‘Opening Night’ Review: Ivo van Hove Makes a Stylish Movie Into a Sludgy Travesty

In a London auditorium, a work of art is being desecrated. “Opening Night,” John Cassavetes’s understatedly stylish 1977 movie about an actress struggling with midlife ennui, has been reimagined as a musical by the Belgian director Ivo van Hove, and the result is a travesty.

Its antiheroine, the Broadway superstar Myrtle Gordon (Sheridan Smith), has landed the lead role in a play about a middle-aged woman. But she isn’t feeling it: Though she is about 40, she insists she can’t relate. She stumbles through rehearsals, clashing with the director, Manny (Hadley Fraser), and the playwright, Sarah (Nicola Hughes), then goes rogue during previews, taking liberties with the script.

To compound matters, the actress develops a neurotic fixation on Nancy (Shira Haas), a 17-year-old fan killed in a car crash moments after getting Myrtle’s autograph. Convinced that Nancy is a cipher for her own lost youth, Myrtle intermittently hallucinates the dead girl’s ghost, and even converses with it. Myrtle is unraveling, but the show — somehow — must go on.

It’s a compelling story line, filled with dramatic possibilities, but “Opening Night,” which runs at the Gielgud Theater through July 27, is scuppered by a series of poor choices. Smith is miscast as Myrtle, for a start: Her onstage bearing exudes a homely approachability rather than high-strung poise or inscrutable aloofness.

Benjamin Walker is wooden as Maurice, Myrtle’s stage co-star and ex-partner, who Cassavetes himself played charmingly in the film. The estranged couple’s brittle onstage chemistry is an essential ingredient in the drama; here, they seem like actual strangers. Haas’s spectral Nancy is a disconcertingly cutesy symbol of youthful feminine vitality, a sprite-like figure who scurries around the stage in a short skirt, knee-high socks and platform boots — suggesting not so much a young woman as a pubescent child.