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Hugo Williams on an artless musical
Advertisers will often try to make a brand of cigarettes more attractive by placing it in the company of something famous, valuable or sexy, such as cowboys, or pieces of gold. Musicals tend to do the same Cats is said to have something to do with Eliot. West Side Story and Kiss Me Kate were Shakespeare. Some other thing bagged Jesus Christ. Buddha is doubtless on its way.
Sunday in the Park with George, Stephen Sondheim operetta at the Lyttelton, seeks our advance approval by associating itself with a great painting, the scene by Georges Seurat, the one with a monkey in the foreground. If nothing else, the result is a superb series of differently organised tableaux vivants of the painting, courtesy of the National's design department, led by Tom Cairns. What goes on around this expensive reproduction of an accepted masterpiece, those added elements of sugar and colouring by Sondheim, are considerably less interesting.
To say that you don't exactly come out of Sunday in The Park with George whistling the tunes is to put it mildly, and if the actors weren't actually making up the dud lines, perhaps they should have been.
The tuneless musical burbling would have mattered less if the writing team had found a more charismatic central character. The most interesting things Georges Seurat did were to have lunch with his mother every Sunday and die suddenly at the age of 31. He did, however, have a mistress, who might have had a baby by him, so that at least is in the plot. Apparently he was too occupied with his work to pay much attention to her (her name is "Dot" - because he's a pointillist!) so she goes off to America with a baker.
Perhaps this baby grows up in the States, gets married and one of her grandchildren turns out to be a performance artist called George. But George isn't satisfied by his artistic achievements (any more than we are) and goes looking for his roots. The park by the river, immortalised by his ancestor, is now ruined by tower blocks, but peopled with the original characters. "Dot" comes back and inspires him to go on with his art. The End.
The visual aspect of this long, forced and boring musical is never short of dazzling. To compare it, as the programme does, with "the culturally resonant comic theatre of Bennett, Stoppard and Frayn" is sheer nonsense. But then that's cigarette advertising for you
© Sunday Correspondent
