In 1890, in a quiet town just outside Paris, France, a book from the future rests on a café table. The binding of The Life and Artworks of Vincent Van Gogh cracks, its pages turning to the penultimate chapter…

As the best (and only) doctor in Auvers, Dr. Paul Ferdinand Gachet’s days are filled with patients, often artists. He lives with his daughter, Marguerite, and fancies himself an amateur painter. During sessions, Gachet often finds himself drifting away, his thoughts gravitating toward color, shadow, light—and the ghost of his deceased wife, who tends to visit whenever he’s indulged in too much brandy.

In late spring, a struggling painter named Vincent van Gogh arrives at Gachet’s doorstep. What follows is an intense and tumultuous summer for Gachet: walking beside Van Gogh through the shadows of a tragic past; struggling to hold fast to his headstrong daughter; confronting his unresolved grief; and attempting, somehow, to fix a hole in his roof.

Unfolding through a series of memories, dreams, and glimpses of the present, A Portrait of Dr. Gachet poignantly blends the lines between fact and fiction, rendering two complex figures in bright hues: Van Gogh at the precipice of his notoriously troubled life, and Gachet, awakening to the realities of his own.

Vincent van Gogh paints A Portrait of Dr. Gachet in this new musical by Dominick Alesia.