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It is always maddening to have critics comparing something current and available with something distant in time and space - especially if they are going to say how much better what you cannot see was than what you can. So, let us get the New York version of Stephen Sondheim's last-but-one Sunday in the Park with George, out of the way as quickly as possible. I do not really remember any of the performances individually - it was the ensemble which counted - so I cannot compare those players with these at the Lyttelton. I do remember that the first half seemed much more tense and electric in New York; I also remember that the second half, generally judged an anti-climax, looked just that way in New York, and does not really seem so here. So, swings and roundabouts, much of a muchness.
The bigger question, of course, is the quality of the show itself. Sondheim seems these days inevitably to have spectators lined up in opposing camps: those that worship everything he does, and those that just cannot see the point of any of it, regarding it as tuneless and over-intellectualized. Anyone who has taken the anti view in the past is not going to change his/her mind here: though from the number of comments on the discordance of the score there must be more people left who regard Lilac Time as the height of musical experimentation than one would think possible. On the other hand, even appreciating the distinction and individuality of Sondheim's music (as well as the lyrics, that is) does not necessarily mean that one can see no weaknesses. For me the score of Sunday in the Park with George is beautiful, but excessively haunted with the ghosts of Sondheim past. Ever since Company Sondheim seems to have been deliberately narrowing his range, expunging 'Broadway' and relying increasingly on the elegant variation of phrasing and mood within a small compass more characteristic of modern chamber opera. The failure of Merrily We Roll Along, a return to variety, must have confirmed him in his purpose. But it is a pity that one keeps feeling in George that continue one more phrase at any point and you would be in the middle of Follies or Little Night Music or Sweeney Todd.
Performances. Well, more distinct than before, for good or ill. The first-night audience seems to have come out raving about Maria Friedman as Seurat's ill-used model/mistress during the painting of La Grande Jatte (which is the subject of the whole show, one way and another). They do not seem to have gone much on Philip Quast as Seurat. The second night reversed such judgements. Philip Quast came over as authoritatively sharp and obsessed in the first half, and as his (beardless) great-grandson in the second half lustily and charmed the birds off the trees. Maria Friedman, on the other hand, hardly carried across the footlights, and left one all too conscious of how much she looks and sounds like Bernadette Peters. For the rest, it was nice to see Gary Raymond in a musical again, and the others were fine, an occasional ineffectual wrestle with being American in the second half apart.
And should the National be doing this sort of thing at all? Presumably if it had been regarded as more commercial they would not have got the chance, and it hardly comes by any standards in to the catchpenny category of Jean Seberg or Carrie. The show is musically serious, and serious in what it is about: the making of art. True, James Lapine's book does have elements of an odd naivety: Seurat was in fact a much more curious and contradictory character than this stereotype of artistic self-centredness, and one does wonder why anyone in the 1880s Paris should think it a sure sign of madness that an artist is seen sketching monkeys in a zoo. However, the show looks pretty, sounds good, and is sufficiently off-beat to hold the attention without challenging a National Theatre audience too far. What more could one ask? And if the purely musical competition is Aspect of Love or Miss Saigon, then can anyone seriously think there is any contest?
© Plays International
