"Sunday in the Park' at the Arden (1st review)

Take a blank white canvas and create your life. Make art. Then connect the dots between your life and your art.

It's not a simple children's game but a lifetime pursuit involving many sketches and crooked lines. The tension between the two, the constant struggle to realize a personal and professional vision so that the end result is a life of balance and harmony is the theme of Sunday in the Park With George, Stephen Sondheim's most personal work.

The 1985 Pulitzer Prize-winning musical is literally staged around George Seurat's famous pointillist oil painting, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte, which he finished in 1884, seven years before he died at the age of 31. At the time, this iconoclastic work, along with his Bathers at Asnières (which makes a brief appearance in the show) was greeted with derision.

The Arden's current production pulls out all the stops: a 15-piece orchestra plays Sondheim's lush music while sophisticated sound and light effects enhance the visual splendor of the play. A first-rate cast, led by Jeffrey Coon as Georges/George and Kristine Fraelich as Dot/Marie, costumed exquisitely in period dress, figuratively and metaphorically step in and out of the painting as they give voice to the brilliant lyrics.

No banal couplets

No one today writes lyrics like Sondheim. His intelligent, witty and original words illuminate the book, in this case, written by Sondheim's longtime collaborator James Lapine. You won't hear a predictable or banal rhymed couplet in two hours. Of all the show's great songs, is there any more stirring and powerful than "Sunday"? Not unless it's "Move On."

The musical begins with sketch after charcoal sketch of trees, people and dogs as Seurat works intensely on a grassy shore by the Seine, depicting bourgeois strollers taking the air in their Sunday best. It's hot outside, and the artist's mistress and model Dot fidgets as he attempts to draw her.

"Concentrate," he admonishes— another theme in the story. You must concentrate to capture the moment; this is the artist's mission.

At the end of Act I, the figures on the stage are in place and the canvas behind them is complete. Seurat has connected the dots in his artwork so that the points of color form the lovely scene we know so well today. What's missing, however, is Dot, who leaves Georges for an ordinary man whose passion is directed toward her rather than his work.

Intermission grumbling

During intermission, I heard some restroom grumbling from a few women who declared they were bored and tired. "Too arty for me," pronounced one upon hearing that I was looking forward to Act II.

Unlike some Sondheim fans, I don't find the second act any less engaging than the first. When we take our seats, a century has passed and we are now in Sondheim's America. Jeffrey Coon reappears as modern-day George, the great-grandson of the famous artist, while Fraelich plays his aged grandmother, Marie, who is reminiscing about her life. While she moves backward in time, George moves forward— constantly inventing new forms, in order to capture the art market.

His "Chromolume No. 7," which he classifies as a kind of sculpture, sends out sparkling showers of color. Thanks to the show's innovative light and sound designer, Jorge Cousineau, it's a breathtaking spectacle.

By contrast, when I saw the Roundabout Theater revival two years ago in New York, George's chromolume was ugly and sterile, an object of mockery by art critics. On the basis of this evidence, I presumed the point was that although Seurat's descendant was related by blood, he lacked his great-grandfather's heart. Cousineau's spectacular Chromolume suggests a new interpretation: Maybe the point is that in every generation, the avant-garde artist is often unappreciated until after his death. As Dot tells George: "Stop worrying if your vision/ Is new. /Let others make that decision--/ They usually do./ You keep moving on."♦


To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.