Sunday in the Park with George (review)

Stephen Sondheim’s Pulitzer Prize–winning musical Sunday in the Park with George was inspired by the life and work of French neo-impressionist painter Georges Seurat, particularly his masterpiece, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. With this painting Seurat perfected a technique known as pointillism, or divisionism, a mathematical process of creation in which the artist applies small dots of color to a canvas that are blended by the viewer’s eye rather than on the artist’s palette. In so doing, Seurat created a new language of art based on perception. From their own observations and imaginings, Sondheim and librettist James Lapine crafted a postmodern meditation on the artistic process. Sunday premiered at Playwrights Horizons in July 1983, underwent considerable revision and extension, and debuted at the Booth Theatre on 2 May 1984. Since then, Sondheim’s paean to the artistic process has become inextricably linked to its original production, in part because of its cast recording and video of the live performance, both of which feature original stars Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters.

In November 2005, British director Sam Buntrock re-imagined Sunday for a new generation. His muchlauded revival began its life at London’s Menier Chocolate Factory, before transferring to the West End’s Wyndam Theatre, where it garnered five Olivier Awards. The production was transplanted to Broadway in January 2008, earning nine Tony Award nominations. Buntrock’s revival, which received much critical attention due to its use of cutting-edge special effects, heightened the postmodern aesthetics of Sunday by utilizing technology as an “extension of man,” foregrounding the fragmented nature of perception, and emphasizing the tension between critical distance and emotional investment.

David Farley’s innovative set design functioned, in the words of Marshall McLuhan, as an “extension of man.” Farley situated the action in an artist’s studio, which he transformed via animated projections and further augmented with solitary pieces of furniture. In act 1, elements of “La Grande Jatte” appeared on the white walls of the studio at the stroke of George’s hand. Sketches emerged and were altered, color was added, and Seurat’s pointillist classic came together, piece by piece. By showing this progression, director and designer invited the audience to enter the mind of the artist, to experience the world as perceived by Seurat. Rather than upstage the actors, Buntrock’s conflation of live and mediatized performance enhanced the intimacy of the production by creating an imaginative canvas for the musical’s two Georges.

Roundabout Theatre Company’s Sunday in the Park with George. Pictured (left to right): Alison Horowitz, Jessica Molaskey, Drew McVety, Brynn O’Malley, Jessica Grové, Daniel Evans (Seurat), Michael Cumpsty, and Jenna Russell (Dot). Photo: Joan Marcus.

Farley employed animated technology for similar purposes in act 2. He transformed the modern-day George’s “Chromolume” into a multimedia light show. Dots of color enveloped the stage, spilled into the auditorium, and slowly coalesced into Seurat’s painting. As in the original production, a blown fuse thwarts George’s first effort. Farley’s design, therefore, served as a visual representation of how George, like his ancestral namesake, attempts to “get through to something new,” but often is frustrated by outside forces, including temperamental wiring and critics. In the extended musical sequence titled “Putting it Together,” Farley created animated projections of George to visualize the ways in which the artist not only extends, but also fragments, himself “bit by bit” in an attempt to entertain his legion of financial backers. The clones of George smiled, nodded, and drank champagne.

Buntrock employed a plethora of framing devices in order to foreground the fragmented nature of perception inherent in Sunday’s libretto. His staging, in concert with the lighting, isolated the inhabitants of “La Grande Jatte” and formed a series of individual portraits. The spatial detachment of the characters served as a visual representation of their...