Good Night, Oscar
Opening Night: April 24, 2023
Theater: Belasco Theatre
Website: goodnightoscar.com
It’s 1958 and Jack Paar is hosting “The Tonight Show.” He’s booked his favorite guest, a pundit as hilarious as he is unpredictable: Oscar Levant, who once famously proclaimed, “There’s a fine line between genius and insanity, and I have erased that line.” In 90 short minutes, Oscar will have audiences howling, censors scrambling, and – when it’s all over – America will be just a little less innocent than she was before.
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April 24, 2023
Fulsome praise, but what we see in the director Lisa Peterson’s production is a far cry from any of it. Mostly it’s just a cry; Levant doesn’t seem brilliant but ill.
April 24, 2023
Entering the Broadway production of “Good Night, Oscar,” I knew nothing about playwright Doug Wright’s titular figure, Oscar Levant, but I left caring for the crotchety old man as if he were my own family. Such is the magic of “Good Night, Oscar” and, specifically, actor Sean Hayes’ virtuosic turn as the accomplished Jewish pianist and talk show personality riddled with various mental illnesses.
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April 24, 2023
Good Night, Oscar, the new bio-play by Doug Wright (I Am My Own Wife) starring Sean Hayes (Will & Grace) as Levant, goes a long way in introducing this long-ago talk-show staple to modern audiences. Whether it justifies the effort is considerably less certain.
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April 24, 2023
Beside the technical achievement of smoothly executing a piano rendition of a difficult opus, Hayes simultaneously manages an acting performance that highlights the excruciating crucible of the moment: A man high on pills, struggling against himself and the resentment he feels at being trotted out, once again, to play a song he both loves and wishes to move beyond. It is a bravura moment and a supreme accomplishment for Hayes as a performer.
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April 24, 2023
In a case of life imitating art imitating life, Sean Hayes’ stellar take on the virtuosic, self-destructive pianist Oscar Levant in Good Night, Oscar matches its setup: a captivating presence stuck in a waiting room.
READ THE REVIEWApril 24, 2023
While Hayes’ Levant is an acerbic, self-destructive, sad-sack of a human being, there’s nothing to hate or even dislike about him. Or Good Night, Oscar. Sean Hayes is just too easy to love.
READ THE REVIEWApril 24, 2023
But the second star is Jacqueline E. Lawton, the production’s dramaturg. Lawton (along with dramaturg Neena Arndt of the Goodman Theatre, where the play premiered last year) ensures that the show balances its dips into the fantastical with historical truths, a difficult tone deftly achieved in Lisa Peterson’s adroit production. If only Broadway would embrace the lobby display to immerse audiences even more in Oscar Levant’s world.
READ THE REVIEWApril 24, 2023
All in all, it’s a spectacularly intense and unstinting performance, a Broadway tour-de-force wherein the honest work bespeaks of a beautiful homage to this phenomenally talented real-life character, a perennial second banana previously in danger of being forgotten in the passage of time.
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April 24, 2023
That Sean Hayes transforms in the new play “Good Night, Oscar,” there is no doubt. Whether the end result is a human being or a bag of tricks depends on your taste for ham.
April 24, 2023
I would not recommend showing up an hour and twenty minutes into a Broadway show, but it sure would be nice if you could do that at Good Night, Oscar.
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April 24, 2023
The play, directed by Lisa Peterson, is a very slow, low burn, whose ultimate conflagrations of both humor and music—care of a bravura, piano-playing Hayes—are dazzling. However, the play takes time to locate its drive and punch.
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April 24, 2023
A towering comedy that casts a long shadow of melancholy, it’s a beautiful tribute to one of America’s great wits and the woman who sustained him.
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