Sean Hayes Shines in Good Night, Oscar at the Barbican

Good Night, Oscar | Barbican Theatre until 21st September

“There’s a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.”
― Oscar Levant

We’re in 1958 America: late-night TV’s golden age. Jack Paar is the king of the talk show, and tonight his big guest is a troublemaker-turned-legend: Oscar Levant, a brilliant concert pianist and Hollywood actor known for his wit. He was George Gershwin’s friend and made a career out of playing Gershwin’s music – his 1945 recording of Rhapsody in Blue was a huge hit.

However, Levant also suffered from a shattered psyche. After a 1952 heart attack he spiralled into painkiller addiction and what they then called “nervous breakdowns”. He famously made provocative, self-deprecating jokes on TV about his insanity, later dubbed “America’s first publicly dysfunctional celebrity”.

Now Good Night, Oscar (written by Doug Wright and directed by Lisa Peterson) condenses Levant’s life into a single TV appearance. Sean Hayes (Will & Grace’s Jack McFarland) plays Levant in a tour-de-force role – fidgety and electric, switching from manic energy to naked honesty in a heartbeat.

One line from the play stands out: Oscar quips that

“the benefit of schizophrenia is you never need to dine alone”.

And yet Hayes balances the comedy with genuine heartbreak. The play digs into how the media exploits you, and how society treats mental illness. Oscar cracks wise about his demons on live TV, saying things so shocking that today they still ring true.

Good Night, Oscar premiered in Chicago in 2022 and moved to Broadway in 2023. The Broadway run earned Hayes a Tony Award for Best Actor. This isn’t a one-man show, though: he is surrounded by a cast of interesting characters – his wife June (Rosalie Craig), his doctor, the TV host Jack Paar, and even Gershwin appears as a ghost. Yet with Hayes at the centre, it never feels empty. He’s flanked by these characters, but it’s his swirling genius in the spotlight.

The central premise is that his wife has checked him out of a mental institution to appear on the show. That is not technically correct – although he was discharged from a mental institution to appear on an episode of What’s My Line.

Whilst being very funny, it doesn’t shy away from the real consequences of a man suffering from this sort of mental illness, and the impact it has on his family and friends. The head of the studio doesn’t want him to appear unless he performs at the piano – worried he will say something that could cause a scandal.

Naturally, he is persuaded into playing – and Sean Hayes performs a thrilling rendition of Rhapsody in Blue. Helped by the fact that he is also a classically trained pianist, this brings the play to a stirring conclusion and the audience, quite rightly, to its feet.

The result is exhilarating. Sean Hayes is Oscar Levant: tight-voiced, jittery, sharp-tongued but achingly sincere. The writing (by Pulitzer-winner Wright) is sharp, weaving in real Levant quips and showing flashbacks of his rise and fall. You might walk away wanting to Google Oscar’s life, because you can find clips of him on talk shows saying some of the things that appear in the play.

Watching Good Night, Oscar, you appreciate that he was ahead of his time, a man baring his soul decades before anyone talked openly about depression.

It’s the kind of theatre I love: it informs as well as entertains, brilliant for fans of old-school showbiz or anyone interested in how fame and mental health collide. I just hope it is filmed for NT Live, as it feels like something everyone should see, if only to remember that sometimes the real story behind the curtain is stranger (and funnier) than fiction.

Sean Hayes is spellbinding as Oscar Levant in a tightly wound 100 minutes with no intermission – hilarious, heartbreaking, and one of the performances of the year.

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