Good Night, Oscar, Barbican review - sad story of a Hollywood great's meltdown, with a dazzling turn by Sean Hayes

Back in the day, when America’s late-night chat show hosts and their guests sat happily smoking as they shot the breeze for a growing audience, the most sought after guest was Oscar Levant. 

No longer a household name except to fans of vintage Hollywood musicals, in some of which, notably An American in Paris, he appeared, Levant (b 1906) was the Swiss Army knife of the entertainment business: a virtuoso pianist, composer, conductor, actor, a writer of hilarious memoirs, a raconteur with his own TV chat show. He was also beset with mental health problems, notably OCD, hypochondria and paranoid schizophrenia, which were exacerbated by his medication, to which he became addicted.

By the time Doug Wright’s award-winning play about Levant catches up with him, in 1958, his long-suffering wife June has felt obliged to have him committed to an institution, where he is undergoing EST and the usual round of drug treatments. But his best friend in television, the chat show host Jack Paar (Ben Rappaport), has persuaded NBC to book Levant for its inaugural edition of The Tonight Show from LA, a surefire ratings winner. A four-hour pass from Mount Sinai hospital has secretly been wangled by June (Rosalie Craig, pictured below) for Oscar to appear on the show, with a trusty orderly, Alvin (Daniel Adeosun), as his chaperone. 

Enter Sean Hayes’s Oscar, first heard kvetching outside the green room’s door, his funny-dial already turned up to 11. Those who have come to see over-the-top gay Jack from Will and Grace will recognise much of Hayes’s Jack in his Oscar. Wright has written for him what amounts to a comedy routine, a relentless stream of one-liners, aperçus and anecdotes, much of it laugh-out-loud funny, which Hayes delivers with impeccable timing and tonal shifts. When, for example, the head of NBC, Bob Sarnoff (Richard Katz), comes to yell at him after the show for his off-colour material, explaining to him what the network believes is unacceptable behaviour in its guests, Hayes makes the line “The network… believes?” a zinger, thanks to that minuscule pause mid-sentence followed by the gentle ridicule he conveys in its last word.

Oscar and Paar are engaged in open warfare with the conservative forces controlling the media – and politics – at the time. They believe television should be a forum for free speech but is being hobbled by double standards, which allow all other kinds of media to operate unpoliced while restricting activities on the small screen. So while Sarnoff sees late-night TV as “warm milk”, Paar uses Oscar’s appearance to get him to tell risqué jokes about J Edgar Hoover’s transvestism and Liz Taylor’s multiple marriages. There’s an especially raunchy one about Marilyn Monroe’s conversion to Judaism. 

Much of Oscar’s humour is directed against himself, though. His self-destructive tendencies are like an open wound. Not just the OCD stirring of his coffee – four times one way, four times the other – but also the toxic memories of his best friend George Gershwin (David Burnett, pictured above right with Hayes), who constantly “talks” to him and whose compositions he allowed to crowd out his own. Levant was the second person to record Rhapsody in Blue, after its composer, a contributing factor in his rise to stardom but clearly a monstrous shackle on his personal creativity. As his four hours of freedom go by, Wright charts Oscar’s meltdown.

Hayes gives an impeccable physical performance, one part or another of his body constantly in motion, a jiggling foot, a rocking upper body. After he downs a bottle of Demerol, he makes his body move in slo-mo, each casual gesture attenuated. His features are unrecognisable as fresh-faced Jack’s, drawn and haggard, like a mournful spaniel’s. He pratfalls and slumps and tumbles.

But what doubtless earned him his Tony award are the seven minutes when he is persuaded to play Rhapsody in Blue on air for Paar's show (pictured below). We are used to actors who can’t play the piano being positioned so the keyboard is hidden and they can mime at will. Not Hayes. He launches into the piece with electrifying gusto, not 100% perfectly in some of the octave runs, but thrillingly enough. Oscar's mental tics are also skilfully incorporated into the recital, such as his paranoid checking of the underneath of the piano or the ceiling during the piece’s pauses. When a recording of the orchestral accompaniment finally joins in, he is positively gleeful, but always totally in synch with the orchestra. It’s a tour de force.This is a handsome production, its sets pinpoint-accurate in projecting the Hollywood luxe of its setting. Tellingly, when the action moves to the sound stage, we see its walls are covered in thick pocketed fabric, insulation that doubles as a padded cell. Lisa Peterson directs a strong cast, all but two of them British, with Rosalie Craig a standout as June, a crisp, smart woman with a supply of trenchant wit of her own (there’s nice wordplay on the double meaning of “commitment”). 

This is also a very “American” piece, citing names forgotten or little known here, such as bandleader Xavier Cugat and pioneering chat-show host Steve Allen, not just Levant, or, for that matter, Paar. That’s not a problem, as the play’s core issue of what you can and can’t say in the media is as potent as ever. Even so, Wright has felt obliged to shoehorn in a lot of expositional material about Levant and other luminaries of the time, some of it a tad ham-fisted. And especially when he uses an invented character, Max (Eric Sirakian), an over-excitable studio assistant with a clipboard and an annoying level of fandom, as a human megaphone to relay all this information.

This is a well-oiled machine now, after rave-reviewed runs in Chicago and on Broadway, and its dialogue is delivered with the self-confident ba-boom of an old-style stand-up, its polished gems a little too polished. Hayes has to perform them as Oscar’s instinctive level of caustic wit, rapid-fire retorts from his well stocked arsenal. But they don’t seem quite so spontaneous now. Even so, his is an extraordinary performance, the unmasking of a genuinely sad clown with a great capacity for melancholy and, one hopes, future meaty roles. 

• Good Night, Oscar at the Barbican Theatre until 21 September
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