The Belgian theater director Ivo van Hove swears he has never seen “Opening Night,” the classic 1977 backstage film by John Cassavetes, but that didn’t stop him from adapting the film for the stage. His innocence helped rather than hindered him, he said, in imagining his stage version based on Cassavetes’s original screenplay.
Mr. van Hove’s “Opening Night” makes its American premiere on Tuesday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where it will play for five performances, in Dutch with English subtitles.
