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Stephen Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George is as far removed from the standard modern musical (such as Phantom or Les Miz) as Hamlet is from The Mousetrap. Arguably this still leaves it with some way to go before becoming a respectable work of art, but Sondheim's enchanting piece gets there, and beyond. A work of art about a work of art, it pays homage to Georges Seurat's pointilliste masterpiece, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, in which, held forever in the shimmering dots of colour, Parisian promenaders take a tranquil stroll by the Seine, holding parasols aloft as if to protect themselves from the pastel-coloured fallout.
For purposes both mischievous and thoughtful, Sondheim and James Lapine (who wrote the book) disturb the painting's everlasting peace. In the show's first half, the picture is slowly and literally brought to life on stage by a droll mix of actors and coloured cut-outs. In impish, telekinetic obedience to the painter's revisional will, trees fly in and out, and dogs pop up and down on Tom Cairns's ravishing set. And, as George (stirringly sung by Philip Quast) sketches the figures on successive trips to the island, we see them in all their bickering, inglorious reality before art can finally manhandle them in to an illusion of harmony.
Sunday in the Park focuses on how we are at once the beneficiaries and victims of artists. Like some irreverent footnote to the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (and which other Broadway composers would have you reaching for comparisons with Keats), ‘It's Hot Up Here’, the tripping gavotte song which opens the second half, explores the perks and penalties of being stuck forever in a painting by a genius: the heat, the monotony, the odious company, eternally condemned to showing your less flattering profile or being without your specs. High up on the wall of the Chicago Art Institute looking like paralysed figures in some weird, jammed lift, Steven Pimlott's superbly characterful cast sneak mutinous looks of loathing at one another. But then again, if immortality-in-art is no picnic, it's not everyone, the song suggests, who has it.
In Lapine's fictionalised account, Seurat's main victim-beneficiary is Dot, the abandoned mistress, model and mother of his child, and always less a human being to him than an object over which light fell interestingly. The risks of cliché here are multiple and the book in particular with its wooden Hollywood idea of profundity ("I am not hiding behind my canvas - I am living in it") does not manage to dodge them. Always rescuing the situation, though, is Sondheim's brilliant story - a sort of pulsing musical morse, flecked and addictive, which as well as creating an aural equivalent of Seurat's dots, conveys in sound the compulsiveness and excitement of his visual experiment.
Added to this, in Pimlott's exquisite production, is Maria Friedman's marvellous performance as Dot, which manages to suggest (sometimes simultaneously) the earthy, grumpily frustrated girl who would rather be at the Folies and the sensitive young woman who has been spiritually awakened by the beauty of her lover's art. Rightly, this character's spirit presides as much as Seurat's over the second half which jumps to 1984 and dramatises the parallel obsession of their American great-grandson, a "light-sculptor" and mixed-media artist. Here, problems arise. The way present mirrors past is cleverly achieved - George I's peremptory manoeuvring of the figures around his painting is wryly duplicated in the politicking skill with which George II orchestrates a ghastly cocktail party of art world creeps. But the emotional temperature is much lower than in the first half and the musical's resolution feels spurious.
Nursing a creative block and sitting alone on the bleakly razed site of his forefather's painting, George II is visited by the spirit of Dot, muse-like and dressed as in the picture. Mistaking him for Seurat, she simultaneously invests him with the painter's creative courage and reconnects him with his past. Behind her, over the bare earth, the figures from La Grande Jatte troop in to pay him their inspirational respects. the objection is not just that George II is effectively accepting this gratitude under false pretences, but that the cause of their startling switch in attitude to their "creator" (particularly Dot's) from tragi-comic ambivalence to smiling, unalloyed homage is left under-dramatised and so feels morally unearned.
The ending is the only time in this exhilarating work that you hear the sound of phoney Broadway uplift, which involves a pretence of transcending difficulties while merely ignoring them.
© Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.
