She seems too young and far too sexy to portray the decaying actress who relives her glory days viewing her younger self in the screening room of her equally decaying mansion.

But from the moment she enters, Scherzinger takes hold of the role and shakes it into her own shape, delivering her signature song With One Look like a Satanic incantation, her voice swooping and soaring on wings of witchcraft. “I am big!” she roars at the young screenwriter Joe Gillis (Tom Francis), “It’s the pictures that got small.”

Wreathed in smoke and darkness, she is a predator in search of a new lover, a new life and a ’comeback’ – “I hate that word. It’s a return!”. Jamie Lloyd’s production is all film noir gloom and haunted shadows, jostling with giant close-ups from hand held cameras in which the actors are revealed in unforgiving detail, burnished with sweat.

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The smoky, haze-filled stage mimics Billy Wilder’s movie more than any previous production, set in what seems more like an abandoned sound studio than gothic mansion.

Propelled by Andrew Lloyd Webber’s music, Don Black’s lyrics and Christopher Hampton’s book, this re-imagining is sparsely furnished – no grand staircase for Norma – but the atmosphere is tense and dangerous.

Aside from a handful of dancers who form an impressionistic idea of sharp, hip Hollywood, the four major characters dominate the evening. Scherzinger rules, a delusional diva with a titanic voice and a simmering sexuality.

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Francis pitches the cool cynicism of the hapless Gillis just right and displays enormous courage in a sequence that sees him walk out of the theatre and onto the street followed by a camera while singing the title song.

Grace Hodgett Young as Betty Schaeffer, the smart girl who falls for him but fails to save him from his fate, is intelligent and moving.

But it is David Thaxton as Max Von Mayerling, Norma’s faithful retainer, who anchors the melodrama in emotional reality. It’s an evening of dark delights. Shame about the staircase, though.

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