What happens when you turn classic paintings into musical theatre?

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then it also must be worth a musical. That's certainly the case with Reframed, which sees Toronto's Acting Up Stage Company team with the Art Gallery of Ontario to create tune-filled dramatizations of three of the gallery's classic paintings.

Reframed launches April 12 and consists of three 20-minute musicals inspired by a trio of works in the AGO's permanent collection: The Marchesa Casati by Augustus John, He Is Coming by Otto Willem Albertus Roelofs and The Young Biologist by Paul Peel. The program, running until April 17, is performed in the AGO's Richard Barry Fudger Memorial Gallery, where the pictures are exhibited.

"It's so cool to have each piece of art that has inspired us hanging right there," says Julie Tepperman, co-author of The Preposterous Posthumous Predicament of Paulie Peel, the musical based on The Young Biologist.

In keeping with the Fudger venue, a.k.a. the "Paris Salon," these are salon-sized performances, featuring three actor-singers backed by a three-piece orchestra. The mini-musicals, however, promise to be as varied as the pictures on the walls.

La Casati, by playwright Erin Shields and composer Bryce Kulak, draws on the circumstances surrounding John's much-celebrated 1919 portrait of the flamboyant Italian heiress Luisa Casati, imagining a reunion between the artist and his model/lover after she has fallen on hard times. He Is Coming, by Sara Farb and Britta Johnson, concocts a fanciful scenario for Roelofs' enigmatic picture in which its female subject becomes an aging artist about to be evicted from her studio.

Then there's Tepperman's offbeat interpretation of Peel's cute painting, which shows a cherubic little boy looking intently at a small frog. She and composer Kevin Wong found in it a tale of childhood grieving with a whimsical twist.

Tepperman says their story grew out of biographical details about Peel, a London, Ont.-born artist and family man who had great success in Europe before succumbing to a lung infection at the age of 31. "He died in 1892, just a year after he'd painted The Young Biologist," Tepperman notes, adding that the boy in the painting was likely his son. "There was something about that fact that made me wonder about the impact his death would have had on his children."

The musical focuses on young Paulie, who tries to rationalize the death of the scientist father he idolized. Wong's score includes a sorrowful, jazz-inflected ballad for Paulie's mother, as well as an upbeat patter song where father and son bond while dissecting a frog. "There's a lot of sadness, but also a lot of humour," Tepperman says.  

The project grew out of Acting Up's NoteWorthy writing laboratory, which pairs playwrights and composers who want to branch out into musical theatre. One of the lab's exercises involved using pictures as inspiration, which got Acting Up's artistic director, Mitchell Marcus, thinking about a public collaboration with the AGO.

He says the museum was immediately interested.  "They were particularly keen when they heard we wanted to do it with paintings from the permanent collection," he adds.

Judy Koke, the AGO's chief of public programming and learning, says the museum is always combating the notion that if you've seen its collection once, you don't need to see it again. "So we love it that this makes it seem really dynamic and interesting in a whole new way."

The AGO is no stranger to live performance, having teamed with Opera Atelier and Peggy Baker Dance Projects, among others. But this is the first time musical theatre has graced its galleries.

It's a way to bring musicals to a different audience, Marcus says, but Reframed would also like to increase an appreciation of visual art.

"We're in the age of the selfie, where people race through museums and the main attraction is to snap a photo of yourself with a painting you didn't even look at," he says. "I hope this provides an insight into what a painting can do – in taking the time to contemplate it, what imaginative ideas and emotions and possibilities can come to life."

Reframed. April 12 to 17 at Art Gallery of Ontario, 317 Dundas Street West, Toronto.