THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
By Doug Wright
Barbican Theatre, Silk Street, London EC2Y 8DS until September 21, 2025
Oscar who? As a Golden Age of Hollywood movie-buff, on first hearing about this piece I noted this as a 'must-see' but wondered how it could work for today's audience, other than a historical curiosity about a tangential character in some great movies such as An American in Paris. This exuberant and witty piece has proved me wrong.
It began life at Chicago's Goodman Theatre, transferred to Broadway where Sean Hayes deservedly won a Tony for it, and it's now arrived in London for a limited summer run in a very lavish production. Its arrival coincides with the media industry debacle around the firing of Stephen Colbert, which took place as part of a wider capitulation by CBS and its corporate owners to the Trump regime, so suddenly it has a contemporary twist. Chat shows as targets.
For it's about the nature of media and the key role humorists play in challenging societies norms, be they the jester in classical plays of old or the latest, perky, stand-up doing the rounds of the late-night talk shows, shows which now serve (rightly or wrongly) as the secular pulpits of today.
It's 1958, and Jack Paar (Ben Rappaport, also transferred from Broadway) hosts The Tonight Show on NBC (still running, hosted by Jimmy Fallon), the hottest late-night talk show on television. His favorite guest is Oscar Levant, the Hollywood actor, concert pianist, and infamous raconteur. Levant's barbs, emanating through a fog of cigarette smoke, elevated Paar's show but for NBC chief Bob Sarnoff (Richard Katz), they were too fancy, daresay elitist. Sarnoff wants to impose a uniform blandness to satisfy both advertisers and the various 'decency' activists who they find themselves beholden to.
When we meet him, Levant has been in a mental health facility, put there by his long suffering wife June (the great Rosalie Craig looking very Park Avenue lady who lunches) and she devises a secret plan to get him a four-hour furlough (which was allowed), smuggle him to the NBC studio and allow him one more chat show appearance in order to keep his career and their marriage going. Parr goes along with it, but they have to keep it from Sarnoff. Levant arrives, worse for wear, on the tight leash of a prim medical orderly Alvin (Daniel Adeosun) and at the studio they're looked after by star-struck production assistant Max (Eric Sirakian). Will the show go on?
Central to the success of it is the star wattage of Sean Hayes as Levant, for whom it was a dream project. Universally loved for TV's Will and Grace, a great example of a decidedly mainstream show which quietly broke boundaries, we know he has comic timing to die for, but here he brings a poignancy and gravitas to the difficult lead role. He plays a self-destructive artist with mental health issues – hypochondria, OCD, mild schizophrenia – and a drug addiction caused by the misguided treatments for the former. For an actor the challenge is to avoid it becoming a one note performance because such characters rarely 'develop'. Hayes, for the most part, greatly surmounts this.
Essentially this is a chamber piece which would have worked in any bijou theater but what you will remember about this (apart from Hayes) are the stunning production values. In an era when full sets have become rare and exotic, Rachel Hauck's beautiful period recreation of a 1950s Hollywood studio is a stunner. The main broadcast studio has insulation which makes it resemble a padded cell and it fills the cavernous Barbican stage, greatly enhanced by the stunning lighting design by Carolina Ortiz Herrera and Ben Stanton. It has all the scale of an opera. As happens on Broadway the set gets a round of applause as does the first entrance of The Star. "Ah, the old style" as Winnie would say in Beckett's Happy Days.
The other coup-de-theatre is Hayes' astonishing piano virtuosity in a complex extended sequence where he battles with 'Rhapsody in Blue'. It's part of a subplot which explores Levant's co-dependent relationship with George Gershwin (David Burnett), whom he resented and venerated in equal measure and which forms part of a drug-fueled dream sequence.
Lisa Peterson's direction is sharp throughout and draws out the contemporary themes without laboring them. Levant's honesty about his mental health and addiction traumas are familiar today, but at the time they were beyond the pale. Wright's script mines this pain really well but leavens it all superbly with Levant's stream of 'bon mots', which keep it all wonderfully afloat.
