Oscar Levant, the troubled midcentury musician and wag, often said he had erased “the fine line between genius and madness.”
hello,”good night oscar, an unconvincing biographical fantasia that opened Monday at the Belasco Theater. But in the evidence of the characters as written, especially the evidence that Sean Hayes impersonates in an accurate but dark performance, Levant cheats it enough to erase the line.
Admittedly, Doug Wright’s play doesn’t do justice to the genius of the joke. Instead, it offers Levant’s most famous spray of cynicism, like about Elizabeth Taylor. And instead of dramatizing how great the Levant was, it’s just repeating that. “America’s greatest wit.”
Great rave reviews, but what we see in director Lisa Peterson’s work is far from that. Levant looks less than brilliant, but sick.
Pathos is a less dramatic engine, but Wright works very hard to raise the stakes, even if it’s fictional. In 1958 Sweeps His Day, “The Tonight Show” featuring host Jack Paar makes its West Coast debut. Paar’s marquee guest and sex symbol girlfriend Jayne Mansfield and Ventriloquist Senor Wences, is a Levant who has not arrived two hours before showtime. NBC president Robert Sarnoff threatened to replace him with popular bandleader Xavier Cugat.
But while Sarnoff (Peter Gross) sees Levant as unreliable and neurotic and unappealing to networks and audiences, Pearl (Ben Rapaport) sees him as unreliable and nervous. sees an artist whose ailments are precisely his strengths. He’s a national identity, a man who hopes Americans will catch “saying on TV things you know well that you can’t say on TV.” He’s good at grading. No wonder Paar calls him his favorite psychotic patient.
That line is no joke. It’s thanks to the scheming of Levant’s wife, June (Emily Her Burgle, excellent), that he was able to obtain a four-hour pass from the facility that Oscar now calls home. When he finally arrived at the studio, with a grumpy orderly (Marchánt Davis) in tow, he was nervous, rumpled and grumpy. June calls him “Eeyore in a Cheap Suit”.
No longer the adorable sprite of “Will and Grace,” Hayes carefully studies Levantine mannerisms, many of which are the result of years of addiction to painkillers. is less a character’s habitat than a non-stop loop of perfectly rendered facial tics, trembling hands, and obsessive gestures. It targets everything that crosses his path, including himself. Once you pass this fence of behavior, your inner life becomes almost impenetrable.
To address the built-in problem of revealing such trapped souls, and in the manner of period psychiatric melodramas such as “Now Voyager” and “Bigger Than Life,” Wright occasionally revisits the Levant. Gives a break in reality and hallucinations. Most of them have to do with George Gershwin. He was Levant’s friend and benefactor, and although he died twenty years ago, he is still a sort of Oedipal rival. “I’m deadly afraid to fail,” says Gershwin’s charming ghost (John Zdrojeski). “But you? Never mind.”
Whether or not Levant cared, it is true that by Gershwin’s standards he failed. Today few people remember him. Therefore, a vast range of dramatically questionable expositions must be deployed to fill the gaps. “I know all the critics say your best performance is in An American in Paris. ‘That musical sequence — the concerto in F — is a show stopper!'”
When a character starts letting other characters know something they obviously already know, and (again, as is often the case here) starts ranting like crazy at mild jokes, something is wrong.
What it is becomes clear in the second half of 100 minutes of play when Levant finally sits down for live coverage after proving that the first half was simply tiring. The music starts, the curtains go up, the lights come on, and he’s still pissed off. Firing one-liners, especially nasty ones, is not a sign of special genius. Thousands of comedians do it. The fact that the one-liners come from men who are clearly in serious trouble doesn’t make them particularly funny either. To me, I see Hayes as the Levant— Like seeing Levant’s own kinescope — It’s incredibly sad.
The weight of reinforcing the point of the play, therefore, weighs heavily on Levant’s pianism— and HayesDirector Peterson has been building it from the ground up. A nesting shoebox on Rachel Hauck’s handsome set represents Paar’s office, and when it’s removed, Levant’s dressing room disappears entirely to reveal a fully packed TV with Steinway Center Stage. A studio will appear. Hayes steps up to it and proceeds to play a seven-minute excerpt from “Rhapsody in Blue” after a final humiliating battle with Gershwin’s Ghost.
fine.
I don’t know how to give “Goodnight, Oscar” a satisfying form, even if it was shocking. I also want to solve problems raised in theatrical terms in theatrical terms. Wright follows this principle in his 2003 Pulitzer Prize-winning play I Am My Own Wife and in his version of the unconventional musical, Gray Gardens. organic conclusion.
“Good night, Oscar” can’t get there, but I understand the problem. The coda that follows the concerto may not tie together the larger themes of genius and madness, but it does resolve some relationships in the way you’d expect from a soap opera set in 1958. Jokes, which were once just origami with words, are now a way to evade interpersonal censorship and evade painful truths.
Only in the last few minutes can you see the soul of the Levant. It’s not a soul made for television, but that’s how most people of his time knew him. It may be. 1965 episode of “What’s My Line” “Have you ever taken great advantage of the various illnesses you’ve had?” He replied, “My health is a public concern.” The blindfolded panel immediately knew who he was.
Only after “Good night, Oscar.”
good night oscar
At the Belasco Theater in Manhattan until August 27th. goodnightoscar.comRunning time: 1 hour 40 minutes.
