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This is the kind of evening that turns a dear friend into a despised foe by the time the curtain falls.
Approach it with care and caution. But do not, whatever your do, miss it.
For Sondheim's heroic leap into the bright unknown is as important as it is divisive.
Like the revolutionary painting that inspired it - Georges Seurat's vast pointillist canvas Un Dimanche d'été à l'Île de la Grand Jatte - it glows with innovative technique and thrilling vision.
No one before Seurat had thought of combining countless tiny dots of colour into one ordered image. By allowing the colours to mix in the eye of the beholder, rather than on the palette of the painter, he brought a new dimension to art.
Sondheim and his librettist James Lapine work a similar revolution in terms of theatre. The lives frozen into this idyllic tableau by one medium are freed and explored by another.
Visually the piece is stunning. Whole sections of Seurat's painting come to life before one's eyes, spilling out the little vignettes which brought them to that park on those various Sunday's, and then are carefully placed into the finished work by the artist himself.
Being a Sondheim subject, of course, it is no surprise that the artist had little life outside his art.
He died at 31 having sold nothing and lost the only woman he loved, his appropriately-named mistress, Dot.
The theme is worthy of Ibsen and might have matched the Master Builder had not the rather superfluous second act attempted to bring us up to date and marry the past with the present in an awkward postscript.
Nonetheless, the concept is more than worthy of its Pulitzer Prize. The music, like the painting, comes in sharp, precise points with sound replacing colour.
And if nothing of this fires your imagination or thrills your admiration as it does mine, then go to see the iridescent Maria Friedman give glorious life to Dot, the downtrodden, semi-literate mistress Seurat immortalised with giant perspective in the forefront of his painting. Philip Quast, Nyree dawn Porter and Sheila Ballantine also bring their own distinction to Steven Pimlott's masterly production.
A collector's item worthy of the National.
© Associated Newspapers Ltd
