Fresh from her triumph as Shirley Valentine, Sheridan Smith plays ageing Broadway star Myrtle Gordon who is losing her nerve days before her next big show following the death of a young fan.
As she anaesthetises her guilt and anxiety with booze, the director, producer, playwright and actors start to panic over her fitness for the all-important opening night.
Smith’s courageous performance in new musical Opening Night echoes the period in her life when insecurity and angst drove her to alcohol and a very public meltdown.
Now in full command of her faculties and talents, she tackles the role with gusto, exorcising her turbulent past whose legacy is evident in the tattoos on her arms. Based on a film by John Cassavetes, this musical adaptation arrives with impeccable credentials.
The songs are by Rufus Wainwright while the director/adapter is Belgian iconoclast Ivo Van Hove.
What could possibly go wrong? Just about everything, as it happens. The use of onstage cameras to film performers and project them on a huge screen is already outmoded. So, too, is the scene in which Smith is filmed in the street outside and then assisted back into the theatre.
Been there, seen that in Jamie Lloyd’s Sunset Boulevard.
Smith holds the centre with her customary flair but she and the entire cast are visibly struggling with Wainwright’s banal lyrics (“You’ve got to make magic/Magic out of tragic”) and blandly conventional music as well as Van Hove’s dialogue that consists of showbiz cliches strung together like faulty Christmas tree lights.
It gives rise to some bizarre performances: Shira Haas plays the ghost of dead fan Nancy as a sexually incontinent drug addict while the full-voiced Nicola Hughes as playwright Sarah appears to be auditioning for a leading role in Sister Act.
Worst of all, Van Hove has altered the trajectory of Cassavetes’ film to turn a tale of vulnerability, cynicism and human crisis into a superficial and unbelievable tale of last-minute success snatched from the jaws of defeat, culminating in a Broadway style finale that is wholly at odds with what has preceded it.
“I’ve been in the theatre all my life and I still don’t know anything about it,” wails one character.
It’s a line destined to backfire on those behind a car crash of a production that not even Smith can avert.