SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE at Pasadena Playhouse
What a nerve-racking experience it must have been bringing Act One of the lategreat Stephen Sondheim’s brilliant but hardly musical theatre formulaic Sunday in the Park with George to a small but scrappy off-Broadway playhouse for its first viewing in 1983.
That first courageously audacious peek at the first act of the groundbreaking classic ran for a mere 25 performances back then at Playwrights Horizons, only tenuously adding a still workshopping Act Two for the final three shows.
With the encouragement and praise of Leonard Bernstein and other American theatre luminaries, Sondheim and his longtime collaborator, director James Lapine, brought Sunday in the Park to Broadway’s majestic Booth Theatre the following April and, although still unsure of its success and stung by mixed reviews from the critics, the musical went on to win two Tony Awards (albeit only for design); eight New York Drama Desk Awards, including Outstanding Musical, Sondheim’s lyrics, and Lapine’s book and direction; and finally the ultimate honor: the Pulitzer Prize for Drama—one of only 10 musicals in history to be so honored.
A lot was at stake for Sondheim, who after the crushing failure of his Merrily We Roll Along in 1981 had announced to the world he was done with musical theatre.
It was Lapine who persuaded him to change his mind after the two had found inspiration anew from viewing George Seurat’s sweeping century-old neoimpressionist masterpiece A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, which magnificently commands an entire gallery wall at the Art Institute of Chicago where it has been on view since 1924.
Sondheim and Lapine returned to the museum several days in a row to study the painting, which introduced Seurat’s invention of pointillism to a then-skeptical art world. Such obsessive behavior sparked by A Sunday Afternoon is a concept I personally understand only too well—but more on that later. Maybe.
As they sat enthralled by the familiar group of working-class citizens caught in a moment of time enjoying the view from across the Seine from a humble and hardly fashionable bucolic park on the outskirts of Paris that provided respite from the urban madness of the City of Lights, they wondered just who the people portrayed were and fantasized about the lives they lived before the artist gave them such celebrated artistic mortality.
Lapine commented aloud that the only thing missing from the stiff-backed Parisians frozen in time on Seurat’s canvas was an image of the creator himself—and soon the pair was collaborating on a fictionalized history of the backstory featuring the artist as the leading character and, surely inspired by the recent failure and struggles of Sondheim himself, breathed life into a piece that forever changed the future of musical theatre.
Sunday in the Park is nowhere near the sweet and simple entertainment previously offered by works contemplating corn as high as an elephant’s eye or real good clambakes. The imagined lifestyle and personal demons haunting any artist as he or she navigates the murky waters of commercial success, of their place on their community, of the emotional connection between creation and appreciation, are all poetically explored without ever considering how to solve a problem like Maria.
Thankfully, the venerable Pasadena Playhouse, my alma mater from it long run as a college of the theatre arts and our State Theatre of California since 1937, has initiated a season-long tribute to Sondheim, who left us in 2021 after over six decades of turning the world of musical theatre on its proverbial ear.
This production inaugurates that effort spectacularly with a full production of the highly acclaimed limited-run 2017 New York revival brilliantly directed by Lapine’s niece Sarna Lapine and starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford as Seurat and his fictional mistress Dot, roles that made even bigger stars of the already celebrated Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters when the show first debuted.
What Pasadena Playhouse and Miss Lapine have managed to create here is an enormously well-appointed effort featuring a large and gifted cast, Alison Solomon’s smoothly fluid choreography, and exquisite production designs including Clint Ramos’ glorious costuming and Tal Yarden’s impressive projections depicting gigantic renderings of Seurat’s canvas in various stages of completion. Every aspect is further enhanced by a glorious 14-piece orchestra under the award-worthy leadership of orchestrator and musical director Andy Einhorn.
It’s hard to imagine, in this era where the traditionally struggling world of live theatre is so drastically grappling with post-pandemic apathy, that the Playhouse has pulled off this massive production when not even Broadway productions these austere days manage this kind of stateliness.
At the end of the first act, while the ensemble sings the triumphant “Sunday” as they assume the positions and costuming of the figures in Seurat’s painting, great art inventively honors great art and the result is electrifying. Yet, although I never saw the original production except as it was filmed on video in 1986 and presented on TV’s American Playhouse, every other mounting I have seen over the years featured some of the figures in the classic tableaux represented by cardboard cutouts carried onto the stage and set in place.
In Sarna Lapine’s staging, each of the figures is assumed by living, breathing actors—a 22-person troupe of veteran performers all with the voices approved by the gods. The effect is staggering and the emotion it evokes literally brings tears to the eyes of even the most hardened world-weary theatregoer—including yours truly.
As the title character who is seldom offstage during the two-and-a-half hour run time, former Good Wife series regular Graham Phillips is a major revelation, completely unrecognizable to this reviewer who only was familiar with him as put-together ivy-leaguer Nick in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the Geffen last season. Graham is possessed of a commanding voice that easily rivals Patinkin’s—and that’s saying a lot.
His performance is appropriately the heart of the production both as Seurat and in the second act as his great-grandson namesake also slammed by the insecurities and inequities of a career as an artist. As the engineer of his electronic art installations tells him as he quits live performance to return to his former job at NASA, "This work is too stressful."
Phillips' leading lady is played by the clearly talented Krystina Alabado, who brings a brand new but not for me always successful take to the role of Dot. She is less comedic, more serious as she wears her troubles on her sleeve rather than showing us how she represses them, and above all without the coquettish throw of the head and period cabaret hall swagger that in the past has given the character her edge of streetwise survivor.
Along with a bit of whimsy and geriatric puckishness that has always characterized the role of Marie, Dot’s 98-year-old granddaughter who has inherited her mother’s strength and resilience and is portrayed by the same actress, Alabado doesn’t quite match the passion Phillips emotes—and her well-trained theatrical emphasis on hitting her final consonants gets in the way of what the character could be.
The ensemble is populated by performers whose collective gratitude at being given the opportunity to honor the genius of Sondheim is palpable, with particular mention of the delightfully tongue-in-cheek performances of Alexandra Melrose and Jimmy Smagula as a pair of stateside tourists who prove the term Ugly American wasn’t necessarily coined in modern times, Jennie Greenberry as a nurse whose towering Mahalia Jackson-esque voice rings like a bell over all others in the group numbers, and Emily Tyra as a 19th-century castmember of The Real Housewives of Paris, France.
Liz Larsen is also a standout as George’s crusty mother, bringing great pathos to the haunting balled “Beautiful” as she laments all the changes going on around her in the name of progress, including the clearing of a lovely old grove of mature trees to build “towers”—in this case, a particularly distinctive one being erected by Gustave Eiffel.
Even with a production as reverent and praiseworthy as this in almost every precision detail, from the staging and design to the performances by actors obviously enthralled interpreting the complex melodies and uniquely insightful lyrics of a master, and with the most sincere gratitude to Pasadena Playhouse for making such an auspicious event (and season) happen, everything is eclipsed by Sondheim’s parnassian meditation on the painful challenges and the loneliness of creating art in a society that never seems to understand nor appreciate the personal cost of doing so.
Children and art, we’re told on Sunday in the Park, are all we have to leave behind us. There’s no doubt Sondheim wrote his finest and most elaborate score while questioning his own journey as an artist, gamely offering a rationale for his own sacrifices he hoped sounded logical enough to eventually be recognized as truths.
Remember I mentioned earlier my personal connection to this pioneering musical? As a very young boy I would accompany my mother while she was teaching classes at the Art Institute and later performing at the adjacent Goodman Theatre. While she worked, when I wasn’t sitting under my monumental bronze lion, one of the majestic pair that guard the entrance of the great museum (a flippant gift from her to me once that at my young age I chose to take quite seriously), I would wander throughout the halls of worldclass art.
Wherever I roamed in the historic 1893 Beaux Arts structure, I always ended up sitting quietly for hours and hours on the cold marble bench placed directly in front of A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, appreciating the many minuscule points of color that, like Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s A Sunday in the Park with George, joined together "bit by bit" to make a whole.
That experience sparked my imagination and changed the very direction of my life, giving me courage to go on when someone as steadfast and unshakable as George Seurat could give difficult birth to such an enduring work of art despite that fact that he died at age 31 having never sold a painting in his life.
My own journey, as with any artist or person dedicated to the creation and appreciation of art beyond all else, has not always been an easy one. Still, a large part of my decision to keep going from early on has always been the magical soul-stirring memory of an unforgettable work of art initially constructed in a vacuum that, despite being misunderstood and faced with indifference in its time, will move and inspire generations to come for as long as our species still exists on our fragile planet.
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