In learning to appreciate art, you can come to better understand yourself. That’s the gentle truism that undergirds Walk on Through, in which Gavin Creel — a “museum novice,†according to his subtitle — discovers a love for the Metropolitan Museum of Art after ignoring it for much of his adulthood. Early on in the show, he sees a painting of a female singer, Henry Lerolle’s The Organ Rehearsal, and imagines an interior life for her not dissimilar to his own as an auditioning actor: “She stands alone and knows the only thing that matters is the music that she’s holding. She’s been in practice rooms for hours with a piano and the musical director and his nasty old assistant. This is the moment that she’s only dreamt before …†Creel continues on, and in watching him watch the painting, you appreciate the details of the work: her stiff posture, the anticipation created by the expanse of hall in front of her. But you also see inside Creel himself: His version of the singer has great talent but also an innate desire to please — and a certain need for purpose. He slips into her perspective: “I’ve heard the cheers at curtain call, a life lived unlike anything. But is that why I sing? Why do I sing?â€
Creel serves as your lightly self-deprecating docent on a tour of his favorite pieces of art at the Met, which inevitably becomes a personal history. Self-deprecating in part because Creel himself, now 47, never visited the museum until a few years ago, joking that it was out of his way on the Upper East Side. A bigger reason for seeking refuge in art, however, seems to have been a midlife crisis: Creel has had a successful Broadway career as a go-to boyish tenor — from Thoroughly Modern Millie in 2002 to winning a Tony for Hello, Dolly! In 2017 — but says he has felt unfulfilled by the work. Onstage, we hear voice messages from an agent pressuring him to go in for a callback for what sounds like a dull role and about a University of Michigan teaching position that hasn’t materialized (in a niche punch line, that call ends with “Go Blue!â€). Plus there’s an ex-boyfriend, played by Ryan Vasquez, who lingers at the edges of Creel’s consciousness. All in all, that’s just the right existential headspace for a museum trip.
Creel admits up front that he has very little art education and is here to win you over with enthusiasm, not history lessons. As he reconstructs his first visit to the museum, he whirls past a succession of artworks, throwing out his first impressions as they appear in frames on the wall behind him (the set is by I. Javier Ameijeiras, the projections by David Bengali). For the most part, his bounding amateurism is the right approach. It’s more interesting to hear what Creel’s responses to the art reveal about himself than a lecture on their provenance might be, though I did long for a few more grounding details — the title and, maybe, date of each painting projected on the wall — along the way. When Creel slows down and spends more time with a painting, as he does with a portrait of Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin by Ilia Efimovich Repin, he indulges that classic museum-tour fantasy of imagining the inner life of the figure in the painting. Garshin, played by Vasquez, steps out to serenade us with stormy Russian angst.
Creel dramatizes all these encounters through songs he has written himself, mostly pop-adjacent numbers that sound a little Sara Bareilles and a little Pasek and Paul. In their lyrics, he doesn’t stay away from uncomfortable emotions — and sometimes luridly giddy ones, like a number set in the Greek wing that focuses heavily on the butts of all those marble hunks — though he sometimes falls back on pat choruses, offering up neat conclusions where you want the lyrics to rest longer in ambiguity. That tension, too, comes out in the performance because his voice is so pristine: He sails along on his liquid upper register but is less comfortable getting rawer. Creel, or at least the version of himself he’s playing, is self-conscious about seeming to be a dilettante and relates to Jackson Pollock by feeling like he also has a scattered brain, in possession of talent but in need of direction.
Creel’s journey through the museum (whose MetLiveArts program commissioned this musical) leads him to confront onstage many of those anxieties — that scatteredness, that messy breakup, a complicated relationship to his Christian upbringing that’s hard to ignore in a place filled with representations of Jesus — but where you want him to delve deeper into them, he gets vague. Creel revisits a final conversation with that ex just before bringing up a painting of Judith With the Head of Holofernes. Sasha Allen comes out onstage to play Judith and lays down a showstopping solo, an amazing moment that obscures the finer emotional dynamics Creel had been working toward in the previous scene with his ex. As great as it is to hear about “the bitch who saved the day,†you paradoxically find yourself wanting to know less about the art and more about him. To reference Sunday in the Park With George, which does, of course, get name-checked: Let it come from you. Then it will be new.
Like a lot of recent solo shows (see also Rachel Bloom), Walk on Through runs aground when it tries to accommodate the emotional impact of the pandemic, as Creel and director Linda Goodrich arrive at an overdramatic curtain-pulling depiction of the Met’s shutdown of the museum. But once Creel does head back to the museum, he encounters a new visitor, and the two of them discuss their differing interpretations of an Edward Hopper painting of the view from the Williamsburg Bridge. One sees a hopeful daydreamer looking out that window, another someone crushed by the loneliness of the city. “We’re both looking at the same thing, but we’re each seeing it totally differently,†Creel muses. That’s one of those little observations that might seem trite, but it does carry a lot with it. You go to an exhibition, or a musical, to encounter someone else’s view of the world, but you yourself can only see it through your own little window. And your view, in turn, can become its own layer of interpretation, passed off to someone else. That’s the basis for so much art and indeed art criticism, all of us trying to talk about what we see, when we’re also just revealing who we are. If you’re a museum novice, that’s certainly not a bad place to start.
Walk on Through: Confessions of a Museum Novice is at MCC Theater.