Opening Night review and star rating: ★★★★
Critics are bound by embargoes dictating when they can and cannot reveal their thoughts on a production. For Opening Night, the response has been so extreme that reviewers barely managed to keep schtum. One wrote “I saw Opening Night” with a melting face emoji, surely a tell-all sign that something is terrible, and another journalist on socials condemned it as a “total mess.” You just know it’s worth seeing, then…
Provocative posters of Sheridan Smith – the West End’s musical world’s A-Lister – hiding from the paps behind big sunglasses have littered the Tube. They’re grabby because they feel so contemporary; the street style breaking with typical musical poster convention. Director Ivo van Hove has been messing with the formula since the early ‘90s; his trademark use of video in production signalled the traditional industry’s willingness to be forward-thinking. He has directed Tony and Olivier Award-winning productions of A View from the Bridge at the Young Vic, Lazarus at King’s Cross theatre and Hedda Gabler at the National Theatre, as well as Bryan Cranston’s “electric” version of Network at the National, and the brilliant Damned at the Barbican, which proved his talent for adaptations.
Opening Night is best viewed as a piece of performance art rather than a play. A musical within a musical where the audience plays a part, it is so self-consciously meta, experimental and full of different flavours that it’s hard to keep up. It is about putting on a musical, but also willingly about nothing at all; the plot purposefully seeming to go nowhere, questioning the notion of a plot itself as various men on and off stage creep over Smith’s Myrtle, the lead star of an in-rehearsals production approaching opening night. All the while, she’s approaching a mental breakdown, similar to the mental challenges Smith faced in real life.
The music, by Rufus Wainwright, is majestic, the on stage band another bright element to look at amongst the cacophonous crowd of backstage hands buzzing about, then there’s a rather morbid line about a young female fan and a frenetic, off-tempo pacing about the endless dialogue that seems to make it feel overwhelming on purpose.
Opening Night is like a nightmare about an opening night, where what’s going on is obscured by anxiety and the stresses of putting on a show, especially when, as Myrtle worries, the language doesn’t sound like a woman and there are fears about whether audiences want to see an older woman on stage anyway.
Two of the lines in Opening Night from male leads go like this: “There must be something other than heat and light that draws us into this gaze of a moth to a flame,” and “Let’s take this play, dump it upside down and see if we can find anything in it.” To say that this is a “total mess” is not a hot take; that much is obvious.
None of this is supposed to make sense. But it is a delightful probing of what could make sense, a continual questioning of the stage, of actors, and of the language we use to project our darkest fears. It’s worth buying a ticket alone just to hear the confusion and pseudo hot takes in the interval about how it’s bad because it’s messy. You’re singing from van Hove’s hymnbook, lads: the fact that Rufus Wainwright’s music is the most conventional thing about Opening Night is hilarious, but true.
As for the video live streaming, and the one bit getting loads of attention featuring Smith outside the theatre having a breakdown that’s filmed live every night, at this stage, post Sunset Boulevard with its technological bells and whistles, it is definitely the least interesting thing about Opening Night.
It is perhaps underwhelming for the many actors who mill about on stage to add to the sense of chaos, and Smith’s role is limiting on her talent in that it’s a pastiche, but there’s something raw and existential to dive for here about the very silliness of the pressures of putting on a show – heck, the pressures of anything! Let’s think like van Hove does – that resonates. The screech of the human condition in the most sparkling of places: a West End stage. If you’re a glutton for punishment you’ll find something watchable here.
Opening Night plays at the Gielgud Theatre until 27 July