By Harry Haun
26 Aug 2010
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| Frank "Fraver" Verlizzo |
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For 35 years Frank Verlizzo has created some of Broadway's most indelible images. Known in the industry as "Fraver" (an amalgam combining the first three letters of his first and last names), he has created key art for some 300 shows, originating, along the way, the iconic imagery for some of theatre's most beloved shows.
Who can forget the shadowy figures of a black-and-white Mrs. Lovett and Sweeney dripping with blood in the poster for the original Sweeney Todd? Or the torn George Seurat painting resting atop denim- and pantyhose-clad legs in the poster for the original Sunday in the Park with George?
"I just try to translate it into something that is pleasing to me and that also attracts someone walking down the street," he says. "That's really the ultimate goal of posters."
He recently went solo, opening up his own design agency, truly a majority of one but with seven clients lined up like dominos the very first week that his shingle went up.
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Playbill wanted to get inside the mind of the man whose life mission is to make art of art by asking him to put a Fraver-esque spin on some fictional theatrical mashups of iconic shows. Here's what he came up with:
The Kiss of the Spider-Man represents a visual merging of the high-kicking Kander & Ebb razzle-dazzle with the Marvel comic-book escapades of Stan Lee.
"I always try to keep things simple and tell a little bit of the story," Fraver says. "It's impossible to come up with a visual image that tells the entire story, but it's possible to come up with one that gives you a feeling for the kind of evening ahead of you.
"I took my cue, just as a graphic artist, from figuring out what I'd do with a spider web for a love story. It's a web coming out from a heart, and the Spider-Man is very much in a Liza Minnelli-Cabaret-ish kind of mode, wearing a bowler even.
"The reason I made Spider-Man look a little fey was that I was basing him on the Kander & Ebb Kiss of the Spider Woman, which had a gay love story, so I blended in the Spider-Man trappings with the Spider Woman plot."
Continued...



