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The was an audible 'Ooh er' of confounded expectation as the curtain rose on Seven Pimlott's production of this Stephen Sondheim/James Lapine musical centred on the life of Georges Seurat's, and more especially his famous pointillist painting Sunday on the Island of La Grande Jatte. It wasn't there. Nor for that matter is anything else when the curtain rises. Yet the sight of the huge stage as a brightly lit white box - like looking into a giant empty TV hewn in ice - is itself pretty impressive. And this is the empty canvas, rendered in 3-D, that Georges is about to paint, to people and make into the familiar masterpiece throughout the first act.
This is a veritable coup de théâtre, the more impressive because of its slow metamorphosis before our eyes, and owes as much to designer Tom Cairns as the music/lyrics and book due. But Sondheim is no slouch and is responsible here not just for a collection of songs, but for encapsulating the whole within a structure of ideas and meditations on the nature of art and its influence on life. He is successful both in this and in presenting Seurat as an obsessive artist, sacrificing personal life to his easel, but to this extent the show suffers the same fate, with ideas bustling in the foreground to the almost total exclusion of any emotion. It's more like following a line of reasoning than being bathed in emotive music.
Yet for all its contrivance the experience is never less than engrossing and is lightened with intelligent humour. Of the picture's two soldiers one is a cardboard cut-out carried by the other, the burly pipe-smoking worker has a running battle with the demure little girl in white, and Dot, Seurat's mistress in the foreground, conceives and gives birth to a daughter during the painting's composition. But finally, the artist, singing or the need of "Order, design, tension, balance and harmony" brings the fragmented chaos to a composed perfection. Like the show.
The much shorter second half serves the purpose of juxtaposition. Georges's artist great-grandson George lives in modern New York creating performance art with a Chromolume (power cuts permitting). We see that where old Georges could order people within a picture frame, young George's real talent is in ordering the commercial backing for his transient art. Both men manipulate others, but one figuratively to create art, the other actually to raise sponsorship. It ends with young George in La Grande Jatte reawakened to art's purpose by an apparition of Dot, despite modern Paris towering in the background, having left only a tree of the original landscape.
Philip Quast and Maria Friedman play the leads with involving intensity. Whether or not audiences will appreciate a musical that has you scratching your head rather than drying your eyes is still to be seen.
