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Sean Hayes, best known as the bitchily bright-eyed Jack McFarland in sitcom Will and Grace, transforms himself here into Oscar Levant, the depressive, drug-addicted pianist, actor and wit who was a mainstay of midcentury US talk shows. Doug Wright’s play is a fast-paced, highly polished, zinger-packed vehicle for his astonishing performance, which culminates in an electrifyingly expressive live rendition of Rhapsody in Blue, Levant’s showcase piece, written by his mentor and spectral tormentor, George Gershwin.
Sure, the play is schematic in its discussion of genius and madness and the boundaries of taste in television, and in the way it tees up one-liners for Oscar to thwack home. It’s also part of a tendency in American entertainment to endlessly regurgitate and re-masticate its own past. Audiences love that on Broadway, where Hayes won a Best Actor Tony, and maybe we’re growing to love it more here too. On press night, Hayes got that most un-English accolade, a round of applause on his entrance.
It's 1958, and Jack Paar (Ben Rappaport, also from the original Chicago/NY production) is about to host his first live talk show from Hollywood, as opposed to New York, for NBC. His guests include Jayne Mansfield and his personal favourite, Levant. Network exec Bob Sarnoff (Richard Katz) is worried that the erratic raconteur will say something off-colour about his mental health, religion, politics or sex. Well, ho ho, so he should: because what no one yet knows is that Oscar is on a four-hour pass from the local booby hatch, wangled by his long-suffering wife June (a wintrily exasperated Rosalie Craig), who had him committed there in the first place. Will he control himself? Whaddya think??
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During the build-up Paar, Katz, June and Katz’s nepo-baby nephew Max all reinforce how brilliant, how broken and how volatile Oscar is. Then, ta-daa, he slumps in, looking as June puts it “like Eeyore in a cheap suit”, and accompanied by Alvin, a black orderly. Alvin is there to keep Oscar off the drugs in his bag and also to provide some context about social privilege and cultural appropriation in 1950s America: Daniel Adeosun transcends the functionality of the role.
In fact, even though June gets the odd humdinger (“marriage is a matter of commitment... who commits who first”), everyone else on stage is a mere feed for Oscar and the show is built around Hayes’s performance. His face is scrunched into a scowl, his head twists on his neck, and his body is racked with OCD tics and twitches. It’s a bravura physical incarnation even before we get to the witticisms, some of which come direct from Oscar’s real-life appearances on Paar’s show. A politician is someone who “will double cross that bridge when he comes to it”. Schizophrenia is “better than dining alone”. A line about Marilyn Monroe converting to Judaism to marry Arthur Miller brings the house down and gets the dander of the moral majority up.
IRL, Oscar was a talented composer and a brilliant interpreter of others’ music, always in Gershwin’s shadow, a charismatic second fiddle to Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire in film. Sure, he shone on TV but Wright surely oversells him as a seer using humour to tell hard truths: “Barrabas slipping on banana skin so we don’t have to”. The deployment of the dapper ghost of Gershwin (David Burnett) is a glib device. But director Lisa Peterson moves things along with apparently effortless briskness: the whole enterprise feels as burnished and streamlined as Rachel Hauck’s gorgeous midcentury set of glowing wood, designer chairs, old-school TV cameras and flashing “On Air” signs.
The arc of the play builds towards the musical performance Oscar doesn’t want to give, then gives his all, for which Hayes deserves all his flowers. After this, the finale is a diminuendo. Oscar (and by extension, Hayes) has been Hamlet, the Clown and the Player King but he exits the stage as Rosencranz. Or Guildenstern. That’s showbiz, folks.
To 21 Sept, barbican.org.uk.
