It’s late in the morning and a big star is kicking off. “Turn on the lights, dammit!” she rages at a stagehand. Her fists are clenched, her tanned, tattooed arms stick out from a royal blue sleeveless dress and her locks are burnt brunette. Once her request is fulfilled, the star turns to the wide, high-ceilinged room and switches to a softer tone. “Humilia-ting!she vibrates, making the last syllable sound like a bell. As laughter fills the air, she loses character and her body visibly relaxes. This woman is no longer Myrtle Gordon, the star-drenched Broadway legend who erupts on the eve of her final show, but Sheridan Smith, the double Olivier-winning star of the musical Legally Blonde, whose own recent troubles have left her feeling has something to offer. prove.
The new musical – called Opening Night and adapted by Ivo van Hove and Rufus Wainwright from John Cassavetes’ thrilling 1977 film – could be just the ticket. “It’s so close,” says the 42-year-old, as he takes a break from rehearsals in this London studio. “I actually let the curtain fall on me. I have experienced such a crisis.” Myrtle – played fiercely and fearlessly on screen by Gena Rowlands, Cassavetes’ wife – stars in The Second Woman, a melodrama that’s stumbling through out-of-town previews ahead of its glitzy New York premiere. Myrtle fears she has lost her youth, her grip on the role and, increasingly, her mind. Her mental health becomes even more precarious after a fan is knocked down and murdered outside the theater. Soon she sees the dead girl everywhere.
There was no support team then. It was just, ‘Get on stage!’
Now considered a masterpiece, Opening Night was panned upon its initial American release, playing to a handful of near-empty theaters. Yet its rawness and daring have made it an object of enduring fascination. Van Hove previously staged a non-musical version in 2008, Isabelle Adjani played Myrtle in a pared-back 2019 production, while Ruth Wilson (versus 100 consecutive male co-stars) brought a 24-hour play based on a single scene from Opening Night to London’s Young Vic last year.
Perhaps Opening Night has become relevant to all of us, not just actors, because our public and private selves have blurred in the age of social media. Smith’s own crisis is well documented. Self-doubt, anxiety and alcohol, along with grief over her cancer diagnosis and eventual death of her father, caused her to publicly fall apart when she played Fanny Brice in Funny Girl in 2016. “Obtaining the script for Opening Night was a sign,” she says. “I knew I had to do the piece as a way to gain control over what I was going through. I was so ashamed of that time. I have to prove that I’m not that person. It was very cathartic.”
She worried that elements of Myrtle’s story could be triggers. “But there are therapists here you can talk to,” she says. “It’s so different from when I had my meltdown eight years ago. There was no support team then. It was just, ‘Get on stage!’” That’s what happens to Myrtle on Opening Night, when she arrives at work almost unfeelingly, only to be shoved in front of the audience with nothing but a black coffee to cheer her up. to calm down. “Life imitates art,” says Smith. “I’m in a stronger place now. We discover the truth of a scene, shake it off and go home. Ivo doesn’t let you live in fear.”
Looking at the 65-year-old director – fresh from a recent production of Jesus Christ Superstar in Amsterdam, and from last year’s sold-out London series A Little Life – it’s easy to believe he’s a stabilizing presence. Thin as a pool cue, hair the color of chalk dust, he calmly approaches Smith between scenes, palms pressed together or one hand thoughtfully raised to his chin. He has a wise, priestly appearance; if he didn’t give any clues, he might confess.
Meanwhile, behind a trestle table with the script open in front of him, sits 50-year-old Wainwright, wearing a salmon-colored hoodie and sporting a badger-like beard. Opening Night has long been dear to the sonnet-singing, opera-writing, Judy Garland-imitating musical polymath: he even dressed up as Myrtle in the video for his 2012 single Out of the Game. “It’s a movie I’ve seen many times,” he says. “It has changed my life every time I have rewatched it, as I find myself encountering new aspects that require maturity to understand.”
Like Smith, Opening Night represents a kind of personal salvation for Wainwright. “Before I started this, I experienced a very deep depression. I was in Australia and I said, ‘I need something to get through the day: a song, a poem, a phone call.’ Opening Night came to mind: the film – and Gena Rowlands’ performance. It really was almost a matter of life and death. I had no intention of killing myself, but I was in a very intense moment. When I got home, Ivo suggested we do Opening Night.” How exactly did the film get him through? “A lot of it was that haircut,” he laughs. ‘And that look she has. The world is so dark and she is trying to navigate the intensity.”
Van Hove has adapted Cassavetes several times, including a production of Faces in which the audience lay on beds, but he never consults the film versions of anything he adapts. In fact, he still hasn’t seen Opening Night. “I need to feel like we can create something unique,” he says. The introduction of music changed its entire dynamic. “There is a unity. You don’t have scenes followed by songs. One thing flows into the other, which makes it feel normal when people start singing.”
Myrtle flees to her lamp-strewn mirror – and the ghost of her dead fan takes her place on stage
This is evident from the section being rehearsed today. It opens with Myrtle going off script and flying into a rage as the ghost of her dead fan Nancy looks on, dressed in a ripped denim jacket, white lace dress and black Chelsea boots, twirling a rose in her hand. When Myrtle flees to her dressing room and sits in front of her lamp-studded mirror, Nancy – played by Shira Haas – takes her place on stage, writhing at the feet of Myrtle’s oblivious co-star. Not only singing and dialogue flow into each other here: all boundaries are porous, from the separation between stage and backstage to the boundary between the spiritual and the physical.
Fans of Van Hove’s work won’t be surprised to hear that video plays a prominent role, with an on-stage crew filming Myrtle for a behind-the-scenes documentary, with footage from their live feed projected behind the actors. “As an audience you have to make choices,” the director explains. “You have to look actively.”
Towards the end of the run-through, Wainwright has advised the musicians in the corner on one of the guitar cues – “Make it dissonant and ugly” – and conducted the company as they sang the show’s ethereal chorus-cum-overture. Manny, the director of the play-within-the-play, gives a stirring speech, moving back and forth between speech and song, rallying the troops with the words: “We get paid to express ourselves on stage pressing – and part of that is pain.”
Van Hove intervenes to emphasize this point. Yes, he explains, it’s a pep talk, but not only 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 out there.'” The reverent silence that has descended on the room is broken by Hadley Fraser, who plays Manny. ‘Now, Ivo,’ he says, ‘as long as you can to sing That …”
When I see Van Hove afterwards, he is spreading antiseptic gel over one of his palms. “I put my pencil in my hand,” he says with a shudder. “It was quite emotional.” Manny did say that pain is part of theater. However, the dominant image from the morning rehearsals is that Van Hove watches over his company like a proud father while their voices sound together. “I call it a play about a theater family,” he smiles. “Families and how they function come up a lot in what I do.”
That will apply more than ever to his upcoming adaptation of The Shining, which will be staged next year with Ben Stiller as Jack Torrance, the ultimate flawed patriarch immortalized on screen by Jack Nicholson. “Everyone thinks of the Kubrick film, which for me is a masterpiece,” says Van Hove, before naming the author. “But Stephen King hated it. When I reread the book, I understood why. The first 100 pages are gone. And then you see that the father has his problems. That’s why they go to the hotel, so he can be alone and write. What I did is go back to the book. It will be something completely different from Kubrick.”
However, with its ghosts, unstable creative types and harrowing mental breakdown, it’s not that different from Opening Night.
• Opening Night is from March 6 to July 27 at the Gielgud Theatre, London