On May 2, Sean Hayes emerged from his bedroom into the living room, where his husband, Scott Icenogle, was watching television. Icenogle had breaking news. “You’ve been nominated,” he said. Hayes, still wiping the sleep from his eyes, responded, “For what?”
“What” was a Tony Award—Hayes’s second nomination—for his virtuoso performance as Oscar Levant in the play, Good Night, Oscar, which dramatizes a long night’s journey into the psyche-scarred soul of Levant, now obscure but once a star of the screen (An American in Paris), the concert stage (the classically trained pianist was revered as the premier interpreter of his friend, George Gershwin), and the talk/game show circuit, where his lacerating quips (many self-deprecating and aimed at his own mental illness) were the 1950s equivalent of OMG (“I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin,” is one of this most quoted).
Good Night, Oscar, written by Pulitzer Prize winner Doug Wright and directed by Lisa Peterson, reenacts a 1958 sweeps week appearance on The Tonight Show, then hosted by Jack Paar (Ben Rappaport), who looked at Levant as ratings gold, and he stoked tension over whether this would be the night Levant would go one pill over the line. (“To put it mildly,” Paar once introduced him, “he’s as nervous as he is clever. For every pearl that comes out of his mouth, a pill goes in. I ask you to keep this mind.”)
For this risky live TV appearance, Levant’s long-suffering wife (Emily Bergyl), arranges a four-hour furlough from the psychiatric facility to which she had him committed. The increasingly pill-desperate Levant both falls and rises to the occasion, and, in the play’s emotional climax, keeps his demons at bay to triumphantly perform Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.”
Levant is funny, yes, (when Paar asks what he does for exercise, Levant responds, “I stumble and I fall into a coma”), but the role is a dramatic departure for Hayes, who is best known for his iconic Emmy-winning Will & Grace character, Jack, a kitten-with-a-whip narcissist with a quip for all occasions.
His transformation, praised Chicago Tribune critic Chris Jones, is “one deep dive of a star-turn, an all-consuming (and notably all-consumed) piece of acting that reveals things in Hayes that most of his Will & Grace fans will be entirely gobsmacked to discover he has in his arsenal.”
This, Hayes told Vanity Fair, was the challenge that drove him to spend the last two decades trying to bring Oscar Levant back to life.
(This interview has been edited for clarity)
Vanity Fair: What was your reaction to the Tony nomination?
Sean Hayes: I collapsed on the couch. I couldn’t believe it. It was an out of body experience. It’s such an honor, and how rewarding to just be recognized for something that you’ve been working on and off for over 20 years. It’s an incredible feeling. For it to go this way, it’s deeply gratifying.
I recently heard an interview with Nathan Lane in which talked about pursuing the towering role of Hickey in Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh to break out of the musical-comedy roles for which he is most associated. Were you looking for a similar challenge?
Absolutely. I’d been told so many times by different people in the entertainment community over the last two decades that I should play Oscar Levant.
Wait, what?
I didn’t know who he was. I went to the Los Angeles Paley Center for Media and looked at archival footage of him. I thought he was fascinating and so funny. People saw something else in me beyond my character from Will & Grace. I believed it, too. I just needed the right vehicle to break out. Other jobs happened, time went on. Other people, out of nowhere would say, ‘Have you ever heard of Oscar Levant?’ I was like, ‘Wow, this is so bizarre.’ I listened to the universe and developed [this project]. Long story short—too late—23 years later, here we are.
