It’s late in the morning and a big star is on its way. “For God’s sake, turn on the lights!” he becomes enraged at a stagehand. Her fists are clenched, her tanned, tattooed arms peeking out from under a dark blue sleeveless dress, and her curls are dyed a tanned brunette. Once his request is met, the star turns to face the large, high-ceilinged room and switches to a softer tone of voice. “Humilia…ting!He makes a high-pitched sound, making the last syllable ring like a bell. He breaks out of character as laughter fills the air, his body visibly relaxing. This woman is no longer Myrtle Gordon, the drunken Broadway legend who went crazy on the eve of her last show, but Sheridan Smith, the double Olivier award-winning star of the musical Legally Blonde, whose recent troubles have made her feel like she has something to do. prove.
The new musical, called Opening Night and directed by Ivo van Hove and Rufus Wainwright, based on John Cassavetes’ influential 1977 film, may be just the ticket. “It’s very close to my heart,” says the 42-year-old artist, taking a break from rehearsals in a studio in London. “Actually, the curtain was brought down on me. “I also experienced such a crisis.” Myrtle, played ferociously and fearlessly on screen by Cassavetes’s wife, Gena Rowlands, stars in The Second Woman, a melodrama that faltered in out-of-town screenings before its glitzy New York premiere. Myrtle fears she is losing her youth, her command of the role, and, increasingly, her sanity. His mental health becomes even more precarious after a fan is knocked down and killed outside the theatre. Soon she starts seeing the dead girl everywhere.
There was no support team back then. Just: ‘Get on stage!’
Now considered a masterpiece, Opening Night was met with backlash upon its initial U.S. release, playing to a handful of empty theaters. Yet his naivety and audacity made him an enduring object of admiration. Van Hove had previously staged a non-musical version in 2008; Isabelle Adjani played Myrtle in a low-key production in 2019, while Ruth Wilson (opposite a row of 100 male leads) brought a 24-hour play based on a single scene from Opening Night. to the Young Vic in London last year.
As our public and private selves have blurred in the age of social media, perhaps Opening Night has become relevant to all of us, not just the players. Smith’s own crisis is well documented. Self-doubt, anxiety and alcohol, as well as sadness over her father’s cancer diagnosis and eventual death, led to her public unraveling while playing Fanny Brice in 2016’s Funny Girl. “Getting the Opening Night script was a sign,” he says. “I knew I had to play the game as a way to take control of what I was going through. I was very embarrassed at that moment. I have to prove that I’m not that person. “It was very relaxing.”
He was concerned that some elements of Myrtle’s story might be triggering. “But there are therapists here you can talk to,” he says. “It is very different from the crisis I experienced eight years ago. There was no support team back then. Just ‘Get on stage!’ “it meant.” This is what happens to Myrtle in Opening Night; When he arrives at work unconscious, he is thrust in front of an audience with nothing but black coffee to calm him down. “Life imitates art,” says Smith. “I’m in a stronger place now. We find the truth of a scene, then shake it off and go home. Ivo doesn’t keep you living in anxiety.”
Watching the 65-year-old director (fresh from a recent production of Jesus Christ Superstar in Amsterdam as well as the blockbuster A Little Life in London last year), it’s easy to believe he’s a steady presence. Slim as a billiard stick, with hair the color of chalk, he calmly approaches Smith between scenes, pressing his palms together or lifting one hand pensively to his chin. He has a wise, priestly air; If he wasn’t giving instructions, he might be confessing.
Meanwhile, sitting behind a trestle table with the script open in front of him is Wainwright, 50, wearing a salmon-colored hoodie and sporting a badger beard. Opening Night has long been a treasure for the sonnet-singing, opera-writing, Judy Garland-impersonating musical polymath: She even dressed as Myrtle in the video for her 2012 single Out of the Game. “It’s a movie I’ve seen many times,” he says. “Every time I rewatch it, it has changed my life because I find myself relating to new aspects that require maturity to understand.”
Like Smith, Opening Night represents a kind of personal redemption for Wainwright. “I had a very deep depression before I started this. I was in Australia and I said: ‘I need something to get me through the day: a song, a poem, a phone call.’ I was reminded of Opening Night: the film and Gena Rowlands’ performance. This really was almost a matter of life and death. I wasn’t going to kill myself, but I was in a very intense place. Then I came home and Ivo suggested we do Opening Night.” How exactly did the movie pull it off? “A lot of it was that hairstyle,” she laughs. “And that look she. The world is very dark and he is trying to find his way in this density.”
Van Hove had adapted Cassavetes several times before; This included a production of The Faces that had audiences lying in bed, but he never resorted to film versions of anything he adapted. Actually, he still hasn’t watched Opening Night. “I need to feel like we can create something unique,” he says. The advent of music changed its entire dynamic. “There is unity. You don’t have scenes followed by songs. One merges with the other, so when people start singing it feels normal.”
Myrtle runs away to her bulb-filled mirror, and the ghost of her dead admirer takes her place on stage.
This is evident from the episode rehearsed today. It all starts with Myrtle going off script and flying into a rage; Meanwhile, the ghost of her dead admirer Nancy, dressed in a tattered denim jacket, white lace dress and black Chelsea boots, twirls a rose in her hand. When Myrtle escapes to her dressing room and sits in front of her bulb-adorned mirror, Nancy, played by Shira Haas, takes her place on stage and writhes at the feet of Myrtle’s unsuspecting co-star. It’s not just song and dialogue that bleed into each other here: all boundaries are permeable, from the distinctions between onstage and backstage to the line separating the spiritual from the material.
Fans of Van Hove’s work won’t be surprised to learn that the video features prominently as an on-stage crew films Myrtle for a behind-the-scenes documentary, with footage from the livestream projected behind the actors. “As an audience, you have to make choices,” the director explains. “You have to actively look.”
At the end of the review, Wainwright advised the corner musicians on one of the guitar cues, “Make it discordant and ugly,” and led the band in singing the show’s ethereal chorus overture. Manny, the play-within-the-play director, gives a stirring speech, alternating between speech and song, rallying the soldiers with the words: “We get paid to express ourselves on stage, and part of that is pain.”
Van Hove steps in to emphasize this point. Yes, he explains, it’s a pep talk, but it’s not just that: It comes from Manny’s heart, just as Mark Antony’s speech in Julius Caesar comes from his. “Outside is Gaza, outside is Ukraine. But here Manny says: ‘We’re creating something meaningful that can impact the world outside.'” Hadley Fraser, who plays Manny, breaks the respectful silence that has settled in the room. “Now Ivo,” he says, “if you can to sing a song HE …”
When I saw Van Hove later, he was applying antiseptic gel to one of his palms. “I stuck my pen in my hand,” he said, startled. “It was pretty emotional.” Manny said pain was part of theatre. But the prevailing image at the morning’s rehearsals was of Van Hove watching over his team like a proud father as their voices rose together. “I call it a play about a theater family,” he smiles. “Families and how they function come up a lot in the work I do.”
This will be true more than ever for next year’s adaptation of The Shining, which stars Ben Stiller as Jack Torrance, the ultimate flawed patriarch immortalized on the big screen by Jack Nicholson. “Everyone thinks of the Kubrick movie, which for me is a masterpiece,” says Van Hove, before mentioning the film’s writer. “But Stephen King hated it. When I read the book again, I could understand why. First 100 pages finished. That’s when you see that daddy has issues. So they go to the hotel so they can be alone and write. What I did was go back to the book. “It will be something very different from Kubrick.”
But it’s not all that different from Opening Night, with its ghosts, unstable creative types, and heartbreaking mental breakdown.
• Opening Night will be held at the Gielgud Theater in London from 6 March to 27 July