The Image of Dorian Grey
Opening night time: March 27, 2025
Venue: Broadway’s Music Field Theatre
Written by: Oscar Wilde
Tailored and Directed by: Kip Williams
Performer: Sarah Snook
Digicam Operators: clew, Luka Kain, Natalie Wealthy, Benjamin Sheen, Dara Woo
Working time: 2 hrs (no intermission)
Deadline’s takeaway: If solely Oscar Wilde had been alive to supply up a pithy description of Broadway’s playful The Image of Dorian Grey starring the exceptional Succession actor Sarah Snook, as a result of this can be a manufacturing that the majority of us will want quite a lot of phrases to convey all of its exuberant theatrical dazzle.
Equal elements appearing masterclass, tech wizardry, phantasm and clockwork stage administration, all costumed and set designed with the wit and colour schemes of probably the most vivid Cindy Sherman pictures, Dorian Grey marks audacious Broadway debuts by each Snook and director-adaptor Kip Williams.
So what if using video cameras on stage is already bordering on cliché, or even when it’s already crossed over. Sundown Blvd.‘s nightly closed-circuit saunter down forty fourth Road proves there’s nonetheless some amusement available, and now Dorian Grey pushes the evolution ahead a couple of gentle years. Snook performs greater than two dozen characters, however not within the standard, sequential Patrick Stewart-in-A Christmas Carol or Andrew Scott-in-Vanya approach. Snook usually performs a number of characters concurrently, appearing dwell reverse her personal video pictures.
Snook as Sir Henry Wotton and, on stage, Dorian Grey
Marc Brenner
In case you’re picturing these hokey split-screen tips commonplace a minimum of for the reason that equivalent cousins of The Patty Duke Present, assume once more. David Bergman’s video design is so state-of-the-art convincing that when one of many taped Snooks interacts on display with the dwell Snook you may want a double-take to remind you which ones is which.
Initially staged by Sydney Theatre Firm after which on London’s West Finish, Dorian Grey sticks fairly near the plot of the Wilde novel all of us learn, or had been informed to learn, in highschool – although Williams slips in loads of intelligent anachronisms, from dance golf equipment and disco music to smartphones and botox. Opening with a close-up shot of Snook’s face on one of what is going to be many hanging panels, the actor narrates Wilde’s plot-setting scene by which painter Basil Hallward and buddy Sir Henry Wotton talk about the youthful Dorian Grey, the artist’s newest muse (although that appears too tame a phrase for the lust this model makes no try to cover).
With the onstage digital camera crew doing invaluable (and sometimes humorous) multitasking as dressers and make-up & wig appliers, Snook dandies up her garments and dons one of many blond wigs – they vary from Marc Bolan corkscrews to no matter you’d name that Flock of Seagulls look – that sign we’re within the firm of Dorian himself. At first petulant and tired of sitting but once more for the artist, the gorgeous younger man quickly sufficient turns into entranced along with his personal picture, by no means extra so than when he begins to note that the completed portrait appears to be subtly and magically altering.
Vivid flashes of colour pop from the darkness in Marg Horwell’s scenic and costume designs
Marc Brenner
You already know the Faustian premise made right here: As Dorian stays endlessly younger and more and more dastardly, the painted picture hidden away within the attic grows older and extra desiccated, new wrinkles and decay with each amoral, immoral and downright nasty act the libertine makes.
Fashionable literature’s final narcissist just about seamlessly makes the leap from Nineties gothic horror to twenty first Century physique horror. At one level Snook makes use of a sensible telephone app to distort her projected face to imitate probably the most egregious of cosmetic surgery fails.
Marg Horwell’s scenic and costume designs blast sensible splashes of overripe colours towards a principally naked, black performing house, delighting within the contrasts simply as composer-sound designer Clemence William should when he makes use of snatches of acquainted tunes to touch upon the motion – Donna Summer season’s “I Really feel Love” and “Beautiful” from the 1966 Broadway musical The Apple Tree being simply two of the simpler. Nick Schlieper’s lighting design additionally performs a particularly essential function in director Williams’ busy imaginative and prescient for the manufacturing.
Too busy? Maybe. Using all these projections and panels – at varied factors they grasp above the stage like so many work in a crowded museum – is probably going going to be judged by some as extreme and distracting, particularly if the appreciation for onstage video or live-stream is sporting skinny (or by no means there to start with). And Dorian, regardless of the visible inventiveness on show, does go a bit overboard and overlong at instances, significantly in a late, prolonged scene that makes use of pre-recorded out of doors footage that enables a couple of Snook to race by means of a forest.
That shift in tone, from closed, darkish and claustrophobic to expansive and brilliant, is sufficient to spur a bit of agoraphobia in any of us. The scene, set to the music of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, is just not solely jarring however, for the primary time in a night of willfully excessive spirits, unintentionally foolish.
The Image Of Dorian Grey doesn’t absolutely recuperate from the mood-shift, in order that even the much-anticipated loss of life scene, by which the monstrous portray is destroyed (we by no means see it, by the way in which) feels a bit each overblown and anticlimactic. Perhaps that’s the all-too-common value paid for the form of hubris demanded of such an formidable mission as this. Wilde, to not point out his most well-known creation, would possible discover {that a} attain properly well worth the try, and Broadway can rejoice that Snook and Williams went for the seize.
