Good Night, Oscar (Play)

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    ‘Good Night, Oscar’ Review: Sean Hayes With Demerol and Cadenzas

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    The “Will & Grace” star is unrecognizable in a Broadway biography of Oscar Levant: wit, pianist and “Eeyore in a cheap suit.”Oscar Levant, the troubled midcentury musician and wag, often said he’d erased “the fine line between genius and insanity.”He says it again, or a version of it, in “Good Night, Oscar,” the unconvincing biographical fantasia that opened Monday at the Belasco Theater. But on the evidence of the character as written, and especially as impersonated by Sean Hayes in a gloomy if accurate performance, Levant doesn’t erase the line so much as fudge it.Certainly the play, by Doug Wright, fails to make much of a case for the genius part of the joke. Instead, it offers a spray of Levant’s most famous quips, like the one about Elizabeth Taylor: “Always a bride, never a bridesmaid.” And instead of dramatizing how marvelous Levant was, it just says so repeatedly. “America’s greatest wit.” “A goddamn lion.” A Horowitz at the piano “with a grace and an ease that even Chopin might envy.”Fulsome praise, but what we see in the director Lisa Peterson’s production is a far cry from any of it. Mostly it’s just a cry; Levant doesn’t seem brilliant but ill.Pathos not being much of a dramatic engine, Wright works very hard, if fictionally, to crank up the stakes. It’s 1958, on the day during sweeps week when “The Tonight Show,” with its host, Jack Paar, will make its West Coast debut. Paar’s marquee guest, leading a lineup that also includes the sex symbol Jayne Mansfield and the ventriloquist Señor Wences, is Levant, who two hours before showtime hasn’t arrived. NBC’s president, Robert Sarnoff, threatens to replace him with the popular bandleader Xavier Cugat.But where Sarnoff (Peter Grosz) sees Levant as unreliably neurotic, and thus unappealing to the network and the audience, Paar (Ben Rappaport) sees him as an artist whose unreliability and neurosis are exactly his strengths. He’s the national id: the man Americans hope they’ll catch “saying something on television they know damn well that you can’t say on television.” He’s good for ratings; no wonder Paar calls him his favorite mental patient.That line is no joke. It is only thanks to the machinations of Levant’s wife, June (Emily Bergl, excellent), that Oscar has been sprung on a four-hour pass from the institution he currently calls home. When he finally arrives at the studio, with a miffed orderly (Marchánt Davis) in tow, he’s strung out, rumpled and morose. June calls him “Eeyore in a cheap suit.”Hayes and Emily Bergl as Levant’s wife, June.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHayes, no longer the adorable sprite from “Will and Grace,” has clearly made a careful study of Levant’s mannerisms, many of them the result of a longtime addiction to painkillers. The work is startling, but the performance is less an inhabitation of character than a nonstop loop of perfectly rendered facial tics, trembling hands and compulsive gestures. His speech is pressured, his mood explosive, his target anything that crosses his path — including himself. Past this stockade of behavior, little of an inner life can get out.To address the built-in problem of revealing such a locked-down soul, and in the manner of period psychiatric melodramas like “Now Voyager” and “Bigger Than Life,” Wright gives Levant occasional reality breaks and hallucinations. Most involve George Gershwin: Levant’s friend, benefactor and bête noire, dead 20 years yet still a kind of Oedipal rival. “I’m scared to death of failure,” Gershwin’s glamorous ghost (John Zdrojeski) says. “But you? You don’t mind it.”Whether or not Levant minded it, it’s true that by Gershwin standards he failed; few people today remember him. Huge swathes of dramaturgically suspicious exposition must thus be rolled out to cover the gaps. “I know the critics all say your greatest performance was in ‘An American in Paris,’” a young production assistant (Alex Wyse) tells Levant, and us. “That musical sequence — the Concerto in F — it’s a showstopper!”When characters start informing other characters of what they would obviously already know, and (as often happens here as well) braying madly at mild jokes, something is wrong.What that is becomes clearer when, in the second half of the 100-minute play, Levant finally sits down for the live broadcast, after proving himself merely tiresome for the first half. The music starts, the curtain rises, the lights come up, and he’s still tiresome. Firing off one-liners, especially nasty ones, is no mark of special genius; thousands of comedians do it. Nor does the fact that the one-liners come from a man who is obviously deeply troubled make them especially funny. For me, watching Hayes as Levant — like watching kinescopes of Levant himself — is excruciatingly sad.The weight of shoring up the point of the play thus falls heavily on Levant’s pianism — and Hayes’s. Peterson, the director, has been building up to it from the beginning. The nested shoeboxes of Rachel Hauck’s handsome set, representing Paar’s office and, when that breaks away, Levant’s dressing room, now disappear entirely to reveal a fully padded television studio with a Steinway center stage. Hayes steps up to it and, after a last, mortifying fight with Gershwin’s ghost, proceeds to play a seven-minute excerpt from “Rhapsody in Blue.”The playwright illuminates Levant’s inner world with occasional hallucinations, most involving Levant’s long-dead friend and rival George Gershwin (John Zdrojeski).Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIt’s fine.Even if it had been mind-blowing, I don’t see how it would have given “Good Night, Oscar” a satisfying shape; issues raised in theatrical terms want to be resolved in them, too. Wright has followed that principle in “I Am My Own Wife,” his Pulitzer Prize-winning 2003 play, and in his book for the unconventional musical version of “Grey Gardens,” each of which uses the raw materials it was built from to fashion an organic conclusion.“Good Night, Oscar” can’t get there, but it understands the problem. A coda following the concerto may not tie up the larger themes of genius and insanity but does resolve some relationships in the way you would expect from a melodrama set in 1958. Selflessness and renunciation are involved. Jokes that were formerly just origami with words now become ways of slipping painful truths past the interpersonal censors.In those last few minutes only, you see into Levant’s soul. It is not a soul made for television, though that’s how most people of his time would have known him. Somehow they accepted him as he was, which may not have been a blessing. When asked, on a 1965 episode of “What’s My Line,” “Have you ever managed to make a great deal of use out of various illnesses that you’ve had?” he answered, “My health is the concern of the nation.” The blindfolded panel knew immediately who he was.I only wish after “Good Night, Oscar” we did.Good Night, OscarThrough Aug. 27 at the Belasco Theater, Manhattan; goodnightoscar.com. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. 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      Sean Hayes Returns to the Piano in Broadway’s ‘Good Night, Oscar’

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      The version of Sean Hayes who arrived at a Midtown Manhattan rehearsal space on a Wednesday morning last month was the one everyone knows from his years as a television star on the series “Will & Grace” and as an entertainer. The effervescent Hayes tossed off a quip about the perceived snobbishness of the Hamptons. (“It’s like Shake Shack,” he said. “Anybody can go. It’s not that fancy.”) With similar ease, he sat at a piano and played a few measures of “Rhapsody in Blue.”But the Hayes who a short while later entered through the door of a set made to look like a 1950s-era TV dressing room was markedly different. His eyes were squinted and his posture was hunched. He occasionally twitched his head or shook his hands. He spoke with the defeated voice of a jowly man, sometimes dropping a one-liner (“Gee, I wonder who died,” he said, contemplating the flowers in his room) and sometimes becoming so vehement that his face turned red and a vein bulged from his neck.This is how Hayes alters himself to play Oscar Levant, the pianist and raconteur, in the new Broadway play “Good Night, Oscar,” which opens on April 24 at the Belasco Theater. Levant, who died in 1972, was as renowned for his interpretations of George Gershwin’s music and his roles in films like “An American in Paris” as he was for his dyspeptic appearances on TV game shows and talk shows, jesting ruefully about his struggles with mental health and prescription drug addiction.The play, written by Doug Wright and directed by Lisa Peterson, imagines Levant on a fateful day in 1958 when he has finagled his way out of a psychiatric hospital to be interviewed on Jack Paar’s “Tonight Show.”Beneath its Eisenhower-era period details, “Good Night, Oscar” sets out to comment on enduring ideas about the burdens of celebrity and creative genius. Whether it succeeds will depend largely on Hayes’s ability to embody the dour Levant, a sort of public neurotic who may no longer be familiar to contemporary audiences.Oscar Levant circa 1947. He’d crack wise about the fragile state of his mental health, and once said, in answering a question about what he did for exercise, “I stumble and then I fall into a coma.”FPG/Archive Photos, via Getty ImagesBut as Hayes explained, these kinds of challenges are exactly what makes the play compelling to him.“If you’re not scaring yourself as an actor, what are you doing?” he said. “If everything’s safe, then the results will show that.” With this play, he added, “I’m going to swing for the fences. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, I’m still alive, right?”Hayes, 52, was sitting in a small room at the rehearsal space. He wore a zip-up sweatshirt and playfully shook his hair, a mixture of copper and silver strands, which he has grown out so it can be styled like Levant’s wavy coif.Though he rose to fame in his Emmy Award-winning role as Jack McFarland, the irrepressible “Will & Grace” sidekick, Hayes has his own complicated history as a pianist. When people in the industry are surprised to discover his musical roots, Hayes reminds them — with mock chagrin — that he played piano when he hosted the 2010 Tony Awards. “I’m like, did you not watch the Tonys?” he said. “I thought we all watched them together.”The youngest child of a mother who raised him on her own, Hayes started receiving piano training at age 5 from a neighbor in Glen Ellyn, Ill. (When his mother asked if he wanted lessons, Hayes said he replied, “I’m not doing anything else.”)By his teens, Hayes was playing Mozart sonatas and performing in competitions. But during high school and college (and a stint as music director at a dinner theater), he could feel himself being pulled away by the allure of acting — and weighed down by the pressure of classical performance.During concerts, Hayes said he found himself thinking: “The notes are the notes. These are the notes Beethoven wrote. These are the notes Chopin wrote. These are the notes Rachmaninoff wrote. And if you miss one of those notes, everybody notices.”With acting, he said, “I released myself of that pressure — and found a new pressure of always having to deliver on good material.”Similar anxieties — though amplified — prey upon the Levant depicted in “Good Night, Oscar.” Wright, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of “I Am My Own Wife,” described his incarnation of Levant as a Jazz Age Salieri, in thrall to George Gershwin and crushed by a self-imposed perception that he never measured up to his idol.Levant’s interviews with Paar are their own little sliver of TV history — shocking to audiences in their day and still potent for their candor. Levant would crack wise to Paar about his hospitalizations, the prescriptions he was taking or abusing, and the fragile state of his mental health. In a 1963 appearance, Paar asked him what he did for exercise. Levant answered, “I stumble and then I fall into a coma.”When Levant returned to the program a few months later, the host opened the show by telling his audience that Levant was “much better now” and that he would never “use or bring somebody out on this stage who was not completely well.”During that interview, Levant said his recent behavior had been “impeccable”: “I’ve been unconscious for the past six months,” he explained. “I’ve been doing extensive research in inertia.”Hayes starred with Debra Messing, left, and Eric McCormack, center, in “Will & Grace,” playing the irrepressible Jack McFarland.THOUGH FRIENDS HAD SUGGESTED he consider playing Levant, Hayes was not especially familiar with the pianist. As it emerged in 2009 that DreamWorks was developing a possible Gershwin biopic, intended for the director Steven Spielberg, in which Levant was a minor character, Hayes said he went so far as to commission his own hair and makeup test to see if he could at least look like Levant. (The film was not produced.)As he learned more about Levant, Hayes said he began to feel an affinity for him. “The mental health issues are in my family,” Hayes said. “Addictions are in my family. I thought, maybe I can wrap my head around this thing. As an actor, that’s what we do.”After Hayes’s Tony-nominated run in the 2010 Broadway revival of “Promises, Promises,” he and the show’s executive producer, Beth Williams, began discussing a possible Levant project for the stage. They later brought in Wright, who had been the screenwriter of the Gershwin film.Wright said he, too, was fascinated by Levant, having grown up with “a really entertaining, outrageous, brilliant father who was severely bipolar and refused medication, so Oscar’s mood swings were really familiar to me.”After a lunch meeting where Hayes demonstrated how he would play Levant, Wright said, he left “more passionate about it than ever before.”Asked how he gets himself into character, Hayes told a story of himself as a novice actor, playing an elf in a Kenny Rogers Christmas stage show. As the director increasingly asked the elf-actors to take on more of the duties of stagehands, Hayes said he told her, “You know we’re not really elves — we’re just playing elves.”In similar fashion, Hayes said, “I’m not really Oscar Levant. I’m playing Oscar Levant. This is my interpretation of Oscar Levant.”Long before the play’s 2022 debut at the Goodman Theater in Chicago, Hayes said he had been working on Levant’s voice, mannerisms, tics and physical bearing. He continues to refresh himself on those elements even now, though Hayes said he is not one of those actors who remains in character outside of rehearsals and performances.Reviewing that production for the Chicago Tribune, Chris Jones wrote that Hayes “displays talents here most of his fans will have no idea he had at his disposal,” adding that he delivers “a stunner of a lead performance: moving, empathetic, deeply emotional and slightly terrifying.”The announcement last year of the play’s Broadway transfer drew a rebuke from the playwright David Adjmi, who wrote in a Facebook post that he had persuaded Hayes to take on Levant and was commissioned by Williams to write a play for the actor.When Adjmi refused to “lighten the material,” he said Williams and Hayes replaced him with Wright while using their option on Adjmi to prevent him from further developing his play.At that time, the “Good Night, Oscar” producers said Hayes and Adjmi had parted ways over “different creative visions.” Hayes, in his interview, declined to revisit the matter. “We’ve already responded to that,” he said.Wright said that he had spoken with Adjmi “to ensure that it would not be awkward if I proceeded with the project, and he couldn’t have been more generous.”“I have to now perform in front of a live audience,” Hayes said of playing the piano onstage. “But it’s different this time. Because I don’t care if I miss a note.”Luisa Opalesky for The New York TimesAdjmi wrote in an email that though he felt Hayes and Williams’s actions were “morally objectionable,” he told Wright that “it was not my place to tell him or any writer what job to take.” Adjmi said he later learned from his agents that Wright had taken the job.THERE REMAINS THE QUESTION of whether Hayes felt a personal connection to Levant that made him want to play him, but the actor seemed comfortable cultivating this air of ambiguity.Jason Bateman, a longtime friend of Hayes’s and a co-host of their popular SmartLess podcast, said he did not necessarily notice that Hayes was striving to play damaged dramatic figures.“If you’re asking, have I sensed a darker, more mysterious side of him, I would say no,” Bateman said. “Being able to sincerely be in a place of joy, openness and honesty already takes a great deal of emotional and spiritual intelligence.”Having made his own transition from comedies like “Arrested Development” to thrillers like “Ozark,” Bateman said it can be sufficiently satisfying for an actor “just sticking around long enough to show audiences the rest of what’s in your trick trunk.”Wright proposed an explanation rooted in a connection he felt he shared with Hayes. “We both have cultivated some pretty affable, convivial exteriors,” Wright explained. “But I think that’s a survival mechanism, being gay men in a hostile world and needing to be liked, to keep ourselves safe a lot of times. That conviviality conceals some darker waters, and that’s how he accesses Oscar.”Hayes remained coy. “In order to play the darker side of Oscar, I do tap into certain aspects and experiences of my life,” he said, “but those are between me and Oscar.”In the rehearsal studio, Hayes said he found it fitting and illuminating that, having set aside his musical career so long ago, he should choose a role that requires him to play piano in the guise of someone filled with self-doubt about his own proficiency with the instrument.“I have to now perform in front of a live audience,” he said. “But it’s different this time. Because I don’t care if I miss a note.”If Hayes makes a mistake, he can always say that he was doing it in character. “It’s organic to the material in the play,” he said. “And I’ve finally realized, nobody’s perfect.” More

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      in Theater

      To Become Oscar Levant, Sean Hayes Revisited His First Role

      by

      The version of Sean Hayes who arrived at a Midtown Manhattan rehearsal space on a Wednesday morning last month was the one everyone knows from his years as a television star on the series “Will & Grace” and as an entertainer. The effervescent Hayes tossed off a quip about the perceived snobbishness of the Hamptons. (“It’s like Shake Shack,” he said. “Anybody can go. It’s not that fancy.”) With similar ease, he sat at a piano and played a few measures of “Rhapsody in Blue.”But the Hayes who a short while later entered through the door of a set made to look like a 1950s-era TV dressing room was markedly different. His eyes were squinted and his posture was hunched. He occasionally twitched his head or shook his hands. He spoke with the defeated voice of a jowly man, sometimes dropping a one-liner (“Gee, I wonder who died,” he said, contemplating the flowers in his room) and sometimes becoming so vehement that his face turned red and a vein bulged from his neck.This is how Hayes alters himself to play Oscar Levant, the pianist and raconteur, in the new Broadway play “Good Night, Oscar,” which opens on April 24 at the Belasco Theater. Levant, who died in 1972, was as renowned for his interpretations of George Gershwin’s music and his roles in films like “An American in Paris” as he was for his dyspeptic appearances on TV game shows and talk shows, jesting ruefully about his struggles with mental health and prescription drug addiction.The play, written by Doug Wright and directed by Lisa Peterson, imagines Levant on a fateful day in 1958 when he has finagled his way out of a psychiatric hospital to be interviewed on Jack Paar’s “Tonight Show.”Beneath its Eisenhower-era period details, “Good Night, Oscar” sets out to comment on enduring ideas about the burdens of celebrity and creative genius. Whether it succeeds will depend largely on Hayes’s ability to embody the dour Levant, a sort of public neurotic who may no longer be familiar to contemporary audiences.Oscar Levant circa 1947. He’d crack wise about the fragile state of his mental health, and once said, in answering a question about what he did for exercise, “I stumble and then I fall into a coma.”FPG/Archive Photos, via Getty ImagesBut as Hayes explained, these kinds of challenges are exactly what makes the play compelling to him.“If you’re not scaring yourself as an actor, what are you doing?” he said. “If everything’s safe, then the results will show that.” With this play, he added, “I’m going to swing for the fences. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, I’m still alive, right?”Hayes, 52, was sitting in a small room at the rehearsal space. He wore a zip-up sweatshirt and playfully shook his hair, a mixture of copper and silver strands, which he has grown out so it can be styled like Levant’s wavy coif.Though he rose to fame in his Emmy Award-winning role as Jack McFarland, the irrepressible “Will & Grace” sidekick, Hayes has his own complicated history as a pianist. When people in the industry are surprised to discover his musical roots, Hayes reminds them — with mock chagrin — that he played piano when he hosted the 2010 Tony Awards. “I’m like, did you not watch the Tonys?” he said. “I thought we all watched them together.”The youngest child of a mother who raised him on her own, Hayes started receiving piano training at age 5 from a neighbor in Glen Ellyn, Ill. (When his mother asked if he wanted lessons, Hayes said he replied, “I’m not doing anything else.”)By his teens, Hayes was playing Mozart sonatas and performing in competitions. But during high school and college (and a stint as music director at a dinner theater), he could feel himself being pulled away by the allure of acting — and weighed down by the pressure of classical performance.During concerts, Hayes said he found himself thinking: “The notes are the notes. These are the notes Beethoven wrote. These are the notes Chopin wrote. These are the notes Rachmaninoff wrote. And if you miss one of those notes, everybody notices.”With acting, he said, “I released myself of that pressure — and found a new pressure of always having to deliver on good material.”Similar anxieties — though amplified — prey upon the Levant depicted in “Good Night, Oscar.” Wright, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of “I Am My Own Wife,” described his incarnation of Levant as a Jazz Age Salieri, in thrall to George Gershwin and crushed by a self-imposed perception that he never measured up to his idol.Levant’s interviews with Paar are their own little sliver of TV history — shocking to audiences in their day and still potent for their candor. Levant would crack wise to Paar about his hospitalizations, the prescriptions he was taking or abusing, and the fragile state of his mental health. In a 1963 appearance, Paar asked him what he did for exercise. Levant answered, “I stumble and then I fall into a coma.”When Levant returned to the program a few months later, the host opened the show by telling his audience that Levant was “much better now” and that he would never “use or bring somebody out on this stage who was not completely well.”During that interview, Levant said his recent behavior had been “impeccable”: “I’ve been unconscious for the past six months,” he explained. “I’ve been doing extensive research in inertia.”Hayes starred with Debra Messing, left, and Eric McCormack, center, in “Will & Grace,” playing the irrepressible Jack McFarland.THOUGH FRIENDS HAD SUGGESTED he consider playing Levant, Hayes was not especially familiar with the pianist. As it emerged in 2009 that DreamWorks was developing a possible Gershwin biopic, intended for the director Steven Spielberg, in which Levant was a minor character, Hayes said he went so far as to commission his own hair and makeup test to see if he could at least look like Levant. (The film was not produced.)As he learned more about Levant, Hayes said he began to feel an affinity for him. “The mental health issues are in my family,” Hayes said. “Addictions are in my family. I thought, maybe I can wrap my head around this thing. As an actor, that’s what we do.”After Hayes’s Tony-nominated run in the 2010 Broadway revival of “Promises, Promises,” he and the show’s executive producer, Beth Williams, began discussing a possible Levant project for the stage. They later brought in Wright, who had been the screenwriter of the Gershwin film.Wright said he, too, was fascinated by Levant, having grown up with “a really entertaining, outrageous, brilliant father who was severely bipolar and refused medication, so Oscar’s mood swings were really familiar to me.”After a lunch meeting where Hayes demonstrated how he would play Levant, Wright said, he left “more passionate about it than ever before.”Asked how he gets himself into character, Hayes told a story of himself as a novice actor, playing an elf in a Kenny Rogers Christmas stage show. As the director increasingly asked the elf-actors to take on more of the duties of stagehands, Hayes said he told her, “You know we’re not really elves — we’re just playing elves.”In similar fashion, Hayes said, “I’m not really Oscar Levant. I’m playing Oscar Levant. This is my interpretation of Oscar Levant.”Long before the play’s 2022 debut at the Goodman Theater in Chicago, Hayes said he had been working on Levant’s voice, mannerisms, tics and physical bearing. He continues to refresh himself on those elements even now, though Hayes said he is not one of those actors who remains in character outside of rehearsals and performances.Reviewing that production for the Chicago Tribune, Chris Jones wrote that Hayes “displays talents here most of his fans will have no idea he had at his disposal,” adding that he delivers “a stunner of a lead performance: moving, empathetic, deeply emotional and slightly terrifying.”The announcement last year of the play’s Broadway transfer drew a rebuke from the playwright David Adjmi, who wrote in a Facebook post that he had persuaded Hayes to take on Levant and was commissioned by Williams to write a play for the actor.When Adjmi refused to “lighten the material,” he said Williams and Hayes replaced him with Wright while using their option on Adjmi to prevent him from further developing his play.At that time, the “Good Night, Oscar” producers said Hayes and Adjmi had parted ways over “different creative visions.” Hayes, in his interview, declined to revisit the matter. “We’ve already responded to that,” he said.Wright said that he had spoken with Adjmi “to ensure that it would not be awkward if I proceeded with the project, and he couldn’t have been more generous.”“I have to now perform in front of a live audience,” Hayes said of playing the piano onstage. “But it’s different this time. Because I don’t care if I miss a note.”Luisa OpaleskyAdjmi wrote in an email that though he felt Hayes and Williams’s actions were “morally objectionable,” he told Wright that “it was not my place to tell him or any writer what job to take.” Adjmi said he later learned from his agents that Wright had taken the job.THERE REMAINS THE QUESTION of whether Hayes felt a personal connection to Levant that made him want to play him, but the actor seemed comfortable cultivating this air of ambiguity.Jason Bateman, a longtime friend of Hayes’s and a co-host of their popular SmartLess podcast, said he did not necessarily notice that Hayes was striving to play damaged dramatic figures.“If you’re asking, have I sensed a darker, more mysterious side of him, I would say no,” Bateman said. “Being able to sincerely be in a place of joy, openness and honesty already takes a great deal of emotional and spiritual intelligence.”Having made his own transition from comedies like “Arrested Development” to thrillers like “Ozark,” Bateman said it can be sufficiently satisfying for an actor “just sticking around long enough to show audiences the rest of what’s in your trick trunk.”Wright proposed an explanation rooted in a connection he felt he shared with Hayes. “We both have cultivated some pretty affable, convivial exteriors,” Wright explained. “But I think that’s a survival mechanism, being gay men in a hostile world and needing to be liked, to keep ourselves safe a lot of times. That conviviality conceals some darker waters, and that’s how he accesses Oscar.”Hayes remained coy. “In order to play the darker side of Oscar, I do tap into certain aspects and experiences of my life,” he said, “but those are between me and Oscar.”In the rehearsal studio, Hayes said he found it fitting and illuminating that, having set aside his musical career so long ago, he should choose a role that requires him to play piano in the guise of someone filled with self-doubt about his own proficiency with the instrument.“I have to now perform in front of a live audience,” he said. “But it’s different this time. Because I don’t care if I miss a note.”If Hayes makes a mistake, he can always say that he was doing it in character. “It’s organic to the material in the play,” he said. “And I’ve finally realized, nobody’s perfect.” More

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      in Television

      Sean Hayes to Star in Broadway Play About Oscar Levant

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      “Good Night, Oscar,” by Doug Wright, explores the life of a pianist who became famous as a witty guest and host of midcentury radio and television shows.It was two decades ago when a friend first suggested to Sean Hayes that he consider playing Oscar Levant. He still remembers his reaction: “Who the hell is Oscar Levant?”Levant, he quickly learned, was a pianist who in the mid-20th century became famous for the mordant wit he displayed as a guest and host on radio and television talk shows, but had a life that was challenged by struggles with mental health and addiction. When another friend suggested Hayes think about Levant as a character, he got serious — watching archival footage, reading Levant’s books, and imagining some kind of performance.There were detours along the way — at one point, Hayes hoped to play Levant in a Steven Spielberg movie about George Gershwin, but the movie never happened — though the suggestion led to an idea which led to a script which led to a production, and next spring that show, called “Good Night, Oscar,” is coming to Broadway with Hayes in the leading role.“If I had nothing to do with this show, I would be absolutely enthralled with this human being that is Oscar Levant — he’s just incredible,” Hayes said in a telephone interview. “I’m just surprised how famous he was, and now nobody knows who he is. So another thrill for me is to reintroduce him to people, because he deserves to be remembered.”The show, by Doug Wright, had a first run earlier this year at the Goodman Theater in Chicago, where the Chicago Tribune critic Chris Jones raved about the play, and about Hayes.“It’s a stunner of a lead performance: moving, empathetic, deeply emotional and slightly terrifying,” Jones wrote. “Once this show arrives on Broadway, as it surely will, Hayes’ work here will be the talk of New York. So will the show, a piece with enough guts to take on the you-must-not-offend-me crew that now seems to run an industry actually founded on creative freedom.”The play, directed by Lisa Peterson, is scheduled to begin previews April 7 and to open April 24 at the Belasco Theater. The lead producers are Grove Entertainment (Beth Williams and Mindy Rich) and Barbara Whitman.Hayes, 52, is best known for his starring role on the television show “Will & Grace” (he played Jack). He has appeared on Broadway twice previously, scoring a Tony nomination in 2010 for his work in a revival of the musical “Promises, Promises,” and then in 2016 starring in a return engagement of the comedic play “An Act of God.”Hayes said he and Levant, although quite different in many ways, share traits that make the role interesting.“I know how it feels to have performance anxiety when playing piano — that was my major in college, I studied for 20 years, I thought I was going to be a conductor and a concert pianist, and that didn’t work out, and it didn’t work out for Oscar either,” he said. “It worked out that he was second banana in a bunch of movies, and I think I’m perceived as that even though the dream is always to lead and not follow.”And there’s more, Hayes said.“I don’t have any drug addiction, like he did, but the anxiety — I’m riddled with it, and some of the depression I have, so that’s kind of interesting,” Hayes said. “It’s just a dream come true for an actor to play a character with so many different facets and levels to him — you wish every part that you ever played in your life was as colorful.”Wright won both a Tony and a Pulitzer in 2004 for his play “I Am My Own Wife,” and he has written the book for four Broadway musicals, including “The Little Mermaid” and “Grey Gardens.” Wright also happened to be the screenwriter for the unproduced Spielberg film about Gershwin, who for a time was a close collaborator with Levant.“The Chicago run was exhilarating — we learned that Oscar’s humor isn’t dated, that it still feels topical, that it still has the power to shock and delight, and that, as one of the first historical figures to openly talk about his own battles with mental illness, we found audiences really responded to not only his humor but his vulnerability, as well,” Wright said.“One reason he has been so interesting to explore in the moment is he provokes a lot of questions about the role of humor in a culture — and, when a culture is under siege, what role can humor play,” Wright said. He added, “What are tenable subjects for humor, and doesn’t humor have a certain duty to, at times, rile and offend and invite change?” More