“I just knew in an instant that was Joe Gillis,” Lloyd said in a phone interview. That Francis looked more like a noir hunk than a typical musical theater actor helped. (“He wasn’t in any way glossy,” Lloyd said. “He looked a real guy.”) And while Francis isn’t naturally cynical — or naturally a baritone — he let the words and music take him there, with a voice that could go barroom smoky or church-bell clear, which convinced Lloyd and, later, Lloyd Webber.
“I mean, he’s a really good singer,” Lloyd Webber called to tell me.
FRANCIS WAS JUST 22 during those auditions, and 23 when rehearsals began. Scherzinger, who plays the fading star Norma Desmond, remembered meeting him and thinking: “He’s so young. Then I realized the whole cast was so young. I was like, ‘Wow, I really feel like Norma Desmond now, because I feel so old.’”
The show opened in London in the fall of 2023 to rapturous reviews. Talk of a New York transfer was immediate. A month into the run, Lloyd came into Francis’s dressing room and asked him if he would like to go to New York. Francis had known that Scherzinger was a lock; he hadn’t thought that Lloyd would take him as well. But the chemistry between the two of them was undeniable. Offstage, this manifests as a brother-sister closeness. (“He’s a good boy, and I love him,” Scherzinger said.) Onstage, it’s a lot steamier. Lloyd wanted them both.
Francis didn’t have to think about it. “I was like, ‘Hell yes, a thousand times over,’” he said.
The show’s Broadway theater, the St. James, was larger than the London one, and the outside jaunt — during which Francis sings the title number while being filmed live — trickier, though Francis insists that the crowds that gather to watch him are typically polite. (Those crowds are more rapacious at the stage door. Francis doesn’t mind it. “It’s quite a nice feeling knowing you’ve made someone’s day,” he said.) But the demands of the show wore at him. He sings or speaks for perhaps 90 minutes of it. And toward the close of the show he has to scream, gutturally.
“It’s not a sustained note kind of scream, it needs to sound like you’ve been shot,” he said.