Photo: Joan Marcus
It’s fitting that the elegant revival of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s musical Sunday in the Park with George – currently at Studio 54 following an acclaimed London run – brings the latest advances in animation and digital projection to the stage. After all, the show takes as inspiration Georges Seurat and his 19th century masterpiece A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, which was itself informed by cutting-edge theories on color and optics, particularly the discovery that two juxtaposed colors could suggest a new color when seen from a distance. Hence Seurat’s famous depiction of a lazy French Sunday using innumerable colored dots, the style that came to be called pointillism.
The original Broadway production in 1984 used cardboard cut-outs to help recreate Seurat’s painting; the current revival begins with a bold stroke of animated charcoal across the blank upstage wall, which eventually blossoms into a shimmering, full-color rendering of the Parisian island where the painting was set. Of course, as remarkable as the digital projections are, they’d be meaningless without director Sam Buntrock’s virtuoso ensemble to convey Sondheim’s rich ideas about perspective, time and art. In the lead role as Seurat in Act One and his art star descendant in Act Two (which takes place a century later in the decadent 1980s art scene), Daniel Evans is delightful, intuitively balancing out the characters’ self-absorption with a gentleness that warms up Sondheim’s somewhat cerebral compositions.
What’s especially fun about Act Two is seeing the versatile ensemble transform into entirely different characters with a mastery that sometimes leaves you guessing who they were in Act One; Alexander Gemignani makes a nearly unrecognizable leap from a belligerent roustabout (reclining in the painting’s foreground) to George’s nerdy A/V assistant, and Seurat’s spurned mistress Dot – the vivacious Jenna Russell – becomes Dot’s now-ancient and adorable wheelchair-bound granddaughter, who steals most of the second half with her comedic charms. Among other things, the passage of a century during intermission points to that old saying that “life is short, art is long”: Seurat died at 32 without having sold a painting, but at least his fictional great-grandson, a century later, was recognized in his time. Of course, as Sondheim makes clear, that doesn’t mean he’s much happier.
Sunday in the Park with George continues at Studio 54 [254 West 54th Street] through June 14th. Tickets range from $36.25 to $121.25.
