Warhol. Basquiat. Electric, eccentric, polar opposites… together, for the first time in the most unlikely partnership the art world has ever seen. Paul Bettany and Jeremy Pope star in the thrilling American premiere of the London sensation, The Collaboration. In the summer of 1984, longtime international superstar Andy Warhol and the art scene’s newest wunderkind, Jean-Michel Basquiat, agree to work together on what may be the most talked about exhibition in the history of modern art. But can these two creative giants co-exist, or even thrive?
Directed by Kwame Kwei-Armah and inspired by the real life 1984 painting collaboration of the aging (at least in terms of artistic relevance) Warhol and the soaring Basquiat – a project presented so much more convincingly and movingly in the 1996 film Basquiat, starring Jeffrey Wright and, in the definitive performance of Warhol, David Bowie, who haunts this play like a shadow – The Collaboration is an oddly lifeless endeavor, a failure in capturing even a moment of simple artistic inspiration much less the ignition of of collaborative genius.
But did the playwright need to make the characters spell out their differences so explicitly? Is that the way these two visual artists would actually speak to one another? Why do so many of the supposed aperçus about art in this play sound canned, at best the kind of practiced lines that art stars say to journalists to sound outrageous? These are the sort of questions that arise here and there during “The Collaboration,” which has a script that can feel surprisingly clunky, in both moments of exposition and in the overall plot, which is largely predictable, even as the actors somehow redeem it.
2022 | Broadway |
Original Broadway Production Broadway |
Year | Ceremony | Category | Nominee |
---|---|---|---|
2023 | Drama League Awards | Distinguished Performance Award | Jeremy Pope |
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