It started, essentially, as a dare. Tony and Olivier-winning actor Gavin Creel lived in New York City for 20 years and never once entered The Metropolitan Museum of Art. When offered an opportunity to write a new work based on their collection, he finally went in.
WALK ON THROUGH is a thrilling new musical featuring 17 original, infectious, pop-infused songs that invite you to join Gavin as he discovers -- much to his and our surprise -- what it means to be fully alive.
Inspired by The Met's world-renowned collections, WALK ON THROUGH is an affirmation of the transformative power of art to reveal the heart of our human condition in a bold new way. The music – and Gavin's journey – break through the noise and divisions of modern life, transporting audiences on an unpredictable and astonishing walking tour of love, loss, and renewal.
Based on a concept originally commissioned by The Met, WALK ON THROUGH made its Off-Broadway debut at MCC Theater’s Susan & Ronald Frankel Theater November 13 - January 7, 2024.
the companion guide
Discover the works of art within The Metropolitan Museum of Art that inspired Gavin to craft WALK ON THROUGH and write this brand new musical score alongside photos by Joan Marcus of the MCC Theater production.
TRACK 1
WHERE AM I
TRACK 2
WALK ON THROUGH
TRACK 3
color
Smashed Strokes Hope Joan Snyder, 1971
Smashed Strokes Hope belongs to Joan Snyder’s breakthrough series of abstract paintings, sometimes referred to as "stroke paintings" because of the way they emphasize the primacy of the artist’s brushwork. Distinct areas of paint seem to have been sprayed on, smeared on haphazardly (perhaps with a hand or a cloth), or applied carefully to create vertical and horizontal clusters. Prominent drips, smears, and stains appear throughout the canvas. In this riot of color, there is a palpable tension between regularity and irregularity, pattern and chaos, control and spontaneity. Snyder once said, "I wanted to tell a story and I wanted there to be different sections. I wanted a beginning, middle, and end, many different parts, happy, sad, tragic parts, many things happening at once, different instruments, different sounds, rhythms."
TRACK 4
wisconsin landscape
Wisconsin Landscape John Steuart Curry, 1938-1939
Wisconsin Landscape is an idealized composite of farm scenes that Curry saw while traveling around the American Midwest. The horizontal canvas provides a panoramic view of the region and draws attention to the dramatic sky. Celebrating agrarian calm and plentitude, Curry’s verdant scene appears to deliberately disregard the effects of the Great Depression, which continued to plague farming communities at the time. Along with Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton, Curry contributed to an artistic movement known as Regionalism, which asserted that truly American art would emerge from small towns more so than large cities.
TRACK 5
HALLELUJAH
TRACK 6
the journey
America Today Thomas Hart Benton, 1930-1931
Offering a panorama of American life throughout the 1920s, America Today is a room-sized mural comprising ten canvas panels. Missouri native Thomas Hart Benton painted America Today to adorn a boardroom on the third floor of the New School for Social Research, a center of progressive thought and education in Greenwich Village, New York. The mural was commissioned in 1930 by the New School's director Alvin Johnson. Benton finished it very early in 1931, when the school opened a new building designed by architect Joseph Urban. Although the artist received no fee for his work on commission, he was "paid" with free eggs, the yolks from which he created the egg tempera paint.
TRACK 7
autumn rhythm (number 30)
Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) Jackson Pollock, 1950
The Met acquired this monumental "drip" painting by Pollock in 1957, the year following the artist’s unexpected death—a sign of how quickly his reinvention of painting was accepted into the canon of modern art. However revolutionary in technique, Pollock’s large-scale work was rooted in the muralism of the 1930s, including the art of Thomas Hart Benton (see America Today, MMA 2012.478a–j) and David Alfaro Siqueiros, both of whom he had worked alongside. Pollock proclaimed in 1947: "I intend to paint large movable pictures which will function between the easel and the mural. . . . the tendency of modern feeling is towards the wall picture or mural." This work’s title suggests not only the month in which he painted it (October), but also an alignment with nature’s constant flux.
TRACK 8
Scattered
TRACK 9
SING
The Organ Rehearsal Henry Lerolle, 1885
This is the most important painting by Lerolle, a friend and collector of such artists as Degas, Denis, and Vuillard. Set in the choir loft of the church of Saint-François-Xavier in Paris, it features members of Lerolle’s intimate circle, including his wife (bare-headed) and her sisters, in fashionable matching hats; his brother-in-law, composer Ernest Chausson, plays the organ. The painter himself gazes outward at left. Shown at the Salon of 1885, this picture triumphed the next year in New York, in the first major Impressionism exhibition in America. One critic recalled, "spectators … spoke low before it, as if waiting for … the voice of the singer to be heard."
TRACK 10
THE STORM
The Storm Pierre-Auguste Cot, 1880
When Cot exhibited this painting at the Salon of 1880, critics speculated about the source of the subject. Some proposed the French novel Paul and Virginie by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1737–1814), in which the teenage protagonists run for shelter in a rainstorm, using the heroine’s overskirt as an impromptu umbrella; others suggested the romance Daphnis and Chloe by the ancient Greek writer Longus. New York collector and Metropolitan Museum benefactor Catharine Lorillard Wolfe commissioned the work under the guidance of her cousin John Wolfe, one of Cot's principal patrons. Like the artist’s earlier Springtime (2012.575), it was immensely popular and extensively reproduced.
TRACK 11
WHAT IS THIS?
TRACK 12
garshin 1
Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin (1855-1888) Illia Repin, 1884
On view: 827
Repin was born in the Ukrainian town of Chuhuiv (Chuguev) when it was part of the Russian Empire. He went on to become a major progressive painter. In the early 1880s, he met Garshin, an acclaimed writer who shared his concern for contemporary political and social problems. Repin made several portraits in this decade of artists in his orbit in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The rich tonal contrasts and lush brushwork are indebted to art he saw while studying in Paris. Four years after this picture was painted, Garshin, scarred by the suicides of his father and brother and his own mental illness, threw himself down a stairwell and died.
TRACK 13
the only one
TRACK 14
GARSHIN 2
TRACK 15
i know you
Untitled Gregory Crewdson, 2005
Gregory Crewdson describes his highly scripted photographs as single-frame movies; to produce them, he engages teams of riggers, grips, lighting specialists, and actors. The story lines in most of his photographs center on suburban anxiety, disorientation, fear, loss, and longing, but the final meaning almost always remains elusive, the narrative unfinished. In this photograph something terrible has happened, is happening, and will likely happen again. A woman in a nightgown sits in crisis on the edge of her bed with the remains of a rosebush on the sheets beside her. The journey from the garden was not an easy one, as evidenced by the trail of petals, thorns, and dirt. Even so, the protagonist cradles the plant’s roots with tender regard.
Untitled Film Still #48 Cindy Sherman, 1979
A lone woman on an empty highway peers around the corner of a rocky outcrop. She waits and waits below the dramatic sky. Is it fear or self-reliance that challenges the unnamed traveler? Does she dread the future, the past, or just the present? So thorough and sophisticated is Cindy Sherman’s capacity for filmic detail and nuance that many viewers (encouraged by the titles) mistakenly believe that the photographs in the series are reenactments of films. Rather, they are an unsettling yet deeply satisfying synthesis of film and narrative painting, a shrewdly composed remaking not of the "real" world but of the mediated landscape.
Soft Figure Robert Heinecken, 1964
A quintessential Los Angeles artist of the radical 1960s, Robert Heinecken graduated in 1960 with a master’s degree in printmaking. Four years later, he founded the photography program at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he taught for the next twenty-seven years. Ironically, he rarely used a camera to create his own images and instead appropriated pictures from magazines. This dreamy and erotic work from the beginning of his career effectively explores camera techniques often defined as "bad photography," such as incorrect exposure, shooting into the light, and motion blur. At first glance one might ask, is it a photograph documenting reality or a copy of a drawing? For Heinecken, this ambiguity is precisely where the beauty lies.
TRACK 16
salvator mundi 1
Salvator Mundi Albrecht Dürer, ca. 1505
This picture of Christ as Savior of the World, who raises his right hand in blessing and in his left holds an orb representing the Earth, can be appreciated both as a painting and a drawing. Dürer, the premier artist of the German Renaissance, probably began this work shortly before he departed for Italy in 1505, but completed only the drapery. His unusually extensive and meticulous preparatory drawing on the panel is visible in the unfinished portions of Christ's face and hands.
TRACK 17
hands on you
Fragmentary Colossal Marble Head of Youth 2nd Century B.C.
The astonishingly realistic fragmentary marble head of a youth was originally part of a draped bust set in a marble roundel almost four feet in diameter. Representing a young god or perhaps Alexander the Great, and found on the upper terrace of the gymnasium at Pergamon, the work would have been one of a number of similar sculptures adorning the space. Because the bust was never exposed to the elements, the marble surface is remarkably fresh.
TRACK 18
annette
Annette Alberto Giacometti, 1961
In this late portrait of his wife and principal model, Giacometti positioned the figure close to the picture plane, half-length and facing forward, framed by an abstract, gestural backdrop. With its expressive brushwork, the work may seem hastily executed; however, sitting for Giacometti was a time-intensive endeavor. Despite this, he never regarded any of his paintings—or sculptures—as finished. The artist’s long and careful painting process and frequent changes to the composition are especially apparent in the depiction of the face. After exhibiting a first version of this portrait in Paris in May 1961, Giacometti went back to rework the picture. According to Annette, he at first only wanted to change the nose, but subsequently turned her expression into the present wide-eyed stare while also retouching the background.
TRACK 19
high
The Weeders Jules Breton, 1868
This is a smaller variant of a composition Breton painted in 1860 (Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha) and exhibited to wide acclaim at the Salon of 1861 and the World’s Fair of 1867 in Paris. In his autobiography, Breton described this twilight scene of peasants pulling up thistles and weeds—"their faces haloed by the pink transparency of their violet hoods, as if to venerate a fecundating star"—noting that he had discovered the subject as a "finished picture" near his native village, Courrières, in northern France.
TRACK 20
alone tonight
TRACK 21
judith
Judith and the Head of Holofernes Lucas Cranach the Elder, ca. 1530
The Jewish heroine Judith presents the severed head of the Assyrian general who besieged her city, having seduced and then beheaded him with his own sword. Appropriately, she is "dressed to kill" and wears an elaborate contemporary costume that would have appealed to Cranach’s courtly patrons. The painter and his workshop produced several versions of this successful composition, which contrasts Holofernes’ gruesome head with Judith’s serene beauty. At the lower right is Cranach's insignia: a crowned winged serpent with a ring in its mouth.
TRACK 22
from williamsburg bridge
From Williamsburg Bridge Edward Hopper, 1928
In this painting, Hopper depicts the austere facades of four apartment buildings and reduces the steel suspension of the Williamsburg Bridge to the margins. Completed in 1903 and connecting Brooklyn with Manhattan, the structure is indicated only by the unobtrusive railing rising at a slight diagonal along the bottom of the canvas. As opposed to focusing on the bridge that facilitates movement in and out of the city, Hopper creates an image absent of noise or motion. He emphasizes the alienation and anonymity of urban life by including a single figure: a woman sitting alone in a top story window.
