‘The Collaboration’ Broadway Review: Warhol & Basquiat Paint By Numbers In Artless Bio-Play

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The wig gives it away, otherwise we’d be hard-pressed to immediately – or even slowly – recognize Paul Bettany’s fast-talking, extroverted and inquisitive artist character in Anthony McCarten’s The Collaboration as that historic icon of cryptic, mumbled monosyllables Andy Warhol.

Unfortunately, Bettany isn’t the only thing that feels smudged in this ’80s-set paint-by-numbers and highly fictionalized dual bio-play about Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, opening tonight in a Manhattan Theatre Club production at the Samuel J.

Friedman Theatre on Broadway. 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.

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.