Good Night, Oscar – Barbican Centre

Last Updated on October 29, 2025

“There’s a fine line between genius and insanity; I have erased this line.”

4.0 out of 5.0 stars

Since the success of Peter Morgan’s 2006 play Frost/Nixon, the celebrity TV interview has become fertile ground for dramatists. The latest iteration of the form to arrive in London at the Barbican Theatre is Doug Wright’s Good Night, Oscar starring Emmy and Tony Award-winner Sean Hayes, Jack in the sitcom Will & Grace, in the role of Oscar Levant (1906–1972), musician, wit and neurotic.

The child of Orthodox Jewish parents from Russia, Pittsburgh-born Levant was a child prodigy performing piano recitals by the age of eight. After moving to New York at age 15 in 1922, the young Oscar immersed himself in both the classical and popular music scenes, working as a pianist in Broadway theatres and nightclubs.

By the late 1920s, he had moved to Hollywood, composing music for over 20 movies, with his most famous composition being the standard “Blame It on My Youth”, recorded by legends such as Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and by non-legends such as myself, with the excellent singer Ian Shaw at Ronnie Scott’s. Levant was also closely associated with the music of George Gershwin, becoming the foremost interpreter and performer of Gershwin’s piano works after the songwriter died in 1937. Levant performed Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” and “Concerto in F” extensively, including in the 1945 biopic Rhapsody in Blue and in concert performances with renowned conductors, including Arturo Toscanini.

Alongside his musical career, Levant gained fame for his sharp wit and self-deprecating humour, appearing frequently on radio quiz shows and later as a television talk show host and panellist on the Brains Trust. His celebrity was marked by candid discussions of his mental health struggles, which was rare for the time, making him one of America’s first publicly acknowledged dysfunctional celebrities. In cinema, he often played versions of himself, appearing in films such as An American in Paris and The Band Wagon. His distinctive persona—brilliant musician and witty entertainer with a vulnerability—earned him a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960 for his recordings. He died of a heart attack in 1972 at age 65, and his life is best understood through reading of his brilliant memoir, Memoirs of an Amnesiac

Doug Wright’s play Good Night, Oscar is set over one day in 1958. Levant has been booked as a guest on the hit late-night TV show The Tonight Show with Jack Paar. The host and his TV executive boss, Bob Sarnoff, were unaware that Levant was being sprung out of Mount Sinai mental hospital by his long-suffering wife, June, for the appearance. Although Levant was a regular guest on the show, the events in Good Night, Oscar are a fiction. The first half of the play is built around the uncertainty as to whether Levant will turn up, with the second act focusing on the appearance itself and the subsequent fallout.

Good Night, Oscar is a brilliant evening of theatre with a virtuosic central performance by Sean Hayes as the troubled musician. Before this renewed interest, Levant was something of a forgotten footnote in show business history. Even the director hadn’t heard of him before reading the play’s script. So there is a lot of backstory to establish Levant’s history, often delivered by Eric Sirakian’s Max Weinbaum, the TV show’s nepo baby runner and geeky fan boy. It falls just the right side of being a bit clunky, but Levant’s one-liners, which still sparkle with wit even when laced with venom, form much of the script and compensate for any minor structural weaknesses.

Hayes captures Levant’s curmudgeonly brilliance, his obsessional behaviour with its associated physical ticks and his capacity for delivering spiky one-liners as he publicly self-destructs. Hayes is too tall and lean to convincingly give us Levant’s squat physicality, but the actor, who studied piano at Illinois State University,  gave a fine piano performance of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, which is an admirable feat for a non-professional pianist.

Rosalie Craig gives a nuanced performance as Levant’s wife, June, juggling three children and her undoubted love for her husband, with the physical threat, chaos and instability that were the outcome of Levant’s addictive personality and illness. Their scenes together in Good Night, Oscar veered between the touching and the confrontational and Craig was a fine match for Hayes.

The cultural tensions that are starting to emerge in the USA in the late 1950s are embedded in the characters of NBC TV executive Bob Sarnoff, played by Richard Katz, and the Tonight Show host Jack Parr, the inventor of the late-night celebrity chat show format, played by Ben Rappaport. Sarnoff, played with an upright sense of indignation by Katz, represents conservative mid-America and lives in fear of the reaction of the audience and the show’s sponsors to Levant’s utterances.

Whilst Levant was never associated with comic Lenny Bruce and the Beat Generation, they both addressed the three taboo subjects of sex, politics and religion that were considered inappropriate for mainstream audiences at the time. Rappaport’s oleagenous Parr represents this more liberal strand of thinking, acting as a cultural provocateur, and with one eye on the publicity it would create for his show, cynically pushing the vulnerable Levant into addressing the topics that Sarnoff had expressly forbidden.

Daniel Adeosun plays Alvin Finney, Levant’s minder from Mount Sinai Hospital. A Chuck Berry fan, he exists in a different cultural universe to the metropolitan sophistication of the other characters, and Adeosun creates a delicate balance between his obvious affection for the unstable Levant and his own self-interest.

A fantasy version of George Gershwin, conjured up in Levant’s psychotic episodes, appears regularly throughout the play to taunt Levant on his own shortcomings as a composer. David Burnett captures Gershwin’s extraordinary hubris as he sashays around the piano, locked in a codependent dance with his greatest interpreter.

Rachel Hauck’s mid-century set for Good Night, Oscar is stylishly kinetic, taking us from the TV dressing room to the Tonight Show studios and Lisa Peterson’s direction is New York-slick, letting Levant’s words take centre stage.

I’m a long-standing admirer of Oscar Levant and hope that Good Night, Oscar doesn’t mask his brilliance with its emphasis on his dysfunctional behaviour. There are other tales that could have been told, but our culture is voracious in its consumption of the talented celebrity victim. Good Night, Oscar is, however, a great night out, and Hayes will win more prizes for his performance.

Good Night, Oscar

31^st JULY – 21^st SEPTEMBER

The Barbican Theatre.
Barbican Centre,
Silk Street,
City of London,
EC2Y 8DS

Looking for something different? Check our Autumn/Winter Off-West-End Theatre Preview