It pains me to report that in a London theatre, “a work of art is being desecrated”, said Houman Barekat in The New York Times.
Opening Night is a stage musical adaptation of John Cassavetes’ “stylish” 1977 film, a psychological drama about a troubled Broadway actress – and it is a travesty. The production, from the Belgian director Ivo van Hove, with songs by Rufus Wainwright, is a confusing, meta-mess that is at points “so schlocky, that it almost feels like a send-up”. Alas, it’s true, said Nick Curtis in the Evening Standard. What we have here is a “muddled, self-important, furtively misogynist” production that squanders the talents of all concerned. Wainwright’s first-ever musical score is a lame “hodgepodge of genre pastiche and schoolboy rhyme”, and the “use of live video adds another tiresome layer of introspection to a project wedged firmly up its own fundament”. It’s an “unsalvageable” disaster.
Anyone who bought tickets hoping to see the show’s star, Sheridan Smith, deliver some “Funny Girl-style razzle dazzle” is in for a shock, said Alice Saville in The Independent. The musical, which is set backstage at a theatre, is “determinedly unflashy and oblique”. But still, Smith is superb in the role of Myrtle, the alcoholic, “self-destructing” actress struggling to adjust to having to play an older woman for the first time.
Smith does her best, said Sarah Crompton on What’s on Stage. But this can’t compensate for the confusing script and a staging that “often doesn’t differentiate between scenes onstage in the play within the play, and the chaos backstage”. This may not be the “least engaging evening of musical theatre I’ve ever sat through”, but as a “waste of talent” it’s right up there. It is admittedly “fairly nuts” that a “leftfield European director” has been allowed “to plonk what I can only describe as a leftfield European musical” in a big West End theatre, said Andrzej Lukowski in Time Out. But in its singularity, I rather liked it. It’s weird, wry and, “under all the avant-garde bells and whistles”, it “unquestionably has a heart”.