Ben Rappaport reprises Broadway role in Good Night Oscar in London

For the second time in a row the Barbican is hosting an acclaimed Jewish play – but in this case the Jewish co-star of a drama showcasing one of Hollywood’s greatest Jewish celebrities is not playing the title role.

Instead, Ben Rappaport is reprising his Broadway star turn in Good Night Oscar as Jack Parr, the WASPy talk show host famous for his nightly sign-off tribute to his favourite guest: “Good Night Oscar Levant, wherever you are.”

While the title role of Levant, the notorious Jewish wise-cracking virtuoso pianist, is played by Sean Hayes of Will & Grace, who won a Tony for his New York performance, Rappaport is joining him in London to play the gentile talk show host who championed Levant, a troubled 20th century genius who was the first celebrity to air his mental health problems in public.

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“Oscar was a coveted guest on chat programmes because he was so thrillingly unpredictable,” says 39-year-old Rappaport, who drew on his own family history for the role of Paar, a pioneer in putting risky guests in front of live television cameras.

“My mother was born Catholic, but converted before I was born, so I had that side to draw from as well as the Jewish heritage which made playing Perchik in Fiddler on the Roof ten years ago (coincidentally Fiddler was the previous show at the Barbican) such a personal experience for me.”

For that 2015 Broadway revival, he says he did “a lot of research into my father’s family, who came over to the States from Minsk and other places in the Pale of Settlement. I found so many parallels with Tevye’s Anatevka,” adds the New Yorker, who has had trouble tracking down the Ashkenazi comfort food so much easier to find at home: “I’ve been asking everyone in London where I can get decent bagels and a good corned beef sandwich!”

It’s only the second visit to the UK in 18 years for Rappaport, who has ancestors in Norwich but grew up in Houston, Texas, where he went to Hebrew school and was barmitzvahed. A prize-winning student at New York’s prestigious Juilliard drama school, he has won over audiences on screen as well as the stage with recurring roles in the long-running dramas Ozark and The Good Wife.

The actor believes Jewish angst, as portrayed in Good Night Oscar by Levant’s rampant OCD, is endemic: “I think the Jewish community carries a lot of generational trauma – it’s part of our DNA” – and that the buttoned-up Paar he plays with such braggadocio positively embraced Levant’s neuroses: “He had him on his show many times, in spite of his mental problems, because he loved pushing the boundaries.

“He was a pioneer among chat show hosts because he wouldn’t prepare his questions – he was subversive, using the ‘aw shucks’ demeanour which endeared him to his audience as a cover. He  presented himself as palatable to the American public and network chiefs, but his other foot was in the subversive camp with Oscar. I believe that Jack saw a bit of himself in Oscar  – an entertainer who loves attention, carves himself up for public consumption and lives and dies for an audience.”

In real life Paar and Levant were such close friends that the former would pay tribute to the latter in that famous sign-off whether he had been a guest that night or not, says Pulitzer-winning playwright Doug Wright. He based Good Night Oscar on real-life incidents, including the fact that Levant, who was committed more than once, got a four-hour leave of absence from a psychiatric hospital to appear on TV.

Art follows real life in Wright’s depiction of Levant’s hallucinations in the form of the ghostly presence of arguably the world’s most famous Jewish composer, George Gershwin. “Levant was so obsessed with Gershwin I just had to include him in a screenplay I was commissioned to write by Steven Spielberg,” says Wright, who admits to sharing an obsession with Levant with Hayes, who fought to bring Oscar to the stage since being cast to play him in Spielberg’s ultimately undeveloped project. “Happily, Steven signed as a producer of our New York stage production, so it has been a nice little confluence of circumstances.”

Rappaport and his actress wife Megan, whose mother is Jewish, will likely spend Rosh Hashanah in London, as the Barbican run of Good Night Oscar finishes the day before. But they will be back in New York before Yom Kippur, where it has been a couple of years since Rappaport celebrated the high holidays in shul as he did growing up: “I am a cultural Jew and I love that the city which is my home now is such a centre of Jewish culture, the original landing spot for not only my own family, but so many other Jewish emigrants over the years.”

Fans of Rappaport’s hunky good looks, slightly diluted as an over-Brylcreem’d Paar, can enjoy him au naturel on the silver screen once again this year – he has a leading role in Grosse Pointe Garden Society, streaming now on Peacock and Amazon, as a suburban gardening club member caught up with others in a blend of murder and mischief.

Levant, who frequently made wisecracks about fellow Jewish celebrities – “I think a lot of Leonard Bernstein, but not as much as he does” and “Now that Marilyn Monroe is kosher, Arthur Miller can eat her” are two of the most famous – no doubt would have a joke of his own about Rappaport’s unlikely casting.

Good Night Oscar is at the Barbican July 31 – September 21 2025. barbican.org