Joan Marcus
As befits its era, Doug Wright’s Good Night, Oscar (Belasco Theater, booking to August 27) is an elegant Broadway play, dressed and furnished with mid-century aplomb. This Goodman Theatre production also feels bravely lost in history, setting itself the task of encouraging audiences to care about someone who is decades past being a household name.
If its subject—the trials, tribulations, and controversy-courting comic brilliance of Oscar Levant—is unfamiliar to those who were not around to watch NBC’s Tonight Show in the 1950’s, then the hope of producers must be that the starriness of Will & Grace star Sean Hayes as Levant will draw the crowds, alongside the perennial theme of when entertainment bleeds into the ugly exploitation of a clearly unwell performer.
Theater-goers should not expect “Just Jack!” when they take their seats. 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. For a sludgy opening stretch, Good Night, Oscar—set in two dressing rooms and eventually The Tonight Show studio, all simply and beautifully designed by Rachel Hauck—is mostly plodding exposition.