Nicole Scherzinger review – raunchy gags and dazzling stylis...

As an impatient slow-clap echoes around west London’s iconic Royal Albert Hall – the star is running 45 minutes late – a seemingly nonplussed Nicole Scherzinger suddenly appears in spotlight, drenched in sparkly diamonds. Having built a career out of overcoming obstacles – breaking out of the shackles of both a girlband (the 55m-selling Pussycat Dolls) and various TV talent show judging panels – a little polite animosity isn’t going to rain on her parade. Later, during a rendition of Maybe This Time from Cabaret, just as hope overcomes despair, she introduces the crowd to her friends “Lawrence and Tony”, AKA the awards she won for her rapturously-received turn in Sunset Boulevard.

Billed as An Evening with Nicole Scherzinger, tonight’s aim is to fuse all of her career tangents. Split into two acts, the first focuses mainly on musicals, from Funny Girl to Follies, plus a standard cover of Diamonds Are Forever. More memorable than the songs, however, are the in-between chats, with Scherzinger’s chaotic humour pushed to the fore. At one point, when discussing her heritage, she says “I also have some English in me …” before raising an eyebrow, pointing at her fiance and adding “his name is Tom”. By the time she shuffles off for the interval, having been onstage for less than 50 minutes, there’s a sense of having witnessed a bizarre standup routine.

Act two changes that. She tears through I Am What I Am, her magnificent voice ricocheting overhead, and receives extended standing ovations for Sunset Boulevard’s With One Look and As If We Never Said Goodbye, which she greets like old friends. There’s also a new original song, about growing impatient with a long-term partner’s inability to pop the question. Scherzinger, aware of her esteemed environs, introduces it by listing the great wordsmiths of our age: “There’s Keats, there’s Shakespeare, there’s Scherzinger,” she says, before announcing the song’s title, Bullshit. A vampy, retro soul stomper with a country twang in the chorus, it sounds promising.

For the encore, she suddenly sheds the floor-length dresses and demure standards for a Pussycat Dolls medley performed in a lace jumpsuit with full choreography. The stylistic whiplash is so great you worry that some audience members may need neck braces. As the crisp electropop of her 2011 solo No 1 Don’t Hold Your Breath fills the room, everyone’s on their feet, borderline dumbstruck at what they’ve witnessed. Bizarre, brilliant, fierce and occasionally frustrating, it’s Scherzinger in a nutshell.

• Nicole Scherzinger plays Carnegie Hall, New York, 8 October; and Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, 30 October