Theater Review: “Sunday in the Park With George”

Nearly three months after seeing the Roundabout Theatre’s revival of the Stephen Sondheim musical Sunday in the Park With George in a preview, I’m not surprised by the news from the other day of the show’s nine Tony nominations. Surely it deserved all of them. The real question remains, however, the same one that has plagued it from its original 1984 production concerning French impressionist Georges Seurat and his (fictional) grandson: What on earth is that second act doing there?

That act should benefit from the familiarity of Sondheim and book writer James Lapine with the contemporary art world. In particular, Sondheim is not just, as a composer, sympathetic to the struggles of an artist (albeit one in a different medium), but from what I understand, he is friends with many artists. The satire of the modern art scene, with its gallery owners and patrons, is shrewd and sharp, but, unlike Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word, affectionate.

And yet…The first act works better than the second. Our sympathies run deeper with Seurat than with his American grandson; the sacrifice of love for art is more poignant; the final victory of art, in the great Seurat painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (which now hangs, incidentally, in the Art Institute of Chicago) is more emphatic; and—let’s face it—the idea of a grandson artist for Seurat mirroring his struggles is not just fictional, but also just plain contrived. The second act came to be because Sondheim and Lapine needed an Act II—not because this one sprang organically from their Act I.

Too bad. The musical is, in many ways, Sondheim’s most personal, about the ruthless demands creators make on those closest to them—and on the ruthless demands their pursuit of artistic perfection makes on themselves. It includes some of the composer’s finest songs, including “Children and Art,” “Putting It Together,” the Act I finale “Sunday,” and my favorite, “Finishing the Hat,” Seurat’s moving soliloquoy on the love he has missed in life and on the measure of victory he’s gained in the process (“Look, I made a hat/Where there never was a hat.”).

Unlike the John Doyle daring productions of Sondheim’s Company and Sweeney Todd, or even the Roundabout’s Follies, this musical, while playing to a sold-out audience of people like myself – i.e., Sondheim cultists—elicited respectful attention rather than rapture. This is hardly the most off-putting of Sondheim’s musicals (that distinction would probably belong to either Pacific Overtures or Assassins), so I tried to figure out why. It’s hard to work up love for a show in which Art, rather than Love, conquers all.

The other problems with the show are, in comparison with these, minor. The show has its share of broad, cheap shots, notably in Act I, which features a husband-and-wife “ugly Americans.” They’re not only fat, not only Southern, but Texan (even though there were few fortunes in the state in those pre-oil gusher days). The show’s producers should have resisted the urge to shoot for the cliché, no matter how well they knew their home audience’s need to feel superior to another part of the country.

In addition, Studio 54 does not seem like the best space for this show; it’s more suitable for Cabaret’s evocation of life on the edge in seedy between-wars Berlin, or even Follies’ depiction of a crumbling entertainment palace.

Director Sam Buntrock first worked on this production at the Meinier Chocolate Factory, then in the larger Wyndham’s Theatre in London’s West End, before taking it to the U.S.

Which brings me to my next question for the Roundabout: What gives with the British imports recently? (In this season, we’ve had this show, The 39 Steps, and Les Liaisons Dangereuses.) No, I’m not for cultural protectionism – I want to see a good show as much as the next person, and don’t care where I see it. Still, there seems to be a kind of snobbery at work in all of this. Can’t American directors have the requisite vision for this kind of show? Don’t American actors enunciate their lines just as well as their cousins across the Atlantic?

By the same token, I have to say that Jenna Russell, with her cockney accent, sounds a bit jarring as a young French woman. It took awhile for the conceit to (sort of) work: her character, “Dot” (like the pointillist technique) may be French, but she’s also lower class, isolating her further from artist-lover Seurat.

I wish Jessica Molaskey, whom I’ve admired for the last few years while listening to Jonathan Schwartz’s weekend show on WNYC-FM, could have had a larger role, but at least it was literally at the center of the production—she’s the figure at the exact middle of the frame that Seurat composed. (Incidentally, little is known of the painter’s life, so the musical began with Sondheim and Lapine freely imagining him and the people who populated his influential landscape.)

Daniel Russell, reprising his Olivier Award-winning performance in the U.K., made a forceful impression as the obsessed Seurat – brilliant in his artistic vision, lost at communicating his love for another human being.

The post-show discussion was one of the most bizarre in my 10 years of watching these at the Roundabout, with the speakers twice interrupted by someone griping at the ushers’ alleged rudeness (which nobody but the loud person seemed to notice!). It’s too bad, because it distracted from one of the best-informed panelists in the series, a Star-Ledger theater critic and blogger named Peter Filichia. He noted, for instance, that the ’84 production (starring Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters) might have been saved because of producer Bernard Jacobs’ willingness to pay for all kinds of sprinklers below stage for the numerous props. (This production eliminates the problem; wondrous 3D projections, allowing experiments with animation, permit objects and people to be seen against very thin screens.)