The Collaboration
Opening Night: December 20, 2022
Theater: Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
Website: www.manhattantheatreclub.com
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December 20, 2022
Between the captivating performances of Pope and Bettany, and the thoroughly impressive production design (mostly notably Duncan McLean, who is single-handedly converting me into a believer in the efficacy of projection design with his use of every surface as means of additional storytelling), I believe The Collaboration is a production worth to be reckoned with. It’s a shame, however, that I couldn’t find a clear point of view from the play itself, even though both artists provided plenty.
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December 20, 2022
Presented by Manhattan Theater Club and the Young Vic Theater, this transfer from London is considerably less curious about whatever lies behind each man’s public facade. But Kwame Kwei-Armah’s production would like you to think it’s lifting the curtain on exactly that as it tells the early-80s New York story of Warhol and Basquiat’s work on those 16 canvases, and the friendship that took root between them.
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December 20, 2022
Like most contemporary art, “The Collaboration” is attractive and fun to look at, but only as profound as you interpret it to be.
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December 20, 2022
It’s hard to call this gushing fountain of clever talk a play. There’s no dramatic shape to it: No plot, no event, no conflict, no danger. But there are two richly drawn characters on stage with plenty to say for themselves.
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December 20, 2022
McCarten, who also currently is represented on Broadway as the book writer of Beautiful Noise, The Neil Diamond Musical – a work that betrays similar history-via-Wikipedia inclinations – reduces two of the greatest, most artistically influential and culturally impactful artists of the late 20th Century into stick figures spouting their respective viewpoints of artistic merit, art’s worth, art’s role in society, art as personal commitment, art versus commerce, photography versus painting, beauty, fame, heroin and ambition. So many subjects, so few credible or original thoughts.
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December 20, 2022
Once Paul Bettany and Jeremy Pope have walked onstage in The Collaboration in their respective Warhol and Basquiat guises, the play itself may as well be over.
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December 20, 2022
The writer Anthony McCarten has not met a Wikipedia page he could not adapt, and with shoddy screenplays for Bohemian Rhapsody, Darkest Hour, and The Theory of Everything under his belt, I’m comfortable calling him one of the most successful hacks working today. His latest play, The Collaboration, is as shallow, uninteresting, and insultingly stupid as those three, with the added offense of not allowing you to distract yourself with household chores.
READ THE REVIEWDecember 20, 2022
And then the actual play starts up, about the titular artistic partnership Basquiat and Warhol formed in the 1980s. It can best be described as a perfect example of Warhol’s artistic philosophy, as he states it in the script: “Why can’t it just be about nothing?”
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December 20, 2022
What would the great American artist Jean-Michele Basquiat have achieved, how famous would he now be, had he not died of a heroin overdose in 1988 at the age of 27?
A moot question, for sure, but very much one that hangs over “The Collaboration,” the interesting new Broadway play by the prolific Anthony McCarten, capably directed by Kwame Kwei-Armah, and staged by the Manhattan Theatre Club.
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December 20, 2022
If only the Tonys gave out such an award, Dick and Robinson would deserve it, because just about the only thing that Anthony McCarten’s new play gets right are the wigs worn by the characters he has named Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
READ THE REVIEWDecember 20, 2022
“It’s not what you are that counts,” Andy Warhol, eternal fan of misdirection, once said. “It’s what they think you are.” And what we think we know about two of the 20th century’s most documented figures is pretty much what we get in The Collaboration, a competent, pleasant, and oddly inert portrait of Warhol’s late-life creative partnership with Jean-Michel Basquiat, now playing at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre.
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December 20, 2022
Pope and Bettany do what they can to add heft to the experience, and Kwei-Armah has tried to make the production as fun as possible with DJ theoretic spinning ’80s jams before the show and during intermission. But much like McCartan’s other Broadway show this season, the Neil Diamond musical A Beautiful Noise, The Collaboration goes in one ear and out the other, not quite befitting of the legacy of the two artists at its center.
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December 20, 2022
But what do we end up knowing of Warhol and Basquiat that couldn’t be gleaned from Wikipedia or biographies at the end of this? Not much. Perhaps that is inevitable with the very famous and very written about, but when fiction tackles such totemic figures one hopes that dramatic license at least would open a new crack in understanding, or something more playful and mischievous in analyzing much-revered legends.
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