How “Sunday in the Park With George” changed Broadway
by Ashley Griffin, Guest Editorial
To read the earlier parts of this series, click below:
When assembling any short list of “most influential musicals” it’s tempting to just reserve one spot for the entire collected cannon of Stephen Sondheim. A case could be made for just about any of his musicals being on a top five list.
Sondheim not only wrote some of the greatest musicals of the Golden Age (“West Side Story,” “Gypsy”) but practically singlehandedly crafted the connecting thread between the Golden Age and contemporary musical theater. Mentored by, arguably, the person who invented what we have come to think of as the American Musical Theater, Oscar Hammerstein II, Sondheim BEGAN his career collaborating with Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents and Jerome Robbins (“West Side Story), and currently has two revivals of his musicals playing to great success on Broadway (with one, “Merrily We Roll Along,” finally being heralded as a masterpiece more than forty years after it closed – only playing sixteen performances) as well as a cast album soon to be released of his newest offering, “Here We Are”.
One could discuss “Company” – the show that turned the mirror directly onto the Upper East Side lunch crowd that frequented Broadway more because it was “what one of a certain class does” than out of artistic enjoyment.
“Into the Woods” has become the definitive deconstruction of fairy tales and how they reflect our lives, becoming the definition of an ensemble musical and the Sondheim work most familiar to young people, and most likely to be performed by them.
There’s “Sweeney Todd” – considered to be one of the best Broadway scores ever written, showing that Opera/Operetta is alive and well (and still successful) in musical theater and answering the question, “Can you truly terrify a theatrical audience?”
But I’ve selected “Sunday in the Park With George” – not only for its artistic merit and experimentation (while remaining a commercial venture), but for how it defined what we now think of as off-Broadway, and made stars out of its largely unknown director, cast, and producers.
“Sunday in the Park With George” was inspired by the famous painting “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” by French experimental painter Georges Seurat (1859-1891). Seurat invented a style of painting called pointillism, in which he used a select color palette to create his painting by tapping tiny dots of color on his canvas. His theory was that the dots of color would mix in the viewer’s eye and have the effect of creating a shimmering light on the depicted scene. His theory proved to be correct – in fact, Seurat’s method is the base of any image you see on a computer or screen – it was the basis for modern pixelization.
Seurat was an unusual man, obsessed with his work and not appreciated in his lifetime, he had one significant relationship in his life with a woman named Madeleine Knobloch, an artist’s model whom he portrayed in his painting “Jeune femme se poudrant.” He kept his relationship with her a secret, but eventually she became pregnant with their son Pierre-Georges. She was pregnant with their second child (who died in infancy) when Seurat passed away at the age of 31.
Yes, it is an entire musical that is only partially (and secondarily) based on a painter and, first and foremost, based on… a painting.
“Sunday in the Park With George” is a 1983 musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and book by James Lapine. It won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Drama (a rarity for a musical), two Tony Awards and an Olivier Award. The show began as an idea of Sondheim’s – wanting to see if he could write a musical that told the story of a painting, a painter, and explored what it was to be an artist.
Lapine has published a phenomenal book on the creation of “Sunday” called “Putting it Together” that I highly recommend. But, basically, Sondheim was interested in working with new collaborators and randomly saw a show Lapine directed (a fluke of a production - one he was wrangled into directing at Yale where he worked as a design teacher, and it ended up being so successful it transferred to NYC. Lapine didn’t even really have aspirations to be a director or book writer) The show happened to be about works of visual art and Sondheim reached out to Lapine to see if he might be interested in working on “Sunday.” They took the show to André Bishop (now considered one of, if not the greatest Artistic Director of all time), who was running the relatively new off-Broadway theater Playwrights Horizons.
The team did a workshop/production at Playwrights where they tried to figure out what the show was. The piece infamously opened without a second act (one wouldn’t be added until the last three performances.) One of the most beloved, and important, songs in the show, “Finishing the Hat,” was put in so late that Mandy Patinkin, who played George, had to go onstage with the lyrics hidden on George’s sketchpad.
The company included a roster of artists who would become tremendously famous, but were all but unknown at the time. The off-Broadway production starred Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters, with the rest of the ensemble cast featuring Kelsey Grammer, Christine Baranski, Brent Spiner, Nancy Opel, Danielle Ferland and many more (Grammer and Baranski would not follow the show to Broadway, but most of the rest of the cast did.)
The first act focuses on the creation of “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte”. The team turned Seurat’s mistress/model Madeleine into George’s mistress/model Dot (though, unlike Madeline, she does not end up with George.) Dot is deeply in love with Seurat, but very aware that he can never truly be a partner to her, she is “something (he) can use” and he will always love “things…not people.”
At the end of the first act George has finished his painting, but Dot (pregnant with their daughter, Marie,) has left for America, married to another man. The piece explores the nature of art, the calling of the artist, and how creating art can both illuminate life, and keep you forever apart from it. The piece uses truly brilliant design elements to create the painting as George finishes it, starting, literally, with the stage as a blank canvas. And the piece reveals the inner lives of everyone in the painting, down to the animals…
But no one knew what to do for a second act, indeed, the second act of “Sunday” is one of the most hotly contested elements of any Broadway musical. Love it or hate it, it is a bit of a jarring jump from the world of the first act and of a very different tone. The creators were never completely happy with it, but between having to rush to get it into the show off-Broadway, then then left with no time for further development when it was announced that the show would transfer to Broadway all but immediately, at some point it sort of “was what it was.”
The second act jumps ahead to present day (specifically the present day of 1983 when the show first went up) and follows George’s (now elderly) daughter Marie, and her grandson, also named George (who believes his connection to Seurat is only a family legend). This George is also an experimental artist – building large “Chromolume” sculptures that, when turned on, use literal light to “paint” images in the air and around the room. Patinkin played both Georges and Peters played Dot in act one and Marie in act two. The rest of the ensemble play parallel characters in both acts.
This act continues to deal with issues of creating art (though it focuses more on the awful juggling act between artistry and financing) as well as what we leave behind in this life (“Children and Art”), and how we can create anything new amidst “all the noise.” One of my favorite Sondheim lyrics comes from the last song in this show:
“Anything you do, let it come from you
Then it will be new”
Perhaps the most intellectually successful aspect of this act is the opening. Act one ends with George’s painting being completed, act two opens with that same painting, only now, almost a hundred years on, the figures in it are frustrated at how difficult it is to be stuck inside of it forever, and forever and forever…
The fact that “Sunday” became such a lauded piece helped put Playwrights Horizons on the map as THE place to develop new work, and established the off-Broadway to Broadway pipeline that was at its height in the late 1980’s/1990’s. Before that, shows primarily first secured a producer, then took their show out of town, then came into NYC.
The idea that you could have a safe space, away from the critics but still in NYC, where you could experiment with and “find” your show was pretty much brand new and was a perfect formula for creating some of the most important off-Broadway and Broadway works. Who knows if “Rent” would have gotten a NYTW workshop production without “Sunday in the Park With George.”
Unfortunately, that formula is changing, with the costs of production rising higher and higher, most off-Broadway theaters can no longer function as singular producing or development entities and mainly partner with commercial producers looking to take advantage of their non-profit status before transferring to a commercial run, and critics are highly courted…
“Sunday” was also a highly intellectual (I would argue also emotional, despite the oft-made criticism of Sondheim’s work - that it was “too cold,”) show at a time when “high art” had faded on Broadway in favor of “mass entertainment” (I am of the opinion that both can happily co-exist, but there has always been a bit of a distinction…certainly when it comes to public discourse.)
And it has continued to push the boundaries of Broadway scenic design. The original design is widely considered one of the most effective and innovative of all time, and the 2008 revival was the first Broadway show to incorporate interactive projections at all – let alone as the basis of their entire set design.
“Sunday” is about art and artistic progress, it’s only fitting that it has been a bastion of innovation itself.