Theater Talkback: Lives of the Artists

September 20, 2012, 12:23 pm

By BEN BRANTLEY

The most gratifying scene in the generally less-than-gratifying “Chaplin: The Musical,” which opened last week at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, comes when the show's title character turns into Charlie Chaplin. Of course this young man, portrayed by the winsome Rob McClure, had always been someone who bore that name (or that of the less familiar-sounding Charles Chaplin).

But this is the moment when we watch him â€" bit-by-bit, step-by-step, to borrow from a relevant Stephen Sondheim song from “Sunday in the Park with George” â€" transform himself into the hapless, bowler-topped figure the world would come to embrace as the brand-name personage Charlie Chaplin. And as Mr. McClure's young comic - n ewly arrived in Hollywood and in search of an alter-ego for the screen - wills that second self into being, we're allowed to imagine we're in at the birth of an immortal image.

Mind you, even this scene in “Chaplin” suffers from the literal-minded psychology that plagues the show as a whole. But there's real enchantment in the way Mr. McClure's nimble, compact frame shapes itself into Chaplin's Little Tramp, a blessed assembly of props and tics and, above all, that walk. What we're watching is a dizzying multi-level metamorphosis, in which an actor is playing an actor finding the part that would define his career.

Giving physical life to the ineffable workings of an artistic mind isn't easy, especially when the products of that mind have become internationally famous. For the most part, dramatized lives of the artists - on film as well as on stage â€" are flat-out embarrassing when our hero is shown in the Act of Creation. This usually involves some tortured-looking actor staring at a blank surface (page, canvas, block of marble), eyes aflame and brow furrowed like a freshly plowed field. (Think of Charlton Heston, as Michelangelo, glowering at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the 1965 film “The Agony and the Ecstasy.”)

But every so often â€" and more frequently on stage than in film, I think (since theater has more breadth of poetic license) â€" the interiority of artistic creation is translated into a visible, physical language that raises goose bumps. The most rapturous example in living memory is the first-act finale of “Sunday in the Park with George,” Mr. Sondheim and James Lapine's portrait of George Seurat, the French pointillist painter.

If you saw that show on Broadway in either its original incarnation in the mid-1980s or in the 2008 revival, you won't have forgotten that scene. In it, Seurat seems to orchestrate a chaos of different elements (which in stage terms means actors, scenery and lights) into the exquisite harmony of the painting “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.”

You really did believe that it was the mind of the artist that summoned this vision into being. Or rather a melding of the artistic minds of Seurat, Mr. Sondheim, Mr. Lapine and the entire creative team required to put on a show. Here was one of the great acts of sympathetic imagination in theater history, in which the effort to bring a musical centerpiece to life improbably reflected the long and laborious gestation making a great painting.

On a smaller scale, but also deeply affecting, was “Pass the Blutwurst, Bitte” (first staged in the mid-1980's and revived as recently as two years ago) in which the performance artist John Kelly shaped himself into the contorted self-portraits of the Viennese Expressionist painter Egon Schiele. Mr. Kelly was assisted by actors who played characters called Alter Egons. And collectively, these Schiele avatars (who fought angrily with as well as stroked and encouraged one another) became a lively testament to the particular narcissism that produced a very particular style of self-representation.

The deeply cerebral Mark Rothko, the Russian-American Abstract Expressionist, would seem a much less likely candidate for vigorous traffic of the stage. And it's true that much of “Red,” John Logan's 2009 biodrama about Rothko, is occupied by wordy disquisitions on the morality and philosophy of painting. Yet as embodied by an intensely focused Alfred Molina, under the astute direction of Michael Grandage, one man's esthetic vision became a dynamic physical process.

And no, we didn't see a Rothko multiform come to life before our eyes. What this production gave us instead was a scene in which Rothko and his assistant (played by Eddie Redmayne) primed a canvas. As enacted by Mr. Molina and Mr. Redmayne, this application of a base coat of paint (red, of course) to a white surface became an athletic event â€" competitive, sweaty and utterly visceral, performed to swooning, stormy music by Gluck.

This scene was as sexy and persuasive as it was hokey, a sort of bullion-cube moment that seemed to concentrate in a few minutes the physical force and passion that an artist might expend on a painting over days, months, even years. It reminded us that it takes more than intellect to create a work of art. And that for resourceful theatrical minds, art's marriage of body and soul can indeed become the stuff of showbiz.

What are some of your favorite moments (or most painful ones) of art being made on the stage?