Portrait of the Critic as a Mucus Factory: A Feverish Night with Dorian Gray
Sarah Snook's kaleidoscopic performance on Broadway
May 18th, 2024
Theatre District, NY
I’m not a theatre critic. Not even close, actually. My credentials consist entirely of a mounting credit card bill and the ability to silently unwrap cough drops in the dark. The real critics will tell you about themes and motifs; I’ll attempt this, but I'm more likely to report sneezing so violently that the entire audience turned to glare at me (just like one of my stand-up shows). I have no official credentials, but living one block from the Theatre District does have its advantages, especially when it means seeing more Broadway shows in the first four months of the year than in my entire time on this here Earth.
I arrived at the Music Box theater with my head throbbing and my nose running like a window AC unit in July. I had tested negative for Covid (whew) and dosed up on Sudafed, tissues surgically attached to my palm. When you get tickets like these, you don’t cancel for anything. I’d heard great noises about this adaptation, but nothing could have prepared me for Kip Williams's adaptation of "The Picture of Dorian Gray".
For the ensuing two hours, Sarah Snook transformed herself into twenty-six different characters before my watery eyes. The same Sarah who, late one night in 2016, sat across from me in a dimly lit booth at Old Town Bar on East 19th & Broadway, clinking whiskey glasses and sharing horror stories from the acting trenches along with fellow Australians Jai Courtney (in town promoting "Suicide Squad") and James Mackay (filming a "Dynasty" reboot for CW). I myself am not an actor (but I played one on TV.)
That night, we’d been blearily discussing a pilot she was there to shoot—some new thing produced by Adam McKay and Will Ferrell that loosely parodied the Murdoch family. That little project would, of course, become HBO’s "Succession," the series that went on to resuscitate Appointment Television and dominate every award ceremony with the unstoppable precision of Simone Biles at the Olympics.
"I’m never really sure if it'll work, the satire is very different. It’s like The Big Short meets Billions," she'd said that night. “That sounds amazing!” I said, "Yeah. But there’s a chance people might not get it." She added, our Aussie accents becoming thicker after several rounds.
People got it.
And now here she was, nine years later, stepping onto the Broadway stage with such mesmerizing command that I forgot to blow my nose. I let it run for so long I started drowning from the inside. I scribbled in my soggy playbill: "The greatest vanity in theater is believing a solo performer lacks ego." Yet here was Snook, disappearing into a kaleidoscope of characters with the fervor of someone escaping herself. One moment she's a pinch-faced dowager, the next a rakish aristocrat with wandering hands, then a trembling ingénue—each transformation executed with surgical precision, and the abandon of me at karaoke after six bourbons.
The woman modestly describing her "Murdoch parody" had transformed herself into theater's most elaborate shell game. Where was Shiv Roy in all this? Nowhere to be found. My mucous glands applauded in torrential appreciation. The first hour blew by like a fever dream. I was entranced.
The production itself is a technological Russian nesting doll. A small battalion of camera people pirouette around Snook while costume wranglers strip and redress her at dizzying speeds. Her performance splashes across five towering black screens where Live-Snook converses with Recorded-Snook in a meta-theatrical Zoom call from hell. At one point, I caught the camera crew performing what looked like synchronized swimming moves while tracking her across the stage.
The technological wizardry behind this show is amazing. Rather than having help offstage from someone ‘on the ones-and-twos’, this audio-visual masterpiece has a small battalion of tech geniuses on the ‘ones-and-zeros’. Just three weeks earlier, I'd white-knuckled my way through the punishing 90 minutes of "Redwood," where Idina Menzel's earnest emoting was repeatedly upstaged by what can only be described as Broadway's most expensive PowerPoint presentation. The contrast between productions couldn't be more stark: Where "Redwood" used technology like your uncle, who just discovered Instagram filters—plastering oversized projections of forest imagery with all the subtlety of a logging company prospectus—"Dorian" weaponizes its screens with surgical precision. One used technology as a crutch; the other, as wings.
Such is the paradox of theater in the digital age—sometimes the most effective use of technology is making you forget it's there at all, much like the most effective use of a handkerchief is remembering to bring one. But in general, I happen to appreciate people who have the cojones to innovate with light.
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A more recent encounter with Snook flashed through my fevered mind as I watched her embody Dorian's increasingly unhinged descent into madness. Just last month at the unofficial opening night of Old Mates Pub downtown, we'd reconnected over pints, eventually closing the place down. "They've literally run out of beer," the bartender had announced at 2am, which we took as a personal victory.
That night, she'd mentioned her exhaustion of going into previews for the show: "I'm running marathons between costume changes. It’s like being an athlete." Watching her work, I understood why. Her vocal work is no less exemplary, a reminder that great theater begins with the power of voice armed with fucking excellent writing. She’s speaking for the. entire. show. There isn’t a single moment where she isn’t on stage, and when we aren’t hearing her impressively chameleonic voice.
In one bravura sequence, Dorian (now sporting what I can only describe as a positively tumescent blonde pompadour) plays with a beautification filter on a smartphone. Tap! Absurdly full lips, skinny face, dazzling eyes. Then Tap! The filter comes off, and there's Snook—gurning for the astonished crowd.
My cold-addled brain made the obvious connection: our society's horrified delight at extreme dehumanization versus our inability to accept nature.
The visual feast continued with virtual walls adorned with classic paintings—Moroni, Bronzino, Gainsborough—Snook's face photoshopped into each with interactive art direction. Flowers explode from every corner of Marg Horwell's sets—bursting from vases, sprouting from jackets, erupting from lounges—their riotous opulence starkly contrasts against the otherwise minimalist stage and the darkness of Wilde's story.
Reading up on Wilde before the show, I never knew he was arrested and put to hard labour before his death from meningitis, resulting from a prison injury. He was arrested on charges of sodomy and gross indecency. The story this play was based on was used as evidence at his trial. (I hope this review never gets used as evidence of selfishly endangering fellow theatre-goers with a head cold.)
Speaking of hard labour, at about the 95-minute mark, my pseudoephedrine began wearing off, but Snook never flagged. Sweat flung from her lips as she brought the show home in a deranged flurry of pure bedlam. The second the lights dropped, the audience leapt to their feet in a wild standing ovation. I was thrilled to see Snook in her element. Several curtain calls later, I realised my upper lip had developed its own ecosystem.
Of the show, actual reviewers have said things like, ‘…It’s a sublime spectacle with impeccable dramaturgy, all spun around phenomenal acting.’ And, ‘This isn’t a star turn so much as a supernova explosion, virtuosity employed not for self-love but love of storytelling.’
On my foggy stumble home, I thought about what Wilde would make of our Instagram filters and social media curation. We all have the ability to present ageless, flawless versions of ourselves online while our true selves deteriorate in private. In Snook's performance, we're reminded of what we've lost: authenticity, vulnerability, the beautiful imperfection of being messy, flawed little bastards.
Despite my throbbing skull, I wouldn't have missed this show for anything.
The Picture of Dorian Gray | 2hrs. No intermission. | Music Box Theatre | 239 West 45th Street | 212-239-6200 | Buy Tickets Here
that's a beautiful portrait you've drawn, must make you feel proud.