Musical seeks to bring Rembrandt's troubled personal life to the stage

HOORN, Netherlands - Like most Dutchmen, Henk Poort knew little about Rembrandt, beyond his two or three most famous paintings. Then Poort was asked to play the Dutch master on stage.\n"Rembrandt The Musical" sounds like classic kitsch, part of the commercial hoopla surrounding the 400th anniversary of Rembrandt's birth July 15.\nBut the $12.5 million show is a lavish production that seeks to illuminate Rembrandt's exuberant and sometimes tragic life. As an artist, he is portrayed as rebellious and disdainful of popular opinion. As a person, he is a somewhat rakish figure bedeviled by three women.\n"What I'm trying to project is that he's going his own way," Poort said after a preview performance in this northern Dutch city. "He's not bowing his head for the rich people. They ask him, 'Make me more beautiful than I am,' and he says, 'If you have wrinkles, you get wrinkles.' He's very truthful to himself."\nScholars say that Rembrandt could be vindictive, quarrelsome and a deadbeat, but Poort plays him with sympathy.\n"He had a very difficult life. He lost two wives, four children, his house, his paintings," said the actor, who also is one of Holland's leading opera performers.\nIt's questionable whether the musical will produce memorable hits, but the stage production has merit. Stage design, lighting and costumes drawn from Rembrandt's canvases work well together in creating the life and times of 17th-century Holland.\nDigital images of his masterpieces, projected onto 30-foot screens, provide a breathtaking backdrop throughout the three-hour show. The resolution is so high that from the back of a 900-seat theater, the audience can see the veins in the hands of an old woman.\nThis virtual moving museum becomes an integral part of the production, with many of the scenes and people shown in the paintings become central characters in Rembrandt's story as it unfolds on the stage. The music was written by Jeroen Englebert, a popular song writer, and classical composer Dirk Brosse.\nThe show premieres on Rembrandt's birthday at Amsterdam's 1,400-seat Royal Carre theater for a six-month run, with eight performances a week. Tourists will have hand-held translation devices, about the size of an i-Pod, with a running text of the lyrics in the language of their choice.\nReviewers were not invited to the preview performances. The sellout audience at one preview, however, gave the cast a lengthy standing ovation.\n"Rembrandt is part of our heritage, but most of us don't know any more about his personal life than most tourists," said Albert Kok, a cultural writer for the Algemeen Dagblad newspaper. After seeing the production, "most will be pleased that they know more about the man than before"