Paar’s marquee guest, leading a lineup that also includes the sex symbol Jayne Mansfield and the ventriloquist Señor Wences, is Levant, who two hours before showtime hasn’t arrived. It’s 1958, on the day during sweeps week when “The Tonight Show,” with its host, Jack Paar, will make its West Coast debut. Pathos not being much of a dramatic engine, Wright works very hard, if fictionally, to crank up the stakes. Mostly it’s just a cry Levant doesn’t seem brilliant but ill. “America’s greatest wit.” “A goddamn lion.” A Horowitz at the piano “with a grace and an ease that even Chopin might envy.”įulsome praise, but what we see in the director Lisa Peterson’s production is a far cry from any of it. Instead, it offers a spray of Levant’s most famous quips, like the one about Elizabeth Taylor: “Always a bride, never a bridesmaid.” And instead of dramatizing how marvelous Levant was, it just says so repeatedly.

But on the evidence of the character as written, and especially as impersonated by Sean Hayes in a gloomy if accurate performance, Levant doesn’t erase the line so much as fudge it.Ĭertainly the play, by Doug Wright, fails to make much of a case for the genius part of the joke.

He says it again, or a version of it, in “ Good Night, Oscar,” the unconvincing biographical fantasia that opened Monday at the Belasco Theater. Oscar Levant, the troubled midcentury musician and wag, often said he’d erased “the fine line between genius and insanity.”

Ways to See a Ghost by Emily Diamand