Opening Night. Book by Ivo Van Hove. Music & Lyric by Rufus Wainwright. The Gielgud Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, London to 27 July 2024.

1✩ Review: William Russell.

“A mind bogglingly terrible car crash of a show.”

Every now and then a car crash of a show hits the London stage and this dire musical conceived by Ivo Van Hove based on the 1977 film by John Cassavetes which starred his wife, Gena Rowlands, as a Myrtle, middle aged actress having a breakdown while rehearsing an out of town tryout for a new play is a truly spectacular example. The film was a flop although Rowlands won the Silver Bear for best actress at the 1978 Berlin Film Festival. But what tempted Van Hove and Wainwright to turn it into a musical is hard to see, let alone what tempted Sheridan Smith to star in it as Myrtle. Van Hove has a track record of taking old films and turning them with some success into plays, Network and All About Eve are two of them, and his career is a glittering one with awards galore so working with him must have been attractive. We see the events in the theatre where the play is being rehearsed, and then when it is being performed, while a documentary film crew is at work and what they are filming is projected on a vast screen on the back wall of the set. Beneath that is a line of mirrored dressing room desks at which the actors prepare for the performance. The video set ups look expensive and are very complicated technically, although there is a difference between the colour of what we see live and what we see on screen which is upsetting visually. The casting of a lot of tall men as producer, director and improbable ex husband co-star round the diminutive and very badly dressed Smith is another of the production’s problems. Her dresses are ghastly and make her look stumpy. Her powers as a theatre and a television actor are indisputable but she does not have a film face so the close-ups on that screen convey nothing to enhance or illumine her performance. Her face seems blank with nothing behind the eyes. Myrtle’s problems are she does not like the play in which she has to play a middle aged woman, something she does not consider herself to be, and she has become obsessed with Nancy, played by Shira Haas, a star struck young girl, whose book she autographed outside the stage door and who was knocked down by a passing car and killed moments later. She keeps seeing her ghost regarding it as her lost youth. Given what the hapless Haas gets to do it was a youth well worth losing. The film, a kind of intellectual horror movie, depended almost entirely on Rowland’s performance for such success as it had. Smith does not provide one which could possibly save the show.The tedious score by Wainwright never manages to come up with a decent tune let alone a ten o’clock song worthy of a leading lady. Opening Night, while it may well fill its planned booking period if enough people want to be able say, as they do of past disasters, that they were there but equally Closing Night could arrive well in advance of the due date. On the play’s opening night after all the preceding angst Myrtle turns up dead drunk and is resuscitated sufficiently to go on stage where she performs whatever it is she has in her mind rather than what is in the script to a rapturous reception. At the moment West End audiences get to their feet for anything but in this case at the press night I saw it was to get to the door as quickly as possible. Car crash shows can be worth recalling but this is one to forget. It is quite simply mind bogglingly terrible. Magic is not, as one lyric suggests, made out of tragic.

Cast

Sheridan Smith – Myrtle.

Hadley Fraser –Manny.

Shira Haas – Nancy.

Nicola Hughes – Sarah.

Amy Lennox – Dorothy.

John Marquez – David.

Benjamin Walker – Maurice.

Ian McLarnon – Leo.

Cilla Silva – Carla,

Jos Slavick – Gus.

Rebecca Thornhill – Kelly.

Ensemble – Robert Finlayson, Daniel Forrester, Jennifer Hepburn, Issy khogali, Chrissie Perkins.

Creatives

Director – Ivo Van Hove.

Orchestrations & Vocal Arrangements – Rufus Wainwright.

Set, Lighting & Video Designer – Jan Versweyveld.

Costume Designer – An D’Huys.

Sound Designer – Tom Gibbons & Alex Twiselton.

Musical Supervisor – Nigel Lilley.

Movement & Choreography - Polly Bennett.