Sara Hemming

As the plot rumbles on, the text itself becomes a drag and the show begins to feel overlong. It doesn’t match the dazzling immediacy and playfulness of Dorian Gray, which so cleverly fused style and story to critique our own image-obsessed age. But then it wows you with a gorgeous image of Erivo, alone in a snowstorm centre stage. Not the best of Williams’s ingenious gothic spectacles, but bloody good all the same.

It’s all outrageous, epically silly and ridiculously over the top, combining jukebox musical logic with Airplane!-style parody and sprinkling oodles of sequins on top.

For a film that was panned at its own premiere, John Cassavetes’s 1977 Opening Night is experiencing a remarkable extended life. Now recognised as an audacious masterpiece, it was the inspiration for The Second Woman — the 24-hour-epic delivered by Ruth Wilson last year — and it drives this similarly ambitious and conceptually complex, though, alas, less successful, musical. That’s a shame for the whole team — director Ivo van Hove, composer Rufus Wainwright — but particularly for Sheridan Smith, who gives a terrific performance at its heart.