EXCLUSIVE: Nicole Scherzinger, recently anointed Best Actress In A Musical at the Tony Awards for her powerhouse performance in  director Jamie Lloyd’s production of Sunset Boulevard, tells Deadline she’ll “put on the show of a lifetime” with a solo concert at London’s hallowed Royal Albert Hall in October.

The award-winner promises that the concert in one of London’s architectural crown jewels on October 6 “will be a show that audiences won’t be disappointed in, hopefully.” The general on-sale ticket date is July 11.

Already announced are two dates that will follow her Royal Albert Hall debut. She plays Carnegie Hall, on October 8,  followed by a performance at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles on October 30.

Scherzinger, on Zoom from her Sunset Blvd dressing room at the St. James Theatre on W.44th St, adds that performing at the Royal Albert Hall “is a dream come true for me and I can’t wait. And I’ll put on the show of a lifetime. Really, I truly will, I promise you that,” she coos to this column.

Working with Lloyd for the past three years on the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, she says, has been an “exceptional experience,” as she describes their collaboration as “something really outside of the box.”

It was a turning point, she continues, “because I felt like most of my life I’ve just been put inside of a box, so I was excited to be able to collaborate with a visionary and a dreamer, because that’s how I am.”

Lloyd gave her freedom, she says, and “a safe place” to create. 

Unhesitatingly, she says that she does her best work “when there are no boundaries on me.”

The Royal Albert Hall is a familiar venue to Scherzinger. It’s where she accepted her Olivier Award  for Sunset Blvd. She’d  previously been nominated for an Olivier Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Musical for her Grizabella in Cats at the London Palladium 11 years ago.

Her relationship with the historic venue goes back even further, Scherzinger says, to when she got to perform “Baby Love,” released as a promotional single for her 2007 debut solo album at the Swarovski Fashion Rocks extravaganza in aid of The Prince’s Trust.

Alicia Keys and Patti LaBelle were among the other stars. Whitney Houston, her childhood favorite, was one of the special guest presenters. “I was on for two minutes,” she protests, guffawing.

But this October 6 will be the “first” time that she has played the Royal Albert Hall in her own right, she says, with a fierce sense of pride.

“I’ve been preparing and fighting and working my whole life to have these firsts,” she cries.

The English audiences have always been so good to her. “They believed in me from the Dolls, they rocked with me in The X Factor UK , cried with me in Sunset Blvd… I feel like I am an adopted Brit,” she declares. 

When Queen Victoria opened the Royal Albert Hall in 1871, its grandeur and ambition were rightly celebrated. “It’s just extraordinary,” Scherzinger says with a sigh of contentment. “It was always my dream to perform there and I am so over-the-moon that I get to have my own show, my own night at the Royal Albert Hall and just breathe my own life and magic into that space.”

A whisper of an idea to do a concert began six years ago when she performed a tiny show at Django, the jazz bar in the basement of New York’s Roxy Hotel. “The industry wasn’t taking me seriously allowing me to do this type of stuff and style and music,“ she says explaining why she put on a show herself. 

Then she took  the nascent production to small venues in London and L.A. There was a 10-piece band but for the new, much bigger concerts, she’d love to be able to incorporate a string section.

During its development she was “super” inspired by the Chita Rivera concerts she’d seen over the years.

There will be a lot of musical theater songs at the Royal Albert Hall, Scherzinger exclaims. ”This is the lane I’m doing now but a lot of people don’t realize that that’s how I grew up,” she says, adding that musical theater show tunes are “in my blood.”

One of her favourite number’s to sing is Stephen Sondheim’s Follies torch song “Losing My Mind.” Smiling, she says, “I  can’t wait to share that song.”

When I ask her to recall the songs she heard on the record player growing up with her family, she growls, “Jeezus, Baz!”

Playfully, she adds, “I’m not that old! A record player, really?

“I grew up with cassette tapes!”

She has a record player now though…

Scherzinger, born in Hawaii but raised in Louisville, Kentucky, attended a youth performing arts high school, and got to see her first musicals, and gave her first singing performances, at the Kentucky Center for the Arts.

She played Dorothy in The Wiz and Ti Moune in Once on This Island. She adored listening to Whitney Houston, Billie Holliday Alanis Morissette and Ella Fitzgerald, plus she was hooked on musical theater. 

One day, she heard Stephen Sondheim’s “Losing My Mind” torch-song from Follies. “I found that song when I was 14 or 15 years old and I had a connection with it,” she says softly.

Lighting a fire

Those artists and their music lit a fire inside of her that continued to her Pussycat Dolls days right through to when she took the stage for the first preview of Sunset Blvd at the Savoy Theatre when a fireball of energy cascaded from her into the auditorium the moment she sang. I sat there mesmerized.

Scherzinger wasn’t best pleased when Lloyd initially broached the idea of Norma Desmond to her. But overtime she was persuaded and found herself attracted to  what she refers to as “all the ugly parts, where you have to look at fear, and your insecurities, and  your anxiety, and your worries and loneliness and your abandonment and just bring all of that to the table … as well as your self…and this was the dream role that came along and it’s a great lesson for anyone: You’ve got to keep your mind open because I did not think that I’d want to do this role, I would never pick this role  for myself. Jamie Lloyd dreamed this role for me and it’s been the most unexpected dream role of my life. Its been a Pandora’s Box …it’s opened me up to show all the colors of me.”

Scherzinger recently celebrated her 47th birthday. “Imagine having all of that in you all of these years and not being able to share that yet. I was just waiting and preparing for the right opportunity and this was it.”

How hard will it be to bid Norma Desmond farewell when the run ends on July 20, I ask her?

It will be difficult, she readily concedes, “because she’s such a big part of me  and helped me to evolve and to grow…”

Doing the role, she suggests, has been like a “healing process.”

But she’s not totally giving Norma up. “I’m taking her with me,” she says with an air of gaiety in her voice.

Norma will always be with her, “and the things I create,” she adds.

One of her dreams, she reveals, is to make a film version of the Sunset Blvd musical. “Hopefully, it’s not the end of this. This chapter of my life, these past two-and-a-half to three years have served me well and I, hopefully, have served others well through it.”

There’s nothing concrete on the film. “It’s just a dream,” she clarifies.

Ahead of Scherzinger’s exit from Sunset Blvd, at the end of its run, Netflix talent show Building the Band – she’s one of the judges with Kelly Rowland, and the late Liam Payne – will premiere on July 9, with episodes released in batches across three weeks. 

The show brings together 50 singers who must form six bands based on their musical talent, without ever meeting face to face, at least initially. It was shot some time back in Manchester, UK. “They’re calling it The Voice and Love Is Blind in one,” she says.

Before scooting away from our Zoom to prepare for her performance on Wednesday, Scherzinger takes a moment to offer a fond salute to Lloyd and the cast of Evita that’s just officially opened at the London Palladium to mostly, but not all, thrilling raves at the London Palladium.

Rachel Zegler won a raft of glowing notices and is “an extraordinary talent,” says Scherzinger admiringly. 

Her friend, Diego Andres Rodriguez, who plays the role of Che, the Everyman, in Evita, is, she chuckles, like “my  brother from another mother,” having spent months working together in the Broadway cast of Sunset Blvd – the show that has scorchingly revitalized her career.