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The idea that inspired London's latest Stephen Sondheim show, Sunday in the Park with George, at the National, is almost everywhere more beguiling than the show itself.
What songwriter Sondheim and his librettist collaborator, James Lapine, have done is to bring to stage life a famously innovative painting.
Then they use it to explore the act of artistic creation - as they strive for a comparably innovative musical.
Georges Seurat painted 'A Summer Sunday on La Grande Jatte' in the 1880s, a multi-layered panorama of Parisian life and a masterpiece of pointillism - the method of building a picture from minute dots of blending colours.
Dozens of people crowd this canvas, all of them staring impassively into space. Sondheim and Lapine give some of them dialogue, even songs, as Seurat himself (Philip Quast) obsessively sketches them from all angles until he is ready to put them in the picture.
There is some fascination in this process as the first and longer act progresses from blank canvas to complete tableau, but it's also, I'm afraid to say, rather boring.
The trouble is that while some aspects of the characters' lives are illuminated as the artist works, those lives are pretty humdrum and generate nothing identifiable as drama.
Nor is the fictional relationship between Seurat and his put-upon model-mistress very interesting either, though Sondheim's score is intriguingly intricate, the set is a pictorial delight, and Maria Friedman acts hauntingly and sings beautifully as the mistress - a girl almost inevitably named Dot.
A further trouble is that the second act is woefully anti-climactic, when the action moves to present-day New York and features the great-grandson of Seurat and Dot.
He's another artist called George who is having career problems - and no wonder, to judge by the sample of 'performance art' we get from him. Paralysingly pretentious, it is clearly intended as parody, but is no less trying for that.
© Associated Newspapers Ltd
