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Steven Pimlott's production of Sunday in the Park with George at the Lyttelton is startlingly different from the version I saw at New York's Booth Theatre five years ago: visually bolder, physically bigger, emotionally a little less charged. But Stephen Sondheim's music and lyrics and James Lapine's book retain their extraordinary wit and audacity: this is a genuine musical of ideas rather than simply a sumptuous divertissement.
It is built around the work of Seurat, a painter who applied rigorous analytical reason to art, and in particular his composition of Sunday on the Island of La Grande Jatte. The first half shows the obsessive, pioneering Seurat working on the separate figures in his canvas, sacrificing his mistress, Dot, to his work and finally bringing the elements in the picture together in a miracle of composition and design.
By the second act we have moved on a century. Seurat's great-grandson is also an artist but a corporation-pleasing technocrat who works with a machine called a Chromolume (Seurat originally called himself a "chromo-luminarist"). But, revisiting La Grand Jatte, he encounters his great-grandfather's ghostly mistress and through her re-discovers the infinite joys and possibilities of art.
That is the broad outline of a musical that subordinates conventional narrative to teeming ideas; but three particular concepts thread their way through this amazingly rich work. It is the recurrent theme, explored by everyone from Ibsen and Chekhov to Ayckbourn, of art versus life. The point is not simply that George loses Dot to a compliant baker but that personal relationships are suspended in the ecstasy of creation. The idea is articulated superbly in the number 'Finishing The Hat', where George explains "How you watch the rest of the world from a window" while losing your identity in the mastery of detail.
But this is also a musical about the changing role of the artist: while Seurat is a private reclusive visionary his great-grandson is a sponsor-seeking, hi-tech collaborator who puts the names of his contributors on the side of his chromolume. I suspect the contrast is oversharp (artists have always needed patrons) but Sondheim's big, second-act number 'Putting It Together', is a classic and highly topical statement about the kow-towing process of fund-raising: as the younger George punningly puts it, "First of all you need a good foundation. Otherwise it's risky from the start."
The third and most profound theme is the Shakespearean one of nature versus nurture: the tension between the world as it is and our urge to re-order it. It comes out in 'Beautiful', a haunting song shared between Seurat and his mother that is the intellectual lynchpin of the show. She wistfully mourns transience and change: he tells her "What the eye arranges is what is beautiful." You realise the whole thrust of the first half comes from seeing Seurat re-order reality and finally arrange the Sunday idlers into an harmonious composition: a gesture cynically echoed in the second act when George is busy fixing introductions and supplying drinks.
But this is also a deeply personal show about the joys and the cost of creation; and what is startling about Sondheim's score is the way it corresponds to Seurat's own visual style. His pointilliste method is perfectly matched by the stabbing, jabbing, staccato music of 'Colour and Light'. But Sondheim also uses what he calls "a rolling vamp" for 'Sunday' which movingly echoes the finished picture's majesty of colour and design.
This is the one point at which Mr Pimlott's production induces tears. But what is impressive is the way he and his partners, designer Tom Cairns and lighting-man Wolfgang Gobbel, have come up with a clean, clear visual concept different in many points from the New York original. The show begins and ends in a picture-framed arctic-white box. By a dazzling trick of perspective, the second act starts with the figures of La Grande Jatte huddled together in an elevated, framed canvas. And where on Broadway the museum-scene was dominated by a laser-beam light-show it here becomes a satire on Robert Wilson-style performance-art: highly relevant since that too is about order, control and arranging bodies in space.
It is not a flawless show (thematic density cannot always make up for lack of narrative tension) but the two acts seem much more tightly integrated than they did in New York. The two lead roles are also superbly played. Philip Quast as the two Georges sharply contrasts the older one's monastic fervour with the younger one's gregarious emptiness and projects the words with clarity, elegance and style. Maria Friedman, as both Dot and her 98-year-old daughter Marie, also confirms she is an authentic star: she brings an earthy comedy to the chafing restrictions of Dot's existence, sings with note-true poignancy and has the gift of what Stanislavski called "public solitude." In a large cast, Gary Raymond also shines out as both a velvet-smooth rival to Seurat and as a typical money-seeking modern museum-director. Jeremy Sams in the pit also ensures a balance between orchestral and vocal sound.
Sunday in the Park makes you work. But it demands and re-pays the closest attention since it is a genuine pathfinder that proves the musical can not only deal with ideas but illuminate the mystery of creation itself.
© Guardian Newspapers Ltd.
