Oscar Levant played second keyboard to Gershwin
In order to understand the life of Oscar Levant, you have to get past the legacy of George Gershwin. Levant was a composer, pianist and author, also a talk show host and legendary quipster. He was also an actor and appeared in more than a dozen Hollywood films though usually playing himself, an attentive sidekick with a wisecrack at the ready. Above all else, Levant is remembered for his connections to Gershwin. They were friends and allies and sometimes competitors, though there was never any doubt who was the greater genius. After Gershwin’s sudden death in 1937, Levant became the definitive pianist for his music, a wave that he rode for a couple decades. Yet as Gershwin’s reputation grew and grew, it became a long shadow over the depressive and insecure Levant, who died in 1972 at age 65.
In the new Broadway play “Good Night, Oscar,” Levant is played by Sean Hayes (Jack from “Will and Grace”) as a middle aged, drug-addled time bomb confronted and overwhelmed by the spirit of Gershwin, to whom he continues to serve oblations.
The comic drama opened Monday at the Belasco Theatre in New York, where I attended an April 18 preview. It was written by Doug Wright, who won a Pulitzer for “I Am My Own Wife,” and directed by Lisa Peterson. The show debuted at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre two years ago.
The setting is spring 1958 and the “Jack Parr Show” is preparing for a rare live broadcast from Burbank with Levant as the first guest – if he would only make it to the studio. When Levant finally arrives he’s already in a state, by turns rebellious and unsteady, jonesing for pills and brimming with self pity. At his side is the
loyal second wife June (Emily Bergl), beautiful, sympathetic and burdened, while Parr (Ben Rappaport) is hoping Levant is just steady enough to deliver some zingers. Also on hand is a nurse and a studio page. In strides a curt and worried NBC producer who tells Levant and Parr that once they’re in front of the cameras they should have an intelligent and respectful conversation but please don’t go near politics, religion or sex. Of course, those become their talking points.
Hayes gives a pent-up energy and convoluted brilliance to the persona of Levant. It doesn’t take long to forget you’re watching Sean Hayes though there’s a passage or two of breathless comic timing that recall the masterful high points of Jack McFarland. Levant’s troubled self also comes through in the knotted and lumpy physicality of Hayes’ depiction. All that falls away once he sits at the piano, throws his shoulders back and performs with virtuoso skill and elegance.
I don’t recall any profanities in the entire evening, but the audience still gasps a few times at Levant’s audacious remarks, which are often at his own expense. Rachel Hauck’s set grows from a cramped office, to the spacious dressing room with kitchenette, to an expansive broadcast studio where the high white walls are padded like a vast sanitarium. During a quiet interlude, we witness Levant’s obsessive compulsive disorder as he fidgets with the clattering flatware.
Levant straddled the realms of East Coast serious music and left coast film star glamour and his matter of fact acknowledgment of mental illness and sundry addictions put him ahead of his time. Other themes from the show that strike a contemporary resonance include the cult of celebrity and the ever expanding reach for the outrageous to gain audiences. We also get a taste of what’s been left behind during the last 60 years — the capacity for thoughtful discourse over the air and the regular honoring of classical music by the mainstream.
After Levant debases himself on live television, that NBC producer berates him for his misogyny and insensitivity plus a short list of other transgressions. This dressing down feels like contemporary times speaking to the past rather than the other way around and comes off as a CYA gesture by Wright and company.
In crafting his script, Wright had plenty of source material to work with, since Levant wrote three books. The first, “A Smattering of Ignorance” from 1942, is a collection of essays that includes a fascinating and gossipfilled take on the concert scene of the day. His largest piece in the book, “My Life: Or The Story of George Gershwin,” is a thorough log of his recollections and observations. In the mid-1960s came two more volumes, “The Memoirs of an Amnesiac” and “The Unimportance of Being Oscar,” each an endless conversational stream of anecdotes and candid assessments of friends and colleagues with self-revealing tidbits sprinkled along the way.
Of the litter of names in his books, some are mostly forgotten figures but others endure. He recalls that during Judy Garland’s marriage to Sid Luft, she dropped by regularly on one pretext or another, but mostly because she wanted to raid his medicine cabinet, where he had “smokestacks of pills.” He talks extensively
about his composition studies with Arnold Schoenberg and remembers Virgil Thompson as “an extraordinary good sleeper. He can doze through the most cacophonous modern composition or even through a screening of a dirty Jean Genet picture.” He called Gore Vidal “the most exhilarating bastard around” and after the author’s failed run for Congress consoled him by saying, “Well, could Oscar Wilde have carried Dutchess County?”
I was surprised at how hard it was to find copies of Levant’s books. They’re out there but at surprisingly high prices. The same goes for the 1994 biography “A Talent for Genius.” The only local library to carry the three by Levant is the New York State Library. Perhaps the tight Levant market is a sign of a resurgence of interest under way. That seems pretty unlikely, though I’d like to see the Broadway show be a success. By the way, it’s a limited run through Aug. 27.
During a week or so of periodic plunges into Levant’s writings I came across some of the laugh lines used in the play but grew fatigued with his ramblings and name dropping. They’re the kind of books you want to read from back to front, yet alas only one of them is indexed. For further Levant-iana there are some recordings in mono sound of him playing Chopin and others, including some of his own music, and these have been reissued on little labels dedicated to historical fare. Only one Levant recording can be found in my own library. It’s the CBS recording of his Gershwin.