E-Mail This Article to a Friend Beautiful music Felder and Zimbalist get Romantic BY IRIS FANGER

Hershey Felder, the outsize talent that rolls pianist, actor, and playwright into one package, thinks nothing of seating himself at the Steinway grand that graces the Loeb Drama Center�s center stage to blast away at Chopin�s heroic A-flat Polonaise before an audience of one. Talking about Romantique (which the American Repertory Theatre is giving its debut beginning this Friday), the second of his "imaginations with music" and the follow-up to George Gershwin Alone, Felder connects the two shows with a single theme: "The artist and his relationship to the world around him."

The differences between the two productions are evident. Gershwin Alone has the 35-year-old, Montreal-born performer on stage solo, shmoozing the audience as Gershwin in between performing his music and singing his songs. The idea, says Felder, is to become "the composer inviting the audience into his living room. My goal is to lessen the distance between the audience and the performer."

With Romantique, Felder takes a more traditional approach to dramatizing the story of the Polish-born composer Fr�d�ric Chopin, his lover the novelist George Sand, and their friend the painter Eug�ne Delacroix. The trio of oversize personalities lived in Paris during the 1830s, when the attitude of the Romantic period in art, music, and literature dominated the work of the then-cutting-edge artists. "Romantique is a play," says Felder. "I don�t break the theatrical concept of the fourth wall. The fun thing is telling the story. Gershwin is about the composer and his audience. Romantique is about the relationship of Chopin to the other artists around him. My next project is Beethoven, about the relationship between man and God."

The liaison between Chopin and Sand (the pen name of Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin, baronne Dudevant) began in 1837 and ended shortly before the composer�s death, in 1849. The couple lived in ecstasy for a while but parted bitterly; however, their pairing became fodder for Sand�s writing.

Felder, of course, plays Chopin; Anthony Crivello, a Tony winner for Kiss of the Spiderwoman, plays Delacroix. Cast as Sand is Stephanie Zimbalist, who�s best known for her five seasons on TV�s Remington Steele. Trained at Juilliard in drama, as Felder was in music, she views her stage career as part of a continuum. "When I had the face and youth, I was on television. That�s what you�re supposed to do. Now that I have the craft and experience, I do theater."

Zimbalist has been busy reading through the many biographies of Sand. "She had a pattern with her men: needy, sick, ill men but all brightly talented. She fed them in every way, in terms of their health. She was also a wonderful cook, and she fed them socially. She bought out the house for one of Chopin�s concerts and arranged for every patron who could be of value to him to be in that audience."

Chopin and Sand were indeed opposites: he was a sickly man who relished the indoor life of the salons of Paris whereas she was partial to her country estate at Nohant. The contrasts between the two could fuel a series�s worth of soap operas, but Felder argues that "the point is not to take the most exploitive parts but the most human. Part of the question in these plays is the struggle to connect the person to the work. With Chopin, the music might be perfect, but the man was not. From what I�m able to analyze, he had melancholia, what we would call bipolar disorder, but he was a genius. You can never answer where the art is coming from."

Romantique is presented by the American Repertory Theatre August 1 through 17 at the Loeb Drama Center, 64 Brattle Street in Harvard Square. Tickets are $45; call (617) 547-8300.