Good Night, Oscar
AN internet acquaintance constantly criticises me. He tells me off for name-dropping, being crass, and making jokes.
I ignore him and think he should lighten up. Ultimately, we’re from very different generations.
Anyway, comedy serves as a pressure valve, providing a brief escape from the daily challenges and existential dread that we face.
“Strip away the phoney tinsel of Hollywood and you find the real tinsel underneath,” piano virtuoso Oscar Levant says, eviscerating the industry that made him.
Back in 1958, Levant left a psychiatric ward to appear on live television. That’s not strictly what happens in Good Night, Oscar, but no matter. This is showbiz, not a Wikipedia page. And like its subject, the play takes liberties. It riffs, it improvises, it collapses timelines for effect.
But it always lands on something emotionally and theatrically true — a kind of cracked honesty that Levant himself would appreciate.
Sean Hayes, best known as Jack from Will & Grace, commands the stage. His cigarettes clenched between frantic fingers. This isn’t some twee impersonation. It’s a full role, writhing, full-body possession.
Hayes gives a physical performance that flirts with caricature but never crosses the line. You can’t look away. He times Levant’s lacerating bon mots with the precision of a jazz soloist — arch, caustic, and funny. Some of the zingers are greatest hits (“There’s a fine line between genius and insanity — I have erased this line”) and yes, the Marilyn Monroe gag gets another outing. But Hayes makes them feel like thoughts being formed in the moment, not recited. Tensions on and off-air.
Beneath the mid-century retro gloss — the chic furnishings, the immaculate suits (Emilio Sosa nails it) — Good Night, Oscar is asking: what do we do with people like Levant? Those too brilliant, too broken, too unpredictable to play nice? Then and now.
Playwright Doug Wright doesn’t offer easy answers. Nor does director Lisa Peterson, who keeps the pace snappy but makes room for devastating stillness. The story takes place in real time: one hour before Levant’s segment on Jack Paar’s NBC talk show, now relocated from New York to Hollywood. Paar (Ben Rappaport, gleefully exasperated) is excited; the network is not. Levant, after all, might say anything — about God, politics, Freud, or himself. That’s the thrill. And the danger. And the show.
Part of the evening’s success, admittedly, lies in co-star Rosalie Craig as wife June, Levant’s elegant, granite-hearted companion who had him committed. Here, she has swung a four-hour psychiatric day pass so that her husband can perform — and, perhaps, remind himself who he is.
June is loving, exasperated, enigmatic. You sense a lifetime of rehearsed negotiations behind every line. She knows this might destroy him, but what else is there? He needs an audience. Maybe we all do.
Anyway. Hypochondriac Levant’s actual demons are never made clinical. He doesn’t arrive with a diagnosis. He just talks. Endlessly. Brilliantly. Self-loathingly. He obsesses over his mother, over his stalled music career, over Gershwin — George Gershwin — who literally appears to him (a suave David Burnett), or rather Oscar’s heightened, unreliable memory of the composer. They talk. They argue. He haunts Oscar, inspires him, possibly ruins him.
Rachel Hauck’s lavish set slyly collapses the border between the dressing room and the sound stage. In the end, it is a padded cell — as if entertainment itself might be the asylum.
We move to a vast studio where bulky cameras observe the actors from every angle. The line between performance and breakdown gets blurrier as Levant hurtles toward his moment.
The real payoff comes in the classy production’s final act, when we finally get to see classically trained Haye’s seven-minute performance of Rhapsody in Blue at a Steinway — it lands like a majestic and jagged thunderclap. He plays live.
It’s not just a flourish. It’s a revelation.
Some of this is schematic — the structure creaks a little under the weight of its ideas. Its message is one of music as an instrument of survival: but it’s damn good theatre. Be more Oscar.
Comedy has become impossible. Good Night, Oscar is a theatrical, tender-hearted success.