Stephen Sondheim’s Pulitzer Prize-winning musical “Sunday in the Park with George” is back on Broadway in a critically endorsed revival that features a strong cast of singer-actors and state-of-the-art video projections.
The score includes several of Sondheim’s most frequently performed tunes — “Putting It Together,” “Children and Art” and “Finishing the Hat,” among them — but, for me, it remains the same chilly piece of theatre it was when I saw the original production in 1984.
With only a couple of exceptions — “A Little Night Music” and “Sweeney Todd” — the Sondheim music and lyrics have always been superior to the material around them. Indeed, the brilliant songwriting too often points up the inadequacy of the shows for which they were written.
“Anyone Can Whistle,” “Company,” “Follies,” and “Merrily We Roll Along” have fantastic song scores, but Sondheim labored under the handicap of storylines that were not at his high level of artistry.
The non-profit Roundabout Theatre Company has imported their revival of “Sunday in the Park with George” from London, where it debuted at The Menier Chocolate Factory before moving into the West End.
The technology-heavy show received several Olivier Awards — the London theatre’s equivalent of the Tony — including two prizes for the stars, Daniel Evans and Jenna Russell, who are heading up a fine new company of American actors on Broadway.
The show was Sondheim’s first collaboration with writer-director James Lapine. They built most of the first act on a clever but ultimately shallow premise: Who were all those people George Seurat included in his giant painting, “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte”?
As the George character sketches and sings we get little vignettes about the lives of “An Old Lady,” “A Boatman,” “A Soldier” and the other figures in the painting. We also meet the only other major character in the show, George’s mistress Dot, who gets pregnant by the painter but leaves him for a baker with big plans in the United States.
Sondheim seems to be venting his own frustration with the critics of the 1970s and early ’80s in scenes showing Seurat being harshly judged by the reviewers of his time. When he wrote this score, the lyricist and composer was coming off the flop of “Merrily We Roll Along” and the break-up of his long artistic collaboration with director Harold Prince, so the bitter tone is understandable, but the artistic establishment-baiting is a little too facile as drama.
It is such a film and theatre bio-drama cliché to have boobish contemporaries of George Seurat and Mozart and Van Gogh throw stones at the artists’ work (In “Sunday in the Park…” Sondheim and Lapine have too many moments built around the notion, “If those dolts only knew George’s painting would go on to be hailed as a masterpiece all over the world!”).
Daniel Evans and Jenna Russell sing the hell out of Sondheim’s terrific songs, and the production values are glorious, but the play around the music still feels thin and distant to me.
