MANIFESTING HER STAR TURN

Tony winner Nicole Scherzinger calls the stage her true love

- MIKAEL WOOD POP MUSIC CRITIC

SHANE SINCLAIR Getty Images FORMER Pussycat Dolls leader Nicole Scherzinger will perform Thursday night at Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Four months after she won a Tony Award for leading actress in a musical for her blood-soaked portrayal of Norma Desmond in “Sunset Boulevard,” Nicole Scherzinger is sitting in the room where she willed her triumph into being.

“I manifested it right here,” she says as she waves an arm around the cozy cabaret tucked inside the Sun Rose hotel on — where else? — Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood.

In 2022, the singer and actor best known as the leader of the Pussycat Dolls put on a series of intimate concerts at the Sun Rose designed to showcase the musical-theater skills she’d been honing since she was a kid growing up in Louisville, Ky. Word got around the entertainment industry, and soon Scherzinger was cast as the star of a radically stripped-down revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber's early-'90s melodrama about a washed-up (and murderous) movie star.

The musical, directed by Jamie Lloyd as a kind of blunt-force digital nightmare, played London's West End before moving last year to Broadway for a 10-month run that brought Scherzinger rave reviews along with theater's highest honor. Ahead of a concert scheduled for Thursday night at Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles, the 47-year-old looked back on the experience as she sipped hot water and munched discs of raw ginger. She wore a Gucci sweatsuit and heels.

Your gig here was you saying, “Put me in, Coach.”

Basically I was telling people, “Hey, can I audition for this movie musical? Can I audition for this live TV musical?” People wouldn't even give me a shot — they only knew me from the pop side. So I was like, OK, let me educate everyone on who I am and what my real love language is, which is the stage.

Give me an example of something you weren’t allowed to audition for.