Reviews 2009
Reviews 2009
✭✭✭✩✩
music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, book by James Lapine, directed by Alisa Palmer
Shaw Festival, Royal George Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
May 22-November 1, 2009
"A Chilly Day Out"
Stephen Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park with George” (1984) is a musical that demonstrates perfectly the advantages of the Shaw Festival’s expanded mandate. The first act depicts the painting of Georges-Pierre Seurat’s masterpiece “Un dimanche après-midi à l'Île de la Grande Jatte” (1884-86), while the second act, set one hundred years later, depicts the artistic trials of Seurat’s imaginary great-grandson named George. The musical thus represents in the most obvious fashion an incident from the period of Shaw’s lifetime (1856-1950) and a modern commentary on it. Modern works set in Shaw’s lifetime, of course, do the same thing implicitly, but “Sunday in the Park” demonstrates explicitly how we of today derive and obtain new inspiration from the works of the past.
The musical receives a production excellent in every way. Its impact depends mostly on how open a person is to its subject matter. The struggles of artists are always difficult to dramatize sympathetically whether on stage or on film because the artist’s primary struggle is internal while his external conflicts with those around are petty in comparison. A playwright can show a painter madly dabbing away, a sculptor chipping away or a composer scribbling notes, but these external shows give us no access to the often unconscious judgements the artist makes moment by moment. As we should all know by now, biography may offer a context but not an adequate explanation of how or why a an artist creates.
Bearing all this in mind, “Sunday in the Park” comes off as a musical very advanced in composition and dramaturgy but ultimately rather coldly cerebral. Admittedly, it seems odd to accuse a musical of being too intellectual when the vast majority of the genre, especially in recent years, are so mindless. Nevertheless, throughout “Sunday in the Park” one keeps admiring what Sondheim and book writer James Lapine are doing without ever becoming engaged in the story. What comes out quite clearly in this productions is James Lapine’s critique of the shabby way society treats artists in both the 19th and the 20th centuries. (For clarity, I will call the French Georges Seurat “G-P” and his American descendant “George”.) Inspired by scientific studies on colour and perception, G-P in the 1880s invents pointillism, a new mode of painting not with brushstrokes but by covering the canvas with tiny dots that the eye blends into colours and forms into shapes. Despite this, he is ridiculed by other painters, never sells a painting in his lifetime and dies at the age of 31. George in the 1980s also links science and art in inventing the “chromolume”, a blending of sculpture, sound and video art, but spends more of his time rounding up funding for his projects than creating them. The implication is that in the world of modern art it is safer for George to keep creating the same successful product than to try something new even though he senses a creative drought inside.
It is hard to imagine a better cast. Steven Sutcliffe conveys an innate sense of vulnerability to make G-P/George as sympathetic a character as possible. His voice which has deepened and taken on a heroic tinge perfectly suits his characters’ mixture of self-assertion and doubt. Julie Martell gives a fine portrayal of her two roles, first as G-P’s mistress and model Dot (based on Seurat’s mistress Madeleine Knobloch), second as his grandmother Marie. She makes Dot’s frustration with G-P’s total absorption in his work completely understandable as well as her subsequent decision when she becomes pregnant to marry another man for security. As Marie she avoids any clichés in portraying an elderly person and makes Marie an intelligent person you wish the creators would let you know better. It’s too bad she has to sing such a lovely and important song as “Children and Art” in the restrictions of her character as an old woman.
Sharry Flett as the Old Lady (Seurat’s mother) and the art critic Blair Daniels and Gabrielle Jones as the lady’s Nurse and museum board member Harriet Pawling always light up the stage. Indeed, Flett and Sutcliffe as mother and son deliver the most moving song of the evening in “Beautiful”. Jay Turvey and Patty Jamieson are suitably haughty as the rival artist Jules and his wife Yvonne in Act 1 and suitably nondescript as a museum director and a composer in Act 2. Kyle Blair and Melanie Phillipson as Franz and Frieda, German servants to Jules are comically hypocritical, proper and stiff in public even as they carry on affairs with their masters in private. Robin Evan Willis and Saccha Dennis are lots of fun as the two giggly Celestes. Neil Barclay and Melanie Janzen are excellent as two American tourists bored with Paris who cut their trip short to return home. Among the characters who do not occur in pairs, Kawa Ada makes a fine impression as a Soldier with his wooden double in Act 1 and as a snooty artist in Act 2, while Mark Uhre stands out as the angry Boatman of Act 1, whose cynicism helps undercut the work’s idealism of art, and as the seemingly gay Billy Webster of Act 2 who reacts to everything with disdain.
Judith Bowden’s design is beautiful although she is necessarily restricted in the choices in Act 1 in recreating, no matter how effectively, Seurat’s painting on stage. It is in Act 2 where her creativity has more play in an array of outré costumes for wear-all-black museum crowd of the 1980s. Alan Brodie’s lighting is key to making the illusion of life turning into a painting, and vice versa, work on stage.
Conductor and arranger Paul Sportelli leads the 11-piece band in a precise reading of Sondheim’s musically sophisticated, pointillist score that sounds quite unlike a Broadway musical and far more like cross between Stravinsky in his neoclassical phase and John Adam’s minimalism. Alisa Palmer provides the sure direction, eking as much humour and emotion as she can from the work. She can’t counteract the overwhelming feeling the piece gives of confinement and stasis. Sondheim has G-P sings of “order” and “control” as his guiding principles, but the musical itself comes off as the embodiment of too much order and control at the expense of insight and feeling. The second act, focussing on the modern George's mid-life crisis and inspiration by visiting La Grande Jatte is sentimental without being moving. Sondheim fans will need no encouragement to see such a fine production of the musical in an ideal venue that permits that rarity in the modern world, the music to be sung and played unamplified. People who love older musicals by Rodgers or Loewe for their sweeping tunes and big emotions will likely find “Sunday” a bit too cold and self-involved.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Cast of Sunday in the Park with George. ©Michael Cooper.
2009-07-22
Sunday in the Park with George