Opening Night - Gielgud

This is not the same as "Sunset Boulevard," where Jamie Lloyd uses cameras thematically to demonstrate how desperate Norma is for her close-up, and why, demonstrating the star making power of the camera.

Cameras are simply a part of Van Hove's toolkit, and have been for donkey's years. He feels (rightly) that we consume our modern world through screens, and the stage space becomes archaic without them.

In Kings of War, the cameras showed us the way we consume war today through war footage, and made Shakespeare feel like now.

Some spoilers follow. . .

In this show, the screen and the stage represent two different spaces, the world of the physical (the quotidian stage) and the world of the mind (the closeup heartfelt screen of dreams).

So, Sheridan's Myrtle looks in mirror and we see her back in the physical space, but on screen we see her dreaming close-up mind.

In the stage space, we see Sheridan's Myrtle messing around with her lines, while on screen we see the raging passion of Nicola Hughes's writer, who wrote them.

By showing us two worlds, and challenging us to combine them, Van Hove shows us a fuller appreciation of lived experience.

I saw it last Saturday night, and I just saw today's matinee, and I can confirm it is not a different show, but it is a tighter, more easily understood show, with a MUCH more dramatic ending to the first half, that takes the audience into the interval on an exhilarating narrative and musical high.

Spoilers follow. . .

In the version that played last Saturday, there was a little bit of jolly hoovering, and that's gone, and that's a good choice because , as delightful as the sequence was, it misinforms the audience that they're about to watch a funny lightweight show, which they are NOT.

There are two major changes from last Saturday to now:-

(1) The first half initially ended with a fully performed big number by Sheridan Smith's Myrtle, which I'll guess is called "A Somebody." Before that there was a number I've forgotten, as it had little lasting impact on me. And before that was Nicola Hughes's writer's dazzling "Its Over," performed with all the belt and bravura of Shirley Bassey's "Goldfinger," complete with dramatic romantic strings and percussion you'd expect in a classic Bond film title sequence. That Hughes song is a highlight of the whole show, and it's very threatening and ominous narratively for Smith's "Myrtle." Now the first half ends with Hughes blasting us into the interval with "It's Over," and it really feels like it's ALL OVER for Smith's Myrtle and for the show-within-the-show. You really feel the pain of Nicola Hughes's writer watching her whole play go up in smoke, as Hughes's giant angry closeup face on the big screen completely overwhelms Smith's tiny onstage frame, and Hughes's singing really is Shirley Bassey level devastating!

Now "A Somebody," in which Smith's Myrtle builds herself back up, is abridged, and opens the second half, which makes SO much sense, as for the whole interval, we now sit with the Hughes's scary emotional bombshell, and "A Somebody" lets us breathe again.

The way it was before allowed us to breathe too early, and to go to the interval in a state of complacency, with Smith not in jeopardy. The other forgettable song has been ditched, explaining the contracting running time.

(2) The book now is more explanatory as to what the dead girl is all about. This probably betrays Cassavetes a tiny bit, as Cassavetes would never explain what he was up to, and revel in people being confounded. On the other hand, for West End audiences, who couldn't care less about Cassavetes, they will now understand better what they are watching, and feel Myrtle's predicament much more powerfully, and they will understand the denouement, when Smith's Myrtle has her showdown with Haas's Nancy.

On second watch, this time from the gods (I didn't trust my slow fingers in the Rush so just caved and bought a £25 gods ticket instead, as I really didn't want to book any other show lol), I felt reinforced in my initial opinion that Rufus Wainwright has written a masterful score and that Sheridan Smith is giving a great performance. And I love how Van Hove is making this show more dramatic and cohesive for an unsuspecting West End audience who don't know they've bought a ticket to an avant garde show.

My own personal feeling is that I'd now raise my rating from 4 stars to 4 and a half, based on the changes described above.

PS: The running time was 2 hours, 25 minutes, with the matinee ending promptly at 4:55pm.

Rest easy, Mr Barnaby.

Van Hove is only one director, and other directors will follow their own idiosyncratic obsessions, and do things differently.

Even Van Hove doesn't always use screens to suggest immediacy: sometimes he just uses bodily fluids and emotional violence, etc etc.

Some directors will always still just make well-made plays, that have Robert Ickes and Van Hove racing out at the interval, but which keep the rest of us conventional "robots" happily entertained in our cosy cocoons.

Bring on another high-kicking spectacle of a "42nd Street," I say, but please let there also be some artistic space for bonkers shows like this one.

Saw this tonight and while there are some good moments, a 5 star show this is not.

Sheridan is the clear highlight and owns the stage. The Act 1 closing number is the best song

Other than that, it's all a but meh and a lot of the time had me and my other half asking "what's the point of this."

By the time you get to the last number, Myrtle's breakdown feels like a bit of a non-event, despite it driving the story for the previous 2 hours.

I was expecting a bit more of the live filming outside the theatre.

The scene with the producer where he sings about moths to a flame was so cringe it was difficult to watch. If they cut it, they wouldn't lose anything.

When I saw 'A Little Life' (from the brilliant onstage seats) before it began I looked at the video screens and thought they'd dominate, and looked up at that metal contraption and thought - yep, all present and correct, that's where the water/rain will come from.  All the expected tricks, and then......neither of those things happened.  Very restrained with nothing feeling overlayed for the sake of signature style. Great.

Sounds like this may be coming together in previews - while not ever aiming for bullseye mainstream tastes (which may yet be its commercial downfall despite the draw of Sheridan Smith).

If Van Hove, in previews, has started making very specfic (and readable) sense with the use of Screen he'll have got way further than I thought Jamie Lloyd did with 'Sunset Boulevard'. I went along not expecting to like everything, but excited by what others described as an inarguably meticulous working out of his scheme/logic. I absolutely couldn't see any of that!

I'm looking forward to 'Opening Night' though somewhat grateful (and selfish) that it looks like being more affordable than a raging Sheridan popular hit might be.

As someone who saw the show on the first preview and then again Saturday night, can say it has improved massively. 

The first preview was truly a turgid unintelligible mess. It's now a rather interesting night at the theatre. Seems they've cut almost half an hour and kept most of the best bits. 

Went from a 1.5 stars to a 4 for me. Is it perfect? Absolutely not, but would rather see this 100 times over than some of the recent new musicals we've seen on the West End.

Well done to then for listening to critique.

Don't get me wrong, I think this will continue to be a marmite production and if you don't like van Hove you won't like this.

I guess they should have had an out of town tryout instead of having a week or two of dreadful previews but yes it seems as if they have really put the work in to making this good.
I say well done to them as well for trying to fix this and doing something actually interesting in the West End.

I’m disappointed now that I booked an earlier preview than I usually would (2nd performance in this instance) and went a couple of weeks ago. Perhaps I’d have enjoyed it more if I’d waited and booked for a later performance once the cuts and adjustments had been made (no extended hoovering opening sequence to sit through for starters!).

I understand previews are exactly that, and they’re used to iron out kinks/make improvements, but as others have pointed out, given they’re rarely priced at anything more than a few pounds less than post-press night performances, I guess we tend to go in with an expectation of a certain level of polish already being in place.

I must say I have found this Opening Night thread to be fascinating.
I attended the first Friday performance and many of the audience were aghast at what they saw. I must admit that I ,like others I talked to, were quite angry at the confused mess on stage. This was evidently not because we didn't appreciate the avant garde production but because it is was not ready for a paying public.
2 weeks later it is now quite clear that the creatives felt the same as so many changes have evidently been made. Whilst I appreciate that previews are a time to fine tune a show it now seems clear that Opening Night was nowhere near ready to be presented to a west end audience. Experimental theatre is all very well but experimenting and working things out in front of paying theatregoers doesn't seem quite right to me.