Review: Sean Hayes is stunning as ‘Good Night, Oscar’ opens on Broadway

NEW YORK — In November 1958, the brilliant composer, concert pianist and outré humorist Oscar Levant, then under medical supervision, appeared live on NBC’s “Tonight” show with Jack Paar in front of millions of Americans.

Audiences had no idea whether they watching the most daring, dramatic and hilarious talk-show appearance they ever had seen, or an appalling exploitation by Paar of an emotionally disturbed and profoundly ill man.

“What Mr. Paar did,” wrote Jack Gould back then in the New York Times, “was play a public game of cat-and-mouse on the general subject of emotional instability. Would Mr. Levant make it or wouldn’t he?” In Gould’s view, Paar “was inviting the viewing audience to dabble in cliff-hanging psychiatry” and had been disturbingly willing to “capitalize on an individual’s personal disturbances” and to “condone jokes on the subject of people who are confined or must be accompanied by attendants upon going into the outside world.”

On the other hand, Levant, who typically played piano on the “Tonight” show, where he was one of Paar’s semi-regulars, had never been more honest with the public, nor had he ever been funnier.

“Good Night, Oscar” the searing and complex play by Doug Wright which began last year at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre under the direction of Lisa Peterson and opened Monday night at Broadway’s Belasco Theatre, is a 100-minute show about that very sweeps-week appearance.

And on a deeper level, this show is about the ethics of late-night TV, golden age or otherwise, the inevitable role of pain in the work of great comedians, and even the human rights of an entertainer who wishes still to talk and tell jokes to his fans, whatever circumstances may have befallen him. Wright leaves it up to the viewer to decide if Paar exploited Levant, or offered a stream-of-consciousness comedian and artist a well-deserved opportunity of a lifetime. Or both.

But many people will be attracted to this show just to see the extraordinary work of Sean Hayes in the title role.

This is, to say the least, one deep dive of a star-turn, an all-consuming (and notably all-consumed) piece of acting that reveals things in Hayes that most of his “Will and Grace” fans will be entirely gobsmacked to discover he has in his arsenal.

Hayes, whose work as Levant has only deepened since I first saw it in Chicago, sets out here to channel Levant’s psychological and performative state of being. 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 in danger of being forgotten in the passage of time. How many remembered him prior to the buzz around this show?

We first see Paar, played in deliciously mercenary fashion by Ben Rappaport, feuding with jittery network boss Bob Sarnoff (Peter Grosz) even as an underling (played by Alex Wyse) fusses around. Then Levant’s wife June (the quietly excellent Emily Bergl) arrives with the news that she has had her husband committed to a mental institution but has lied about the destination to score a one-night pass (that part is fictional), meaning Oscar arrives with his nervous attendant Alvin (Marchánt Davis), along with a medical bag full of drugs. Things go from there, as Levant goes into his act with Paar.

The clunkiest part of the play involves Levant’s visions of George Gershwin, to some extent his real-life nemesis but also the dominant obsession born of his neurosis. Frankly, I think Hayes could have shown us all that on his own, even without the appearance of John Zdrojeski as a debonair musical ghost, but it’s a device that serves Wright’s purpose in the thrilling finale as Hayes’ Levant flies, in several senses of that word.

“Good Night, Oscar” is an old-school show with jokes that rightly have the potential to offend, which is the whole point of the work, and to a large extent the era it is exploring. The show needed guts to produce and it displays them, even if the set design from Rachel Hauck displays expressionistic themes only in cleverly subtle ways.

This is a play about a great entertainer but also about improvised, dangerous live TV, an era that has mostly receded when it comes to late-night entertainment playing to a political choir, but is very much present when it comes to news, as recent events reveal. For anyone who cherishes personal freedom or Hayes himself, it’s not to be missed.

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At the Belasco Theatre, 111 W. 44th St., New York; goodnightoscar.com.

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