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The dots, as it were, are all in place but they don’t fuse into a harmonious whole in the British première of Sunday in the Park with George, Stephen Sondheim’s 1985 Pulitzer Prize-winning apololgia pro sua arte. On Broadway, the show about the creative and emotional travails of Georges Seurat played as Sondheim’s cathartic expression of his own thoughts about the blocked artist who submerges human feeling in his work, as the composer himself is often said to have done. Imaginatively staged by librettist James Lapine and passionaley sung by Mandy Patinkin as Seurat and Bernadette Peters as his mistress Dot, the musical was then both rarefied and affecting, cerebral and devastating.
Steven Pimlott’s London staging understands the work conceptually but doesn’t connect it with an audience, an ironic flaw in a show that, as Seurat tells us repeatedly, is precisely about “connection”. The first act shows Philip Quast’s bearded Seurat putting together his master work, “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte”, over a series of Sundays in the mid-1880s. While Seurat strives for the “tension” and “balance” essential to his work, James Lapine’s book brings to life the motley strolling assemblage who will be frozen on canvas in time for Sondheim’s glorious first act finale, ‘Sunday’.
The characters, a societal cross-section, include another artist and his wife; a gauche American couple; a brusque boatman; and Seurat’s mother and her nurse. But the only fully dramatized one is Dot (Maria Friedman), who yearns for her share of her lover’s attention only to shift affections to Louis the baker, with whom she has a child and, as the act closes, is preparing to leave for America.
The second act takes place 100 years later, by which point the canvas is up on the wall, its poses forever fixed. The vagaries of permanence allow for the evening’s one true showstopper, ‘It’s Hot Up Here’, delivered with much more wit and panache than it had on Broadway. (Tom Cairns’ set aids the number immeasurably, actually framing the characters on a gallery wall.) The act’s catalyst is Seurat’s (fictional) great-grandson George, a New York-based performance artist struggling to find his distinctie voice amid the imposing legacy of his great grandfather’s oeuvre and the gross attitudinizing of the New York art market.
This Seurat makes ‘chromolumes’, the representation of which prove highly problematic. In Broadway, the seond act divided viewers who were genuinely intrigued by the laser show which young George unveils and those who found the scene a parodic con. In London, such controversy is unlikely, since Martin Duncan’s performance piece is so bad that it mangles the point of the show. After all, if we don’t feel that this Georg’s vision is worth fighting for – that there is indeed a talent struggling to break free – then we have no stake in the epiphany which he arrives at upon returning to La Grande Jatte and encountering Dot’s ghost. Duncan’s Euro-pastiche violates, too Sondheim’s lyrics about George’s art: “They twinkle and shimmer and buzz”, George’s grandmother Marie (Friedman again) sings in the musical’s most haunting number, ‘Children and Art.’ That Duncan’s concept does non of those things may make audiences wonder what Marie is talking about – that is, if they’re not already left pondering her assertion, sung to her late mother Dot, that , “Mama, you’d like them (George’s creations)/Mama, they’re good.”
The cast is merely adequate when it should really twinkle and buzz. One exception throughout is the notable Ms Friedman, who makes Dot a stubborn and impetuous creation distinct from the full-throated muse offered by Bernadette Peters. Philip Quast sounds uncannily like Patinkin, but he’s not a very expansive performer, and his acting too often renders opaque his emotional state at the time; he mistakes inexpressiveness for self absorption. In supporting roles, Sheila Ballantine’s quavery soprano ruined the press night impact of Sondheim’s aptly titled number ‘Beautiful’ (the song certainly is) and Nyree Dawn Porter hadn’t yet tapped the comic potential of her second-act role as New York sophisticate Naomi Eisen.
Many thanks to Emma for providing this review
© Plays & Players
