Hollywood Fringe Musical Puts Claes Oldenburg in a Cardboard Spotlight
A fringe musical about Claes Oldenburg is doing more than turning Pop art into a joke. It is also asking who, exactly, gets remembered when an artwork becomes part of the cultural landscape. Enormous Things: The Musical, a 90-minute production by Chris Gale and Sarah Lew, is playing at Second Place Studio on Hollywood Boulevard as part of the Hollywood Fringe through June 28, 2026.
Gale stars as Claes Oldenburg, the Swedish American artist whose oversized public sculptures helped define a certain strain of 20th-century Pop. The production leans into that scale with cardboard costume versions of familiar works, including “Saw, Sawing” and “Plantoir.” Its premise is deliberately theatrical: Oldenburg is imagined in a creative rut after his muse, Claramonde, disappears.
From there, the show becomes a comic art-history detour. Oldenburg is taunted by Jeff Koons, played in drag by the real-life balloon artist and performer Balloons, then sent on a Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure-style journey that brings him face to face with Michelangelo, Yayoi Kusama, Alexander Calder, and an embodied version of Rodin’s “The Thinker,” played by Ryan Hailey.
The production’s sharper edge lies in its attention to labor. Lew has said the show was shaped by her experience in film and television art departments, while Gale drew on a family background in sculpture. Together, they use the musical to satirize the art world while pointing to the workers, assistants, and collaborators whose labor often disappears behind a celebrated name.
That concern gives the piece a more pointed resonance in the case of Coosje van Bruggen, Oldenburg’s wife and creative partner. In the musical, she is represented by Claramonde, but both creators suggest that her role in Oldenburg’s oeuvre deserves fuller recognition. The show also gestures toward the broader culture of uncredited labor in galleries and artists’ studios, a subject that has become increasingly visible in recent years.
For all its comic invention, Enormous Things is not simply a parody. It is a reminder that art history is often written around personalities, while the work itself is made through collaboration, repetition, and invisible effort. The production’s future may lie beyond Los Angeles — Gale and Lew have said they hope to bring it to New York or Minneapolis — but for now, it is using Hollywood Fringe to make a pointed case for who belongs in the story of Pop art.
