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Rhoda Koenig on Stephen Sondheim's musical portrait of Georges Seurat.
To paraphrase Dorothy Parker, the love affair between Stephen Sondheim and Stephen Sondheim is one of the prettiest in the musical theatre. When he began writing Sunday in the Park with George, Sondheim says, he was "disheartened by the Broadway theatre community's naked hatred" for his recent shows, in particular Merrily We Roll Along. "You could feel the hostility in the audience at that production, and my own theory is that people resented us for doing maverick work, but not having to starve to do it." As someone who had no connection with the Broadway theatre community and was in the audience at that production, I have to say that any hostility I felt arose from having my time wasted by an inane musical that differentiated its characters so little they had to wear T-shirts printed with their names. Had I known the size of Sondheim's bank account, I would not have been more or less favourably disposed.
Sunday in the Park with George is, perhaps not coincidentally, a show about a man who, though a genius, is disliked and - yes - misunderstood. Standing next to an enormous white frame waiting to be filled with life that has to be manipulated, weeded, and cut down to size, George (as he is here) Seurat tells us he wants to "bring order to the whole through design." Is he an artist or just a control freak? With Sondheim painting the portrait, there is little doubt about what's intended, but in sacrificing action and character to concepts (the show-business version of ideas), he has come up with a vapid show that is both bitter and twee.
Sondheim says that he and his collaborator were drawn to the idea of setting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte to music because none of the people in it was looking at any of the others; they were inspired to invent identities and relationships for the mysterious promenaders. But the figures in the musical landscape don't become fully-fledged characters. Tags are hung on them - adulterer, navvy, brat - but, once a few lines establish the label, nothing happens. They remain as two-dimensional as the cut-out friend a soldier strolls around with, and whom the two girls he picks up treat as simply a quiet type. Nor are the main characters drawn in any more detail. George works on his pointilliste painting ("Red, red, orange," he sings. "Blue, blue, blue, green,") while his mistress, Dot, (get it?), tries to make him notice her, acknowledging that, though artists are bizarre and cold "I like that in a man." Finally, the pregnant Dot, leaves for America, and George, who scarcely notices, finishes his picture, moving a combination of living and cardboard figures into place. In Act II, his great-grandson, George, is running out of inspiration for his 'chromolume', one of which is shown - a performance in which dancers strike attitudes and wave coloured rods and illuminated spheres. He travels to the real La Grande Jatte, where the spirit of Dot, speaking as if to the first George, urge him not to feel isolated and sterile ("You gave me so much") and sends him back, reborn, to his balls and sticks.
Sunday in the Park with George is the kind of show that sounds pretty deep when you read about it, providing, as it does, prime fodder for rambling Sunday-in-the-papers-with-the-critics pieces ("What is art and what is reality? Is the permanent more real than the transitory? Is the frame more real than the picture?" mused John Peter in The Sunday Times, to which, after much consideration, I can only reply, "Gee, I dunno"). When you hear the terms in which this argument is conducted, however, it's somewhat less impressive - choppy babyish assertions and platitudes, giving way at the end to transcendental mush (Dot advises, "Anything you do/Let it come from you/Then it will be new"). As for wit, how about an American tourist thinking the French masculine form of direct address is pronounced 'masseur'? If that doesn't grab you, there's the hilarious scene in which George, chatting up a dog, confides, "This week has been r-r-r-ough!".
The burden of Sunday in the Park with George is that "art isn't easy" (tell it to the coal miners, Steve) and, implicitly, that success in art absolves you from being judged in merely human terms. (Also that women, masochistic ninnies that they are, will be happy for you to love them and leave them, if you're sufficiently great.) For all that Sondheim belabours his innovation, this show, with its cheerless dot-dot-dot score, is hopelessly regressive, down to its expectation that we will be thrilled by the Victorian entertainment of living pictures. Its philosophy is infantile in its egoism, in its elevation of the artist as an Olympian emotional cripple. Sure, great artists have, famously, been shits, but their life stories give us the ironic contrast between their art and their work, the tragedy of a love that can find expression only in imaginary relationships. In this hymn to alienation, neither Sondheim's nor Seurat's work provides that tension-filled juxtaposition. The very form of the painter's work - tiny points of colour that are supposed to coalesce in the eye but, in fact, remain distinct - is itself a chilling statement of eternal apartness. At least, however, Seurat's promenaders don't whine. Sondheim surrounds George with prissy bourgeoises, clubby painters, and dense art groupies to emphasise his noble struggle, but the artist who defends himself has a fool for an advocate. "Art isn't easy" is not the plea of artists, but of interior decorators.
© Punch Ltd.
