Is it old age, sentimentality, fanaticism or naivety when a multiple award-winning film director like Gus Van Sant staged a play about a famous artist that is pure paean? Andy Warhol, whom the now 70-year-old Van Sant chose for his first stage direction, climbs a golden ladder to heaven from New York newcomer to superstar in “Trouble” without an irritating conflict. The German premiere of the European co-production at International summer theater at Kampnagel in Hamburg left film connoisseurs at a loss, who appreciate the American director because of his stressful biographies from the youth and violent milieu of the lower middle class in the USA, such as “My Private Idaho” or “Good Will Hunting” or because of the Oscar-winning portraits of gay activist Harvey Milk with Sean Penn.
What can be seen in this panegyric of an artist who invented the affirmation of the consumer world as an art form? The affirmation of the artist as an artificial figure. And in the form of a musical. Gus Van Sant developed “Trouble” at the suggestion of John Romão, who likes to encourage creative celebrities to change their artistic habits for his Biennial of Contemporary Arts in Lisbon. And that’s why the director of stars like Matt Damon, Keanu Reeves or Ben Affleck, who play young problem types in his films, works here with young people who first want to become stars. And he developed a material that isn’t about problems, it’s about glamour. And where the cinema’s perfect scenography has been replaced by a few photo wallpapers of the kind that musical students would use for their thesis.
The most famous figures of epochal change become hyper-impressive figures
The nine young Portuguese around 20, who Romão and Van Sant cast for the premiere in Lisbon, play dozens of protagonists of the pop era in New York on the fly with a lot of enthusiasm that has to make up for their lack of life experience. And so the most famous figures of the epochal change in art in the late 1950s, when pop began to replace abstract expressionism in the zeitgeist, are above all exaggerated imposing figures who play Warhol’s rise to world fame as if it were the “West Side Story”. .
Famed critic Clement Greenberg got into a fight with Warhol for not being in the Expressionist gang. The important gallery owner Leo Castelli shows the qualities of a charming street dealer. The painter Jasper Johns is a vain rooster who exaggerates every gesture, just like Truman Capote, who appears as a cliché of a colorful fag. And the admitted and ignored actors in Warhol’s Factory, from Edie Sedgwick to Valerie Solanas – whom Warhol hunts down and shoots here in a Wild West scene – are strongly naive notions of the art world.
It’s like a school play in front of parents
Warhol himself is so all-round nice and confident, as if he were the archangel of pop art, and not a person with countless complexes and neuroses and accompanied by dramatic acts of desperation in his factory by people who, in his light of success and with the ingredients of a variety of drugs, take control of it life lost. Of course, this kitsch Andy wins the audience’s sympathy precisely because of the incompleteness of his expression. It’s like a school play in front of parents or a seminar project at an acting school: For an Eleven show, this 90-minute evening is a great achievement, but as a serious project by a world-famous director, the show above all shows a lot of bad acting and a glossed-over story .
Gus Van Sant has also written lyrics and music to the cheerful superficiality of this youthful arts-for-kids musical, lovely songs that underscore with poppy melodies how he wishes one could just love Andy Warhol. And that’s why it is perhaps most surprising why the piece is called “Trouble”. The answer is: it was originally supposed to be called “Andy”, but the Warhol Foundation objected. Because of this annoyance, Andrew Warhola’s pseudo-musical biography is now named after something that completely lacks the staging as material.