Theatre in Review: Art (Music Box Theatre) Bobby Cannavale, James Corden, and Neil Patrick Harris are having a high old time on stage at the Music Box these nights. You might, too. Depending. Yasmina Reza unleashed a commercial juggernaut with Art, a brief, tart comedy about three bourgeois Parisians falling out over an all-white painting that one of them purchases for an outrageous sum. An international hit in the 1990s, it is back, once again doing robust business. (It is currently being revived in Paris, too.) In any production, it offers a carte blanche for three actors, usually stars, to horse around for ninety minutes, to the delight of their fans. Based on the receipts and the audience reaction at the performance I attended, it is currently doing exactly that. Still, the thinness of this entertainment is hard to overlook. It's become a truism to note that Art is rather like that controversial painting, an utterly blank canvas on which anyone can project any impression; still, the charge continues to stick. The secret of its success may be its lack of offense: It's a moderately amusing piece, gesturing occasionally toward significance, which challenges its cast to spin something out of nothing. It makes the frothiest sex comedy from Broadway's postwar boom years look like Desire Under the Elms. For the fans, the good news is that director Scott Ellis has engaged three top pros who know how to take care of themselves. As Serge, a dermatologist, who practically bankrupts himself to own the painting -- it's "an Antrios," he says, knowingly -- Harris amuses, whether gazing at his purchase in open-mouthed reverence, or, roused to fury, leaping up and down like a child deprived of his lollipop. Cannavale, donning a pair of glasses to make sure he isn't missing something, or reacting with a laugh that cuts like a CNC router, is assured as Marc, who is astonished by what he sees as Serge's idiocy. (Indeed, he is threatened by it to the point that it undermines the basis for their friendship.) Even so, both stars are nearly blindsided by the whirling comic energy of Corden, as Yvan, the trio's hapless peacemaker, who, horrified at the bad behavior surrounding him, perches on a couch, rolling around like one of those push toys that pop back up, issuing fresh panic signals at carefully timed intervals. (At one point, he burrows under the couches, like a badger seeking shelter.) Corden, his voice an ever-ascending ladder of high-pitched grievance, also dines out on the script's showiest set piece, an increasingly hysterical rant about the women in Yvan's life, all fighting for top billing on the invitations to his upcoming wedding. Returning the Music Box, the site of his triumph in One Man, Two Guvnors, Corden reminds us that he is one of our funniest, most agile clowns. There's plenty of professionalism onstage, extending to David Rockwell's set, with its hint of Empire style, Linda Cho's flattering costumes, Jen Schriever's sleek lighting, and Mikaal Sulaiman's sound design, which makes good use of electronica music. Yet the entire enterprise is marked by a sense of nagging unreality. The supposed provocation of the all-white painting is more than a little forced. (Presumably, Reza is riffing on Robert Rauschenberg's 1951 work White Painting, but one can't be sure.) Would these men turn on each other so violently over such a seemingly trivial matter? Hard to say because Reza has written them as attitudes rather than characters. They're mouthpieces for varying positions, divorced from any plausible psychology. Indeed, they bounce about the stage like subatomic particles in a collider, crashing into each other without generating any real energy. Possibly, the playwright has a solid grasp of her countrymen's attitudinizing ways, yet, in this production, Art unfolds in a kind of no man's land: In Christopher Hampton's translation, these haute-Parisian figures speak a mid-Atlantic patois, with British locutions and references to dollars rather than francs or euros. None of it sounds authentic when mouthed by these actors. The play's most fundamental problem is voiced by Marc during one of his furies: "The thing is, all of a sudden, I can't understand, I have no idea what binds me to Yvan...I have no idea what my relationship with him consists of." Funny, that's what I was thinking about five minutes after the curtain went up: Who are these men and why are they friends? (Even allowing for the way that longtime relationships evolve across long periods of time, Marc, Serge, and Yvan have little or nothing in common.) This is especially felt as the conversation turns sour, with Serge attacking Marc's "repellent" life partner. Because Reza doesn't construct plausible relationships, nothing is at stake as they come apart. None of this is likely to matter for audiences looking to hang out with their favorite stars. Ellis' direction keeps things humming at a lively clip, and he makes the most of a silent sequence in which all three characters, reduced to resentful silence, munch on olives, the clang of each pit as it is dropped into a metal tray signaling their lurking disgruntlement. Actually, that last bit of business is telling. In the final scene, the characters' attempts at getting to a restaurant are repeatedly frustrated, leaving them with only olives to snack on. That's Reza's play for you, a small bite rather than a full meal. Still, plenty of people are enjoying it, which is fine by me -- as long as we're all agreed that Art is not to be confused with theatrical art. -- David Barbour 
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