The Picture of Dorian Gray
Opening Night: March 27, 2025
Theater: Music Box Theatre
Website: doriangrayplay.com
READ THE REVIEWS:
March 27, 2025
It’s not technology itself that leaves “Dorian Gray” feeling so brittle where “Vanya” is a tear fest. It’s that the technology dominates all other values, including Wilde’s, often denying the human contact, and contract, that are at the heart of theater’s effectiveness.
READ THE REVIEW
March 28, 2025
The mounting is an incredible accomplishment — for Snook’s performance and Williams’ tech innovation, yes, but also for its reclamation of a queerness the publicly shamed Wilde couldn’t lean all the way into. This production is his delicious vengeance.
READ THE REVIEW
March 27, 2025
Despite some fancy camera work and close-ups, this production only goes skin-deep. Wilde himself was an aficionado of artifice, which makes the irony here all the more painful, since this production cannot find any depth in its surfaces.
READ THE REVIEW
March 27, 2025
Williams’ cine-style quickly grows distancing and repetitive. Too often, Snook herself is out of view, available only by video; a few times she even leaves the stage entirely, leaving us alone with her pre-recorded selves. These choices suck the “liveness” out of the event. That distance is further heightened by the video work’s distractingly high frame rate video—the quality is so unsettlingly crisp, to the point of wanting to grab a remote and turn off motion smoothing.
READ THE REVIEW
March 27, 2025
Fast, clever, delicious, and performed by Snook with the giddy virtuosity of Simone Biles executing a floor routine, it reaches the gut and the heart lightly, thrusting like a fencer, by way of its playfulness and spectacle.
READ THE REVIEW
March 27, 2025
It’s a theatrical tour-de-force, as well as an impressive feat of video engineering. But, unlike the title character, its imperfections are all too apparent.
READ THE REVIEW
March 27, 2025
But what the worthwhile play offers — and I know there are many who pooh-pooh screens onstage as a rule — is the childlike wonderment of not understanding the logistics of what you’re looking at. The first hour is marked by awed and confused “How did they do that?”s. “How did she do that?”
READ THE REVIEW
March 27, 2025
Equal parts acting masterclass, tech wizardry, illusion and clockwork stage management, all costumed and set designed with the wit and color schemes of the most vivid Cindy Sherman photographs, Dorian Gray marks audacious Broadway debuts by both Snook and director-adaptor Kip Williams.
READ THE REVIEWMarch 27, 2025
At this point, theater purists may throw up their hands and demand: Why pay inflated Broadway prices for what is essentially two hours of TV? To my mind, it’s sublime spectacle with impeccable dramaturgy, all spun around phenomenal acting.
READ THE REVIEWMarch 27, 2025
Snook’s performance in Kip Williams’s self-penned production is powerful in every way, an exquisitely crafted melange of determination, drive and cheekiness. On the night I saw the show, she did not drop so much as a syllable. And yet there was nothing automaton about her work, which was just as well given all of the screens that surrounded her. She’s brilliant, alive and fun. All at once.
READ THE REVIEW
March 27, 2025
Much of this legerdemain derives from Marg Horwell’s wonderfully ornate Victorian costumes and the uncredited hair and makeup designs, which are remarkable. These changes in pre-recorded physical properties are far more impressive than what Snook manages to perform live on stage.
READ THE REVIEWMarch 27, 2025
Despite the show’s ruminations revolving around Dorian’s ego, there is no vanity in this performance where Snook sweats, sneers, and dashes across stage. The bold production is as cinematic as it is theatrical, and a perfect showcase for its shining star.
READ THE REVIEWMarch 27, 2025
Her performance is a masterpiece in both the physical demands of theatre and the brilliance of camera work, with every subtle rise of an eyebrow captured on screen. She deserved all the cheers at the multiple curtain calls, and a very long nap.
READ THE REVIEW
March 27, 2025
And as in Sunset, these trappings transcend gimmickry because they are contiguous with—and find new ways to mirror—the central themes of the material. When it violates the borders between art and experience, that’s true to Wilde’s point.
READ THE REVIEWMarch 27, 2025
The integration can be so effective that it’s occasionally difficult to tell whether one of the characters is a recorded projection or not (but unlike many other solo shows with multiple characters, it’s almost always clear which character is talking when.) Even the various-sized screens on which the images are projected feel beautifully choreographed.
READ THE REVIEWMarch 27, 2025
Frankly, the event proved more exhausting than exhilarating to my elderly Boomer taste and attention skills. Probably the generations who grew up on those big screens at home and little screens in their hands will love a hot date with Sarah Snook in such a cool show.
READ THE REVIEWMarch 27, 2025
It is a wondrous merging of technical wizardry, clever stagecraft and incomparable artistry.
READ THE REVIEWMarch 27, 2025
Despite the show’s overreliance on whiz-bang technology, Snook is never anything less than jaw-dropping. The Australian actress tackles the prodigious task at hand with breathtaking precision, believably engaging in verbose conversations with her digitalized selves, and never missing a beat as she plays to each and every camera that’s ceaselessly roving and whirring around her.
READ THE REVIEWMarch 27, 2025
“The Picture of Dorian Gray” stars the actress Sarah Snook, and only Ms. Snook. Calling it a one-woman show, though, hardly does justice to the magic trick of multiplicity she performs, a performance worthy of Oscar Wilde and his strange and seductive tale of innocence lost. It takes nothing away from Ms. Snook’s performance to note that she shares the spotlight with Wilde’s preening prose, so sparkling that it could charge its own admission.
READ THE REVIEW