in between and showing off her coloring skills. All of which is to say, if this is a prelude to her doing shows like this indefinitely and working to insert “I’m Still Here” into her repertoire 20 years from now, some of us will be there for it.

“The women look absolutely divine,” Scherzinger told the audience. “Lots of hot men in the house tonight.” Here’s betting she says that to all the Carnegie and Royal Albert Hall boys. Or maybe not.
“Looks like all the WeHos showed up,” she added, getting a roar big enough to drown out what she said afterward. She didn’t shy away from elbow-pushing humor. Speaking about her heritage, she described herself as “Hawaiian, Filipino, Spanish, Chinese, Polish…Irish 2%…I also have a little English in me too. His name is Thom.” Her fiance, Thom Evans, came up for reference again as she sang the night’s only new, original song, the pop-R&B vamp “Bullshit”: “This is my idea of ​​a love song. It’s about waiting for that special someone to, how do you say, get it together (and) put a ring on it. You catch my drift?” Sample lyrics: “Wake your ass up before I get up and go.” She flashed a ring after the song ended and said, “Needless to say, he got the message.”

Scherzinger didn’t ignore the people on the balcony behind her, even if she meant to at times. “You have the best seats in the house!” she informed them early. Much later, towards the end of the second of three acts, she became confused when she started talking about Prince, whom she described as “a big part of who I am – he was my mentor, my big brother.” She retreated to the bedside table and took a moment to turn her back to the audience and wipe her nose. “Thank god for these tissues…” Then she remembered that there was a whole separate audience backstage. “Oh good, you guys are here, I forgot about that. Give it up for my surprise party there.”

“Purple Rain” was her main swipe at mainstream pop rock tastes, and at the one that makes her cry. The “La Cage aux Folles”/Jerry Herman/Gloria Gaynor anthem “I Am What I Am” was her main soup for WeHos, as she put it. As for the pure Broadway demographic in the crowd, although she mostly stuck to musical theater’s greatest hits, it was a delight when, to kick off the final act, she belted out the sassy “Drowsy Chaperone” number “Show Off,” which is exactly what she intended to do for the finale. She appeared for the final bit in what almost appeared to be an elegant dressing gown in the bedroom, sipping tea (“Let me put this down before I spill too much,” she said), eventually showing some leg. And then completely abandoned showing much more than that, as the show settled into its full-Pussycat final run.

With the final Pussycat Dolls medley, Scherzinger — who hoofed it up in black lace and heels, somehow about a foot taller than her 5’5″ frame — was about life as a showgirl. That’s what would probably really attract them if she ever deigned to do this as a Vegas residency.

But what most of this Disney Hall crowd will remember most is the two-song “Sunset Blvd.” piece, where Norma came to life on her West Coast home turf, minus the Broadway stage blood. Without Jamie Lloyd’s cameras there to do close-ups, Scherzinger played the anti-heroine just a little less for obsessive compulsiveness and more for pure Barbra butter. Norma Desmond doesn’t really need to be portrayed as a killer when we already know from this killer good revue that Nicole Scherzinger is one.

Setlist for Nicole Scherzinger at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, October 30, 2025:

Don’t rain on my parade
I enchant you
Diamonds are forever
Stitch witu
You Raise Me Up/Reflection
Losing my mind/not a day goes by
Maybe this time

Set 2:
I am what I am
Bullshit
With a look
As if we never said goodbye
Purple rain

Set 3:
Show up
Buttons
When I grow up
Not Cha
Don’t hold your breath