Sarah Snook Goes Fantastically Wilde In ‘The Picture Of Dorian Gray’ – Broadway Review

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Opening night: March 27, 2025
Venue: Broadway’s Music Box Theatre
Written by: Oscar Wilde
Adapted and Directed by: Kip Williams
Performer: Sarah Snook
Camera Operators: claw, Luka Kain, Natalie Rich, Benjamin Sheen, Dara Woo
Running time: 2 hrs (no intermission)
Deadline’s takeaway: If only Oscar Wilde were alive to offer up a pithy description of Broadway’s playful The Picture of Dorian Gray starring the remarkable Succession actor Sarah Snook, because this is a production that most of us will need more than a few words to convey all of its exuberant theatrical dazzle.

Equal parts acting masterclass, tech wizardry, illusion and clockwork stage management, all costumed and set designed with the wit and color schemes of the most vivid Cindy Sherman photographs, Dorian Gray marks audacious Broadway debuts by both Snook and director-adaptor Kip Williams.

So what if the use of video cameras on stage is already bordering on cliché, or even if it’s already crossed over. Sunset Blvd.‘s nightly closed-circuit saunter down 44th Street proves there’s still some amusement to be had, and now Dorian Gray pushes the evolution forward a few light years. Snook plays more than two dozen characters, but not in the usual, sequential Patrick Stewart-in-A Christmas Carol or Andrew Scott-in-Vanya way. Snook often plays multiple characters simultaneously, acting live opposite her own video images.

If you’re picturing those hokey split-screen tricks commonplace at least since the identical cousins of The Patty Duke Showthink again. David Bergman’s video design is so state-of-the-art convincing that when one of the taped Snooks interacts on screen with the live Snook you might need a double-take to remind you which is which.

Initially staged by Sydney Theatre Company and then on London’s West End, Dorian Gray sticks pretty close to the plot of the Wilde novel we all read, or were told to read, in high school – though Williams slips in plenty of clever anachronisms, from dance clubs and disco music to smartphones and botox. Opening with a close-up shot of Snook’s face on one of what will be many hanging panels, the actor narrates Wilde’s plot-setting scene in which painter Basil Hallward and friend Sir Henry Wotton discuss the youthful Dorian Gray, the artist’s latest muse (though that seems too tame a word for the lust this version makes no attempt to hide).

With the onstage camera crew doing invaluable (and often funny) multitasking as dressers and make-up & wig appliers, Snook dandies up her clothes and dons one of the blond wigs – they range from Marc Bolan corkscrews to whatever you’d call that Flock of Seagulls look – that signal we’re in the company of Dorian himself. At first petulant and bored with sitting yet again for the artist, the beautiful young man soon enough becomes entranced with his own image, never more so than when he starts to notice that the finished portrait seems to be subtly and magically changing.

You know the Faustian premise made here: As Dorian remains forever young and increasingly dastardly, the painted image hidden away in the attic grows older and more desiccated, new wrinkles and rot with every amoral, immoral and downright nasty act the libertine makes.

Modern literature’s ultimate narcissist pretty much seamlessly makes the leap from 1890s gothic horror to 21st Century body horror. At one point Snook uses a smart phone app to distort her projected face to mimic the most egregious of plastic surgery fails.

Marg Horwell’s scenic and costume designs blast brilliant splashes of overripe colors against a mostly bare, black performing space, delighting in the contrasts just as composer-sound designer Clemence William must when he uses snatches of familiar tunes to comment on the action – Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” and “Gorgeous” from the 1966 Broadway musical The Apple Tree being just two of the more effective. Nick Schlieper’s lighting design also plays an extremely crucial role in director Williams’ busy vision for the production.

Too busy? Perhaps. The use of all those projections and panels – at various points they hang above the stage like so many paintings in a crowded museum – is likely going to be judged by some as excessive and distracting, especially if the appreciation for onstage video or live-stream is wearing thin (or never there to begin with). And Doriandespite the visual inventiveness on display, does go a bit overboard and overlong at times, particularly in a late, extended scene that makes use of pre-recorded outdoor footage that allows more than one Snook to race through a forest.

That shift in tone, from closed, dark and claustrophobic to expansive and bright, is enough to spur a little agoraphobia in any of us. The scene, set to the music of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, is not only jarring but, for the first time in an evening of willfully high spirits, unintentionally silly.

The Picture Of Dorian Gray doesn’t fully recover from the mood-shift, so that even the much-anticipated death scene, in which the monstrous painting is destroyed (we never see it, by the way) feels a bit both overblown and anticlimactic. Maybe that’s the all-too-common price paid for the sort of hubris demanded of such an ambitious project as this. Wilde, not to mention his most famous creation, would likely find that a reach well worth the attempt, and Broadway can rejoice that Snook and Williams went for the grab.