Opening Night review — Sheridan Smith shines but the show struggles to connect

For a film that was panned at its own premiere, John Cassavetes’s 1977 Opening Night is experiencing a remarkable extended life. Now recognised as an audacious masterpiece, it was the inspiration for The Second Woman — the 24-hour-epic delivered by Ruth Wilson last year — and it drives this similarly ambitious and conceptually complex, though, alas, less successful, musical. That’s a shame for the whole team — director Ivo van Hove, composer Rufus Wainwright — but particularly for Sheridan Smith, who gives a terrific performance at its heart.

Smith has been admirably candid about the meaning of this story for her. Cassavetes’s film focuses on an actress, Myrtle, who is struggling with her age and with her role as an older woman in a new play heading for Broadway. As opening night approaches and Myrtle is pressurised by director, producer and writer to stick to a script that she finds reductive (“It’s not humiliating,” her director, a man, tells her), she begins to implode. She is haunted by the death outside the theatre of a 17-year-old fan, who becomes blurred in her mind with her own younger self, and starts to unravel, finally turning up drunk for the opening night. 

For Smith, who suffered a breakdown during a run of Funny Girl in 2016, the material is very close to home, and she has spoken publicly about the importance of supporting mental health. And, as with her superb performance in Shirley Valentine last year, she brings great wit, infectious warmth and aching vulnerability to Myrtle, giving meaning to the tiniest purse of the lips or sideways glance at the audience. In her hands, Myrtle is an intelligent, impassioned, sensitive woman driven to the edge.

As a story about the blurring of public and private worlds and the fragility of mental wellbeing, it now has wider resonance in an age where social media amplifies those issues. Van Hove accordingly blurs the edges, delivering it as a multi-layered, intricately interwoven collage of live action, film footage and documentary video.

The locations in the play and those in the play-within-the-play merge on a stage bordered by dressing-room mirrors, props and costumes in Jan Versweyveld’s set. As in the original film, fiction and “reality” bleed into one another — often we’re not sure where we are. On occasions the action spills into the backstage area or, most memorably, out on to the street, as cameras follow the intoxicated Myrtle stumbling into the theatre for opening night.

The director has used this sort of sophisticated layering technique to brilliant effect previously — his Shakespearean epics were superb examples. He has also elicited moving performances of characters in extremis, such as in Who Killed My Father. But something has gone awry this time. The multi-layering becomes confusing and alienating — it’s often hard to follow what is going on — and seems to swamp the characters, most of whom remain one-note. Nicola Hughes as the playwright has a terrific voice but, as a character, she is not written with any depth. Fine actors like Hadley Fraser, as director Manny, and John Marquez, as producer David, are left with clunky lines and no character development. It all feels emotionally undernourished. 

Wainwright’s music is richly varied and sympathetic. Lush, lyrical, intricate, even capricious, it ranges from full-blown operatic emotional overdrive to a delicate solo accompanied by acoustic guitar for the director’s heartsore wife (Amy Lennox). But the lyrics are blunt, to put it mildly — “You’ve gotta make magic out of tragic.” It’s a show that suggests the overwhelming, quite terrifying nature of breakdown and the need for connection — and yet, strangely, it fails to connect, emotionally. 

★★☆☆☆

To July 27, openingnightmusical.com