Video: Inside Opening Night of THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY with Sarah Snook

It's pretty wild, which should be no pun intended, but also pun intended, I guess

Yeah, it's fantastic. It's amazing. Hello, I'm Richard Ridge for Broadway World

Olivier Emmy and Golden Globe Award winner Sarah Snoke is making her Broadway debut in Oscar Wilde's

the picture of Dorian Gray, which adapted and directed by Kip Williams, and we're here on opening night

What's making it so special with doing this show here and introducing it to a whole new audience

especially a young audience? I think it's, you know, partly in a kind of a spirit of Oscar

where he really found fame first of all in America where American audiences really accepted him

and it seems in that kind of way that it's nice to bring this kind of show back to America in that way

and have him have a second wave in a sense. And for young audiences to be able to discover

the brilliant mind of Oscar Wilde. It's really exciting. I've seen so many people

young people in the stage door after the show. And I'm blown away by how many people engage with it and really respond to it

What I love is everybody knows you from television and everything else. You know, we all had that time when we saw someone

We're like, oh my gosh, they do this live. And you're introducing them to a whole new world

Yeah, some people have said that it's the first Broadway show they've ever seen, which is really exciting

You know, it's a dream of mine to have been on the stage here. And I've been working in Australia and then obviously did this in London

the West End And so we had to open a show on Broadway and be the lead of the show And it pretty extraordinary You perfection in this show watching you work the cameras work the audience

keeping the live going. I mean, you're razor sharp. Like, what kind of conversations did you and Kip have when you

because you're being directed for camera and for the state? Yeah, yeah. I mean, there isn't really a difference between in how we approach this particular project

between stage and screen acting, I suppose. there is a real commitment to mining for the truth

and Kipp's a brilliant director. It means, you know, I get notes every night

Which is, oh, yeah. We can never perfect it. You know, it's always, there's too much

There's too much that could go wrong or too much that could go right. And so it's finding new things

Like the other night, there was something that came up that I realized, oh, that's actually connected to that

I never realized that probably in The Odyssey of the Senses, Doreen met Alan Campbell, who's the chemist

in the first phase where he was doing the perfume. Oh, that's delicious

So I just realized that the other night. That's great. So you learn new things every day. Always, always

There's new things to find. You know, it's a whole world, the whole personality of 26 different people

so you've got to find them. The relevance of this piece, I mean, why it works so well today

in generation, ever generation? Well, I mean, I feel like Oscoa was a prophet of sorts

I mean, he, at the sort of end of the Victorian era, was looking at the world that was starting to become obsessed with appearance

and obsessed with being young, and obsessed with beauty. And really he conceived of a story

that actually speaks directly to the way in which those obsessions have become the center point of our lives today So he could have been writing about the 21st century even though it was 130 years ago Collaborating with Sarah what that journey has been like for you Yeah I mean it been a dream It been the biggest joy of my life I mean she is obviously

a genius actor, but also an incredibly nice person. And then she has this relentless work ethic

She just wants to keep going further and further. And a show that's as complex of this requires

an actor who really wants to work hard and who wants to climb the Everest. And I've never experienced

somebody who wants to climb higher and faster than Sarah does. So it's been a dream. It's been amazing

Well, you've designed the sets and the costumes to this show, wearing two hats

I mean, talk about the wardrobe, because things layer on top of layers, right? Yeah, it's a kind of like a crazy capsule collection

for characters that can build on top of each other and change very quickly

So it's something that we had to design to work on stage before we could commit it to film

You see a lot of the characters on stage in pre-recorded content, so it has to be something that we can replicate quickly and easily

but still be kind of made of incredible excess and beauty and aesthetics

which is kind of at the core of the language and the visual imagery from Oscar Wilde's novel

Remember there's the beautiful sets, and it's so theatrical of us watching it all change

Yeah, we, secretly I just adore old school theatre. I love kind of things that people move around with their hands and paint with their hands

So all of the set has been made with theatre in mind and a love of theatre in mind, and it's been hand-painted and a beautiful group of people making very kind of manual

beautiful old theatre things to be seen on camera so that they work together in a kind of technology and non way It very nostalgic I think What was the biggest challenge for you Was it figuring out how it would look on camera how it would look to the audience Like what was that

It's exactly that, it's managing that balancing act. It's got to work on, like

the whole premise of the show is that it is two forms combined

seamlessly, effortlessly, that kind of talk to each other and inform each other

So it's got to work on both levels the whole time. And that's tricky

And collaborating with your director, Kip Williams, and collaborating with Sarah, what that's been like for you, what it's meant to you

This is my many-year-th show with Kip. I can't tell you off the top of my head

So that's joy always. And it's seven or eight years since I've worked with Sarah. So that's wonderful

Oh, I mean, it's been such a journey over the years to kind of craft

And in the initial formation, it was such a, it was such a painful perthing process

because there's like so many interleaving elements and there's so many so many moving elements

in creating this live composition every night and there's so much work to be done behind the scenes

to create it and to like all the planning in all the in all the in all the content that is pre-shot

before all the audience get in there's like there's months and months of work has gone into

the show before the audience steps on stay before the audience. comes into the theatre. And then, of course, once the audience are in there, the last 80

is done live in front of the audience's eyes, which is very exciting