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Michael Coveney on a beautiful musical lacking in passion
Although it is big, measuring around seven foot by 10 foot, I remember being disappointed in the size of Seurat's Grande Jatte painting in the Chicago Art Institute. Stephen Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George, which has begun an 11-week straight run in the National Theatre's Lyttelton auditorium, brings the frozen, hieratic figures to life, and to life-size.
On a dazzling white stage, the artist, George, fills in his canvas while losing his girlfriend model, Dot, to a baker who kneads her in bed. George is obsessive about trees and the colour of water and natural light, as hums as he paints, in little dabs and harmonically related burbles. An umbrella flies in, a soldier and his stiff cut-out doppelgänger exchange badinage with two girls, a rough boatman frightens a small child.
Dot accuses the blinkered George of having no mind, no heart, no life in his art. The same has been said of Sondheim. the not-very-startling conclusion is to pick up blank paper or canvas, battle on, and be true to your muse.
This comes at the end of a scrappy and awkwardly staged second act sequel set 100 years later, when George's great-grandson is using electric light in some pretentious performance art work in a gallery crowded with potential sponsors and hangers-on. Steven Pimlott's production, and James Lapine's libretto, would have been so much better if these sequences weren't so risibly daft.
For all its stop-start musical deliquescence, and intermittent vocal semblances of Seurat's pointillism, the show, seen in New York in 1984, is more precious than smart and does not begin to compare for musical guts and passion with the second Sondheim/Lapine collaboration, Into the Woods.
Ironically, for a musical primarily about the candescent properties of illumination, the production lost its lighting designer, Wolfgang Göbbel, a few days before opening. His, or somebody else's, work is still the best thing about the first act, with its mauve and red tinctures on the lake and sky, and deepening shadows under the trees.
The most magical touch in Tom Cairns's design is the insertion of Seurat's previous painting, Une Baignade, Asnières, into the Grande Jatte, with three little boys rushing into the shimmering blue and white plastic water.
Philip Quast and Maria Friedman have voices more than capable of meeting the peculiar and nebulous demands made of them, but as stage personalities they are a mismatch. This may be the point, or just another dot on the horizon.
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