The 2022-23 Broadway season ends with a trio of productions--Prima Facie, Summer 1976, and Good Night, Oscar--featuring dazzling star-level performances. Sean Hayes delivers one of the most powerful and versatile turns in a straight Broadway play in many seasons in Doug Wright’s somewhat flawed, but ultimately absorbing and entertaining play, Good Night, Oscar, now at the Belasco after a run at Chicago’s Goodman Theater.
Wright continues his streak of plays and musicals about real-life figures and stories such as I Am My Own Wife, War Paint, Hands on a Hard Body, and Grey Gardens. This time his biographical gaze turns to Oscar Levant, celebrated wit, movie musical second banana, composer, concert pianist, and famous hypochondriac and mental case. Levant’s schtick consisted of wry cynicism and ribbing his illnesses—imagined and real. He was a dryly comic personality playing the sidekick in several classic films such as “Romance on the High Seas,” “An American in Paris,” “The Band Wagon,” and “The Barkleys of Broadway.” His brilliance as a musician and songwriter were overshadowed by that of his best friend George Gershwin whose songs and concert pieces Levant endlessly played instead of his own works.
Wright takes an actual event—Levant’s live appearance on “The Tonight Show” starring Jack Paar (smooth Ben Rappaport) in 1958—and turns it into a searing portrait of Levant’s dazzling talent and crushing self-loathing. Wright raises the stakes by having Levant out on a pass from a mental facility. His long-suffering wife (sturdily supportive Emily Bergl) has finagled his temporary absence with a lie (she told the doctors their daughter was graduating high school) in order to have her neurotic husband prove his worth to himself and an audience of millions. Meanwhile, Paar is under pressure from the network, represented by president Bob Sarnoff (properly stuffy Peter Grosz) to keep the loose-tongued Levant on a short leash. To add to the mayhem, just before airtime, Oscar downs a medicine chest full of pills, stolen from the supplies of his attendant Alvin (Marchant Davis doing his best with a functional role).
Hayes, heretofore best known as the hyper-kinetic, outrageously out Jack on the long-running “Will and Grace” sitcom, is equally over the top here but also completely believable as the jittery celebrity. His physical life perfectly suits the frayed Levant’s desperate state. He seems ready to jump out of his skin at any moment. Barely able to hold his frayed nerves together, he spits out witticisms and one-liners like a marksman using his jokes as bullets to demolish his demons.
As if that weren’t enough, Hayes caps the evening with a concert-level, idiosyncratic piano solo of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, conveying not only Levant’s interpretative genius but also the character’s insecurities and broiling inner conflicts. My only quarrel with this otherwise superb portrayal is Hayes’s attempt to sound like Levant which comes across as a slurred Jimmy Stewart imitation.
While the central characterization by actor and playwright is spot-on, the supporting figures come across as devices to further the plot, provide exposition or a foil for Levant’s unconventional, scorching humor. (As noted, the actors are all fine in their limning.) Sarnoff represents the staid, milquetoast attitude of 1950s mass media just so Oscar can tear him down when the network prez cautions the unstable guest star to steer clear of any controversial topics. Studio gofer and Sarnoff’s nephew Max (very funny Alex Wyse) is a rabid movie fan ready to supply facts about Levant’s career. Alvin just happens to have a decent singing voice so he can croon a bit of his patient’s most memorable ballad “Blame It on My Youth” as evidence of Levant’s blighted talent. Wright even has the ghost of Gershwin (dapper John Zdrojeski, glibly dismissing Levant’s gifts as second-rate) appear in two extended and overlong fantasy sequences (the second is largely unnecessary).
Director Lisa Peterson’s staging balances the laughs and pathos, hitting the right notes in sequence for a symphony of sympathy for Levant’s tortured condition. Rachel Hauck’s versatile set creates the right atmosphere of 1950s style and glamour while Emilio Sosa’s costumes carefully define the characters’ emotional and social status. Though Good Night has its sharps and flats, the naturals, particularly Hayes’ memorable performance, make up for any off notes.
