Opening Night Reviews Round-up – starring Sheridan Smith

"Sheridan Smith’s boozy meltdown shakes up musical theatre"

"Smith plays a Broadway star in the midst of a mental crisis in Ivo van Hove and Rufus Wainwright’s glittering and extravagantly original musical adaptation of the Cassavetes film"

"... here is an extravagantly original production, every bit as eccentric as the film but also its own alchemical creation, more vivacious in this musical incarnation."

"The trope of the brittle older woman in crisis is well worn... But there is counterintuitive casting in Smith, who does not strive for Rowlands’ unreachability or dangerous magnetism. Instead her Myrtle has an earthbound glamour and a celebrity honed from hard graft"

"Smith brings vulnerability, even flecks of comedy, and makes Myrtle’s crisis modern, relatable – that of a woman wanting to age on her own terms."

"The warmth of the production is counterintuitive too. Its tone is almost upbeat, but without clashing against Myrtle’s core anguish. Much of that is down to Wainwright’s slowly gorgeous music. The early songs have a springy, Chorus Line sound while later ones are full-bodied and tender with an edge of the operatic, bringing heat and intimacy to the drama."

"Unadventurous musical adaptations of films comprise a crowded corner in the West End, but this one seems to shake up musical theatre itself. It may be the most unusual thing on the London stage right now and is captivating in its glittering strangeness."

"Sheridan Smith is superb in Ivo van Hove and Rufus Wainwright’s deliciously odd not-really-a-musical"

"It is, to be clear, fairly nuts that leftfield European director Ivo van Hove has been allowed to plonk what I can only describe as a leftfield European musical in a big theatre in the middle of London’s glittering West End."

"As with much of his oeuvre, a big screen dominates proceedings, and what it displays is at least as important as watching the actors directly; the composition of the shots matters as much as the mise en scène."

"The whole production feels suspended between brutal reality and waking dream."

"Smith is wonderful: her fading starlet isn’t a hysterical diva but a clever woman facing a legitimate existential crisis... The cool, amused intelligence in Smith’s eyes is glorious as Myrtle elects to totally subvert a scene"

"In the second half, things get wilder, as Myrtle is haunted by visions of Nancy (Shira Haas), a troubled fan who was run over outside the theatre. It’s here that Wainwright’s score really comes into its own... as Myrtle becomes ever more detached from reality, it’s reflected in the increasingly unnaturalistic use of song."

"It’s a weird, wry, very human vehicle for a superb group of actors to tell a story that looks like it’s going to be an archetypal fable about a doomed star, but thrillingly pulls away from that, as Myrtle literally changes the script of her life and ‘Opening Night’ drifts into a euphoric final fantasia."

"Maybe it’s a musical, maybe it isn’t, but under all the avant-garde bells and whistles, it unquestionably has a heart – a buoyancy and belief in humanity that’s lacking in the original film."

"Sheridan Smith defies director's bid to ruin her big night with a cheekiness and vulnerability as dangerous as it is riveting"

"What an extraordinary theatrical mash-up Opening Night is. It's almost as if this studiously obtuse new musical which opened in the West End last night was designed to sabotage its fabulous leading lady, Sheridan Smith. And yet, if you can't keep a good woman down, you've got no chance whatsoever against Smith's unstoppable charisma."

"Thank God also for Rufus Wainwright's music. True, it sometimes dwindles into semi-tonal burbling. But it also explodes with the singer-songwriter's gift for doomed glory. A spectacular duet with Nicola Hughes as an exasperated writer character even brought to mind the brassy swagger of All That Jazz"

"More than anything though, it's thanks to the emotional wattage of Smith's voice that the show really soars. To quote the lyrics of one of her early numbers, she makes 'magic out of tragic'. There are moments, too, when I was simply in awe of her acting. She switches between playing herself, her actress character and the actress' character in the play within the play"

"There are many reasons to be dismayed by this show, but Smith, who at one point is filmed crawling drunk through the street outside, somehow defies Van Hove's attempt to derail her."

"Sheridan Smith captivates, if the songs don’t quite, in Ivo van Hove and Rufus Wainwright’s new musical"

"Ivo van Hove is a director who gives his audiences the illusion of privileged access – the thrilling sense that he is showing his workings... This reaches its climax in Opening Night"

"Opening Night is about seeing through to the reality behind a play, witnessing rehearsals, understanding the protesting actor at the heart of the drama. It could be seen as a chaotic, feminine companion piece to Sam Mendes’s brilliant and decorous exploration of the subject in last year’s The Motive and the Cue."

"Sheridan Smith plays the Broadway star Myrtle – knowingly cast in that she is a double Olivier award-winning star who has had her own struggles with fame. Wisely, she does not attempt to compete with the film’s blond diva, Gena Rowlands – her darker hair in itself a statement of intent – but she wins our sympathy from the start."

"The problem is partly that songs have to overwork to reveal the story. And although Wainwright’s music is enjoyable – jazzy, tending towards melancholy, big on brass and easy on the ear – the lyrics are seldom up to the job. Often, words shrivel under the limelight."

"Towards the end of the show we get to see the arresting footage, which turns out to be more compelling than it should be: when the audience becomes the show, something else must have got lost en route. Opening Night is tantalising. It bewilders, beguiles and overpowers – an almost hit."

"Sheridan Smith exquisitely self-destructs in weird meta-West End musical"

"Rufus Wainwright’s songs reach new emotional heights, Smith’s performance is radiant – but Ivo van Hove’s stage adaptation of John Cassavetes’s 1977 film is sometimes misjudged"

"Anyone who bought tickets to Opening Night in the hope of seeing its star Sheridan Smith treating us to a bit of thespy, Funny Girl-style razzle dazzle is in for a serious shock."

... Ivo Van Hove’s musical, set backstage during a show, is determinedly unflashy and oblique, dimly illuminated by singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright’s operatic torch songs. In fact, it feels a bit like the whole cast is trolling musical theatre fans: they linger like bedraggled pigeons in the corners of a vast unornamented stage, capturing the inertia, rather than the glamour, of backstage life. It’s flawed, but intermittently haunting."

"... while Wainwright has always shown a genius for creating whole sonic and emotional worlds in brief songs, he reaches new heights here."

"Still, Van Hove’s production isn’t sturdily built enough to contain all this emotion: it flattens and muddles where it could heighten."

"All in all, there’s an unfortunate irony here. Smith plays an actor self-destructing as she tries to make sense of the nonsensical role she’s been handed. But her own part here is pitifully underthought too, its vague references to menopause doing little to show what it’s actually like to be a woman facing down her future in a sexist, ageist industry."

"Sheridan Smith shines in a bizarre drama"

"At one point in this very strange musical about backstage drama at a Broadway play, a character remarks that “half the audience loved it, half the audience hated it’’. Those words may well become the epitaph for the collaboration between singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright and that ever-provocative Belgian director Ivo Van Hove."

"It’s a long time since I saw a show that seemed so determined to wrongfoot everyone. The songs and the script are occasionally inspired, but more often maddeningly opaque. God knows what Smith’s army of admirers will make of it all. Shirley Valentine this is not."

"At least Van Hove’s trademark use of video screens makes sense. We, the audience, watch ourselves entering the foyer."

"Some of Wainwright’s songs weave a haunting, chamber opera ambience, yet in the second half, in particular, too many are derailed by overly dense lyrics. I’m still glad I saw this show. Smith’s fans probably won’t be so pleased."

"Sheridan Smith shines but the show struggles to connect"

"Multilayered musical by Ivo van Hove and Rufus Wainwright opens at the Gielgud theatre, London"

"John Cassavetes’s 1977 Opening Night... drives this similarly ambitious and conceptually complex, though, alas, less successful, musical. That’s a shame for the whole team — director Ivo van Hove, composer Rufus Wainwright — but particularly for Sheridan Smith, who gives a terrific performance at its heart."

"For Smith, who suffered a breakdown during a run of Funny Girl in 2016, the material is very close to home, and she has spoken publicly about the importance of supporting mental health. And, as with her superb performance in Shirley Valentine last year, she brings great wit, infectious warmth and aching vulnerability to Myrtle, giving meaning to the tiniest purse of the lips or sideways glance at the audience. In her hands, Myrtle is an intelligent, impassioned, sensitive woman driven to the edge."

"The multi-layering becomes confusing and alienating — it’s often hard to follow what is going on — and seems to swamp the characters, most of whom remain one-note."

"Wainwright’s music is richly varied and sympathetic. Lush, lyrical, intricate, even capricious, it ranges from full-blown operatic emotional overdrive to a delicate solo accompanied by acoustic guitar"

"It’s a show that suggests the overwhelming, quite terrifying nature of breakdown and the need for connection — and yet, strangely, it fails to connect, emotionally."

"Sheridan Smith enthralls, but this play is a pretentious, convoluted mess"

"This musical adaptation of John Cassavetes’s film 1977 film lurches from one so-so number to the next"

"Even without Smith’s backstory, it’s a twisty, meta spin on the old “the show must go on” theme – the art-meets-life complications accentuated by romantic confusions"

"Although he pioneered the use of live video on stage, here he barely bothers to justify, dramatically, his use of a roving film crew beyond the basic steer that the company are being trailed for a fly-on-the-wall documentary. Captured imagery dominates the stage, including a brief foray outside the Gielgud, showing Smith staggering and slumping near passers-by."

"... he evening lurches from one so-so number to the next, Wainwright’s score stylistically all over the place and many lyrics lacking rhyme or reason."

"As for the supporting cast, whether they’re playing exasperated director, interfering producer, slighted author, vexed leading man or twitchy teen revenant, they give it their all. But it’s not enough to win hearts and minds. Shezza will live to fight another day. Whether the show deserves to long outlive its own opening night is another matter."

"Maddening lack of focus"

"Sheridan Smith struggles to illuminate this weird new musical from Ivo van Hove and Rufus Wainwright based on John Cassavetes’ 1977 film"

"A strange adaptation of a strange film, for a show with so many cameras onstage, this new musical displays a maddening lack of focus."

"... if Cassavetes’ original succeeds in compelling, thanks largely to striking cinematography and a raw performance from Gena Rowlands, this version, which features live video footage, is so aimless and tonally muddled that it feels downright weird. Which might be less of a problem if it were not ultimately a bit boring."

"Myrtle, the rapidly unravelling star, is played by Sheridan Smith with an arresting blend of wit, bravado, frustration and vulnerability, the camera tracking her every nuance of expression. And there is strong support from Hadley Fraser as director Manny, Amy Lennox as his neglected wife, Nicola Hughes as Sarah, the frustrated playwright whose creation Myrtle is threatening to sabotage, and Benjamin Walker as her self-regarding and exasperated co-star Maurice."

"But it’s tough for any of them to make much of characters who are little more than props in Myrtle’s frenzied whirlwind, and even Myrtle herself remains a frustrating enigma."

"None of this is helped at all by Wainwright’s songs. Most are jaunty ditties on guitar, banjo and brass, peculiarly at odds with the jagged darkness of the narrative"

"Car crash of a production that even Sheridan Smith can't avert"

"What could possibly go wrong in this Ivo Van Hove directorial? Just about everything, writes Neil Normal."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Even Sheridan Smith can’t save this confused, messy musical"

"The star’s magnetic talent is wasted in Ivo van Hove and Rufus Wainwright’s arthouse folly of a backstage musical"

"It’s not lacking in star power: in fact, Sheridan Smith proves once again she is among the most magnetic performers in British theatre. Yet what exactly is she pulling her audience towards in Opening Night, an arthouse folly of a backstage musical?"

"She has finesse as well as fortitude as Myrtle sings about love and her perceived obsolescence. Near the end, ruling the stage with a tune that sounds like a more singer-songwritery I Will Survive, she makes you wish, not for the first time, that she was in a clearer, more consequential story"

"So there’s something on offer for Smith-watchers. At some price, though. Van Hove first did a non-musical version of Opening Night in 2006 in Amsterdam... He is, on his night, a thrilling theatre-maker. This is not his night."

"Wainwright’s distinctive music veers between Sondheimy, electro-poppy and pop-operatic, plus a couple of tunes that would be better suited for the job than most recent Bond themes. For all that, the characters only fitfully come across as if they really need to sing. The more soaring the song, in fact, the more you wonder why you are feeling so little."

"Even Sheridan Smith can't save this dismally muddled show"

"This take on John Cassavetes’ 1977 film is unsalvageable"

"This dismally muddled, self-important, furtively misogynist musical about an actress going to pieces squanders the talents of everyone involved, even breaking Sheridan Smith’s unique ability to connect with an audience."

"Singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright contributes his first-ever musical score, a hodgepodge of genre pastiche and schoolboy rhyme so lame I hope it will also be his last. The use of live video adds another tiresome layer of introspection to a project wedged firmly up its own fundament."

"Certainly the talents of Smith and Wainwright seem inextricably linked to their sensitivity, but Van Hove leaves both of them horrible exposed here. He puts Smith in particular through the wringer, forcing her to confront her vulnerabilities and blaming us for watching. How dare he?"

"Here Van Hove simplifies and updates the jazzy narrative of the film and shoves everything subtextual into the foreground. The show becomes a series of needy pleas for love and tedious emotional collapses, while Wainwright’s score skips from a Ravel homage/ripoff to hollow torch songs to footling showtunes. His lyrics range from the staggeringly obvious to the buttock-clenchingly pretentious."

"Sheridan Smith is better than this self-indulgent twaddle"

"Rufus Wainwright and Ivo Van Hove's misguided musical is bewilderingly terrible on almost every front"

"Oh dear. Just occasionally a new West End show is so bewilderingly terrible that one can only gasp in quiet amazement at the fact that it has made it before paying audiences in the first place. A customarily effervescent and full-hearted performance from leading lady Sheridan Smith can do nothing to salvage this mess, through which a nasty vein of misogyny pumps insistently, and sections of which are devoid of even basic narrative sense."

"... there is the occasional striking number, but the music remains awkwardly unembedded in the action and fails to add any depth to the woeful script."

"Smith offers an utterly compelling portrait of a woman who is disintegrating mentally – and after an extended section involving fearsome strobe lighting, I felt as though I was too."

"Sensational Sheridan Smith can't save catastrophic car crash musical"

"Opening Night starring Sheridan Smith and directed by Ivo Van Hove is a confusing, tedious mess with disappointingly forgettable music by Rufus Wainwright."

"Talk about tempting fate... This show actually opens with a car crash. Oh, the irony. The production is more like a multi-lane pile-up"

"Not even a charismatic, soul-baring Sheridan Smith can save Ivo van Hove's abominable, misjudged musical adaptation of John Cassavetes' iconic, challenging 1977 film"

"A Stylish Movie Becomes a Sludgy Travesty"

"Ivo van Hove’s stage adaptation of the 1977 John Cassavetes film, with music by Rufus Wainwright, turns a taut character study into a corny melodrama."

"It’s a compelling story line, filled with dramatic possibilities, but “Opening Night,” which runs at the Gielgud Theater through July 27, is scuppered by a series of poor choices. Smith is miscast as Myrtle, for a start: Her onstage bearing exudes a homely approachability rather than high-strung poise or inscrutable aloofness."

"The songs, by Rufus Wainwright, are algorithmically bland."

"... amera operators stalk its perimeter, transmitting close-up, real-time footage of the actors onto a big screen above the stage. The idea is to ramp up the psychodrama by bringing us up close and personal, but there isn’t much intensity to intensify. The multiple angles add little to the experience."

"There are one or two good moments, including a tense rehearsal scene in which Myrtle objects to having to endure an onstage slap."

"Van Hove has transformed a taut, subtly observed character study into a sludgy melodrama."

"Sheridan Smith’s Turn Cannot Save Ivo Van Hove and Rufus Wainwright’s Monotonous Musical Adaptation"

"... where Cassavetes artfully constructed Myrtle and built an intriguing blur between what is happening in her head and in the play being rehearsed, the blur here topples into a mess. Some of the fault for that is due to the decision to add an onstage crew"

"One can, of course, weave multiple plot strands together to surreal but emotionally dazzling effect. But that requires a directorial clarity that’s lacking here, and the underwritten book and unfocused staging means the combination merely blurs. We’re insufficiently engaged to care."

"Most problematically, the video work completely pulls focus. The actors are robbed of agency in the space since watching faces in tight, hard close-up (wildly unflattering when singing) is always going to be more attention-grabbing than watching them on the stage."

"Typically writing his own excellent orchestrations, he [Rufus Wainwright] provides effective underscoring from the Ravel-like opening strands to the punchy percussion and guitar of the desperate climactic sequence, but his meandering songs neither build nor guide the listener with any dramatic shape.

"She’s [Sheridan Smith] game and the least of the show’s problems. She handles both music and character with dedication, and repeatedly seeing her tear-stained face in close-up shows how seriously she takes the role. But, as with all the characters, her material lacks the depth to allow her to shine. Van Hove is many things, but the least of them is a playwright."