by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The “feature” Charles and I watched last Thursday night was Sunday
in the Park with George, a 1985 video
presentation of the original Broadway production of the musical I consider
Stephen Sondheim’s greatest work. Indeed, if he’d done nothing else for the theatre
— no lyrics to Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story and Jule Styne’s Gypsy, no A Little Night Music, Company,
Follies, Sweeney Todd or Into the
Woods — this one show would establish him
as one of the all-time giants of musical theatre. Sunday in the Park
with George was Sondheim’s first
collaboration with writer James Lapine after years of working with Hugh Wheeler
(a partnership that broke up in the wake of the failure of Merrily We
Roll Along, their adaptation of a 1934
George S. Kaufman play about a love affair, told backwards — beginning with the
couple breaking up and ending with their first meeting — though they had been
warned because the 1934 original had been a flop, too), and for the first act
they told the story of the real-life French painter Georges Seurat (1859-1891)
and the creation of his most famous work, “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of
La Grande Jatte.” A few explanatory titles at the beginning of the video
explain that the Grande Jatte was a resort frequented in the 1880’s mostly by
working-class Parisians, though occasionally members of the upper class would
go out there as unobtrusively as possible on what in the U.S. in the 1920’s
became known as “slumming” trips. The show’s acknowledgment says it is “a work
of fiction inspired by the art of Seurat and what little is known of his life,”
and to that end Lapine invented the female lead of Dot (Bernadette Peters,
turning in a far finer performance than she did in the next Sondheim/Lapine
show, Into the Woods, because a
more realistic character gave her far more to work with), who’s both Seurat’s
mistress and his model.
In the opening scene he’s sketching her as one of the
figures he intends to have appear in the “Grande Jatte” painting and he’s
rudely telling her to keep still while she sings of her discomfort over her
“Sunday in the park with George.” The first act is about an hour and a half
long and deals both with Seurat’s work and with the “regulars” and
semi-“regulars” at the Grande Jatte whom he incorporates into the painting,
including a pair of soldiers (one of whom is a live actor, Robert Westenberg,
while the other is a cardboard cut-out, life-size and painted in Seurat’s
style, one of the sometimes annoying little “arch” touches that afflict
Sondheim’s musicals), a prominent artist and critic named Jules (Charles
Kimbrough) who praises Seurat’s work to his face and disses it behind his back,
an old woman (Barbara Bryne) who turns out to be Seurat’s mother, her nurse
(Judith Moore), a couple of women who cruise the soldiers, a boatman (William
Parry) who has a proletarian’s attitude of contempt for anyone with more money
or status than he, an obnoxious little girl with glasses and others. The act
artfully alternates between Seurat (Mandy Patinkin, coming off his star-making role
in Barbra Streisand’s Yentl and
turning in an otherwise good performance that’s just a bit too Jewish to be
credible as a 19th century Parisian artist — though I looked up the
Wikipedia page on the real Seurat and the photo there looks strikingly like
Patinkin in the show) creating and controlling this world of people who are
going to become the characters in his painting, and the real people themselves,
with their own ambitions, attitudes and actions. The central conflict is
between Seurat, Dot and Louis the baker (Cris Groenendaal), who’s also after
her and who seems like a much better match — at least he pays attention to her
and doesn’t just ignore her when he’s not telling her to hold still in one
uncomfortable position after another — and there’s an ironic Sondheim lyric in
which Dot compares the two men in her life and says Louis is also an artist,
only his artworks are far more
popular and are immediately enjoyed by their consumers.
The conflict ends with
a heart-wrenching duet between Seurat and Dot called “We Do Not Belong
Together,” and apparently in this performance it was so heart-rending it got to Bernadette Peters personally
and she cried through so much of it the producers decided her vocal was
unusable and she had to dub her own voice in post-production. Dot leaves Seurat
and marries Louis even though she’s pregnant with Seurat’s child, and a
typically ugly American couple who are visiting Paris and are singularly
unimpressed with everything but its pastries hire Louis to come to the U.S. with
them and make those spectacular French baked goods for them in America. Of
course, he brings Dot and “their” child, a daughter whom Dot names Marie
because she’s been teaching herself to read out of a red-bound primer in which
all the women mentioned in the examples are named Marie. (“Why is she always
Marie?” Dot complains, though later she gives that name to her daughter.) The
hour-long Act Two deals with a modern young artist named George (Mandy
Patinkin) who creates works he calls “chromolumes” (after
“chromoluminarianism,” one of the terms Georges Seurat coined for his painting
style, though the name for it that has entered the art history books is
“pointillism”). The chromolume we get to see in action is his Number 7, which
looks like a statue of R2-D2 topped with a large glass globe that shows
holograms while the rest of the machine puts on a light show — only when it’s
exhibited by the museum that commissioned it as an homage to Seurat’s “Grande Jatte” painting (the museum is
unnamed but the real “Grande Jatte” is part of the permanent collection of the
Art Institute of Chicago) the creation puts such a drain on the museum’s
circuits it shorts out and the display comes to an abrupt and unscheduled end.
When they fix the technical glitches and it resumes, it turns out to be a sort
of holographic biodoc on Seurat and the creation of “La Grande Jatte,” and in
what’s become the best-known song from the show (and virtually the only one
performed out of context), “Putting It Together,” the modern-day George laments
at how many sponsors are required for him to create anything and how he can’t work until the financial package
behind him is set.
Indeed, the reception for him after his display is more a
networking opportunity than anything else, and the actors who played the
characters in Seurat’s painting and his life in Act One reappear as typically
pretentious would-be patrons, critics and assistants, one of whom tells George
that after this project he’s leaving the art world and returning to his calmer,
less stressful former job with NASA. The featured guest at George’s opening was
his grandmother Marie (Bernadette Peters), who keeps insisting that he is the
great-grandson of Georges Seurat — which he refuses to believe for reasons
Lapine’s script keeps hauntingly ambiguous, though we get the impression that’s
a family burden he doesn’t want
the challenge of living up to and which would just add to the already large
number of stressors in his life. George (the modern one) gets an invitation to
present his chromoluminarian homage
to Seurat on the actual site of the Grande Jatte, which turns out to have been
heavily developed and full of aggressively ugly apartment buildings, and though
his grandmother Marie has died by then, he meets up with the spirit of his great-grandmother
Dot (she’s still played by Bernadette Peters, whose performance here is much stronger than the one she gave in the next
Sondheim-Lapine show, Into the Woods:
apparently playing a realistic character with human emotions and motivations
turned her on a lot more than playing a fairy-tale witch) and she re-energizes
him to do something new with his art — it’s never explained exactly what, but
the big duet between them, “Move On,” is essentially a continuation of “We Do
Not Belong Together” only with the opposite message: they do belong together, even as inspirations spanning the
generations rather than real people living at the same time. What’s more, Dot’s
appearance enables George finally
to come to grips with his legacy as Seurat’s great-grandson and to understand
that the mysterious words scrawled by Dot in the back pages of that red-backed
grammar primer — “Order. Design. Tension. Balance. Harmony” — were her
transcription of Seurat’s artistic credo.
I’ve seen this presentation of Sunday in the Park with
George several times and every time I’ve
found it utterly magical. The first time was with my late roommate, who watched
it on HBO when he was still getting premium channels and much to my irritation
turned it off after half an hour after I had got totally engrossed in it. The
second time was when it was rebroadcast on PBS and I recorded it on Betamax, a
tape I later showed to my late partner John Gabrish. I had worried it might be
too recherché a story for him,
but it turned out John had a personal connection to the painting: he was from
Sheboygan, Wisconsin but had lived much of his life in Milwaukee. The distance
between Milwaukee and Chicago is about the same as that between San Diego and
Los Angeles, so people in Milwaukee wanting a culture fix from a first-class
city go to Chicago the way San Diegans go to L.A. — so John had seen the
original painting at the Art Institute many times and the story came alive for
him because he knew the work so well. For me, I had a quite different reaction;
when I’d seen slides of the “Grande Jatte” in art history class in junior
college I had reacted much the way the artist and critic Jules does in Lapine’s
script: I had found it dull and emotionless. Seurat’s painting technique was to
use a restricted number of colors and apply his paint in the form of little
dots over the canvas so the eye would blend them together and see more and
different colors than were there in the actual paint. (Ironically, a color TV
image is essentially created the same way: what we were watching when we ran
this DVD was a series of dots — “pixels” — of colored light, either red,
yellow, blue or black, which the eye blends into a whole palette of really
existing colors. In a sense, the entire technique of halftoning that allowed photographs
to be reproduced in print and then allowed TV first to exist at all and then to
exist in color is an homage to
Seurat, who in real life had read works on color theory, including the one by
French author and chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul, who invented the color
wheel.) That’s one reason why he created so few works — he spent two years on
“La Grande Jatte” and the credits to this show claim only seven Seurat
paintings exist (though his Wikipedia page shows at least 12) — before his
death at 31. Other artists, from Van Gogh to Basquiat, may have died equally
young but they produced a lot more works in the time they had! So for me Sunday
in the Park with George gave me a greater
appreciation of Seurat’s work than I’d had before. Later I ran the tape for
Charles, who didn’t like it — this time around he enjoyed it more than he had
before, though he still isn’t as impressed by the show as I am.
I think it’s a
work of utter magic, and though it won the Pulitzer Prize for drama it was
snubbed by the Tony Awards, who gave Best Musical that year to La
Cage aux Folles (obviously influenced by
the social daring of doing a musical in which the central characters are a
middle-aged Gay couple, though in all other aspects La Cage aux
Folles is a depressingly ordinary musical
farce with almost none of the depth, richness, artistic quality and insight of Sunday
in the Park with George) — and this
production enables us to watch this magnificent piece with the actors for whom
Sondheim and Lapine created it. Patinkin and Peters are marvelous; yes, there
are times (especially during the big duets) during which I found myself wishing
to hear what weightier, more operatic voices might do with Sondheim’s songs
(which isn’t always how Sondheim himself wants them performed: I remember
reading how many singers, including Sarah Vaughan, work their asses off to take
the long lines of his best-known song, “Send In the Clowns” from A
Little Night Music, without pausing for
breath in the middle — only Sondheim said in an interview that since the song
is performed in the show by an actress playing an older woman, he expected the singers to pause for breath and didn’t
necessarily want the song sung with the superb breath control Sarah Vaughan
brought to it even when she was
no longer young), but I also love this show and appreciate the honest, natural
performing style Patinkin and Peters brought to the leads. Indeed, though the
music-to-talk ratio in Sunday in the Park with George is far more skewed to talk over music than the one
for Into the Woods, Sunday
in the Park with George is considerably
better constructed musically, with strains from the various songs used
effectively as leitmotifs and the
always awkward transitions from speaking to singing handled smoothly (far more
so than in Violet, the recent
musical I just saw “live,” where the plot was strong and the songs were good
but the junctures between them were so crude as to be wince-inducing). One
minor quibble: the arrangements of the songs played on stage used only eight
musicians, and the orchestrations by Michael Starobin sound a bit thin —
especially by comparison with the original-cast album, for which Starobin
beefed up his arrangements for more musicians and a bigger “sound” that would
work better on records. Sunday in the Park with George — despite that silly title (maybe it would have been
taken more seriously if it had had a name like Art Isn’t Easy, a phrase repeated many times in Lapine’s script) —
is a masterpiece, an absolutely magical work, and this performance is a document
of the original production and is fully worthy of it.
