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The talent and personality of an artist of stature are the most difficult things to bring off in the theatre, and this is particularly the case in a musical. But Stephen Sondheim, one of whose main offstage interests is creating and solving puzzles, has just about managed it in his latest musical to be seen here, though he has the advantage of taking as his subject Georges Seurat, an artist so obsessed with his own approach to painting - he was the creator of pointillism - that he had no personal life, was little-known by his fellow artists and died at the age of 32.
Why, one might ask, should this be an advantage? Because it enables Sondheim to concentrate on the nature of Seurat's art and to focus our attention on the making of one of his greatest pictures, ‘Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte’. The characters are Seurat himself, virtually oblivious to everything around him, especially his model and mistress Dot, his mother and the people in the park, another artist, Jules, and the assorted loungers and passers-by, all stunningly conveyed and realised in Tom Cairns' series of settings.
In the second act Sondheim and his book-writer James Lapine switch to the nature of art itself, discussed through the character of Seurat's great-grandson, a fashionable creator of multi-media events, pretentious and empty, who, dissatisfied with his particular art, returns from New York to Paris, where he encounters the ghost of Dot, his great-grandmother, who has instinctively learned of Seurat's vision perhaps because of the artist's neglect of her, which permitted to escape to America with a baker and Seurat's baby, who also appears, now aged 98, in the gallery scene, played superbly by the same actress as Dot, the excellent Maria Friedman.
Though some of Sondheim's music and lyrics have a familiar ring - one song 'Putting It Together', his version of a "catalogue" number, might almost have been taken from Company - he has devised what might almost be called pointillist music, little darting shafts of colour and light, which alone displays his ability as the outstanding musicals composer of out time, and his director, Steven Pimlott, has followed him every step of the way to bring us, with Cairns, a series of ravishing tableaux.
Philip Quast, as George, is one of the most notable singing actors to come along in years, making us understand that a personality thought enigmatic is actually only single-minded, a difficult role, both musically and dramatically, and there is a splendid sense of ensemble from the remainder of the large cast.
© The Stage Newspaper Limited
