Friday's & Sunday on Saturday

I saw Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George in its original incarnation on Broadway sometime in the spring of 1984. It got mixed reviews but still won a Pulitzer for Drama in ’85, but got shut out for Tonys except for a couple of design awards.

In my hazy memory it was two musicals. The first act was done in period, that is, during the halcyon days of the Impressionist movement in France (Paris in particular). Based on the creation of Georges Seurat’s pointillist masterpiece “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” (shown here) in particular and the art world at that time in general the show was a tour de force of logic and preciseness, with a book and direction by James Lapine, that created a perfect setting for Sondheim’s incredible talent for lyrical imagery and musical genius. I recall being blown away by this production; especially with the crescendo of beauty at the first act curtain that left me, and everybody I knew at the time, totally stunned.

Oops, wait, the show was only half over. And, oops, as I recall vividly, the second act handed us a lemon and, although some lemonade bubbled up later on, it was a disappointing letdown of the first rank. Act two begins with a fictional descendant of the original artist, also named George, who tries to get us to believe that modern art in all its creativity could be equally compelling. He could be right but in 1984 it didn’t get done, although performances by Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters almost saved the creators from themselves. Almost. As I recall it was a really weird evening of theater with an incredible high, brought low. As I consequence it is memorable to me now as only half of a wonderful show.

This is corrected in some ways by the 2008 Broadway revival I saw at this Saturday’s matinee. It is the 2005-06 production originally staged in London and imported to these shores by the Roundabout Theatre Company as part of their season. The two lead actors, Daniel Evans and Jenna Russell, came along for the ride (the rest of the company are Americans) and I thought she was great (and a very, very good singer) and I thought he was good but lacked a certain ballsiness that I wanted in the role of a maverick (at the time) artist like Seurat.

This production probably comes as close as possible in getting that dratted second act under control. We only get an “impression” (get it?) of the “Chromolume” that I thought was a horrible problem in the original production, so the laser lightshow we see now serves to bridge the two acts fairly successfully and pretty much makes the show into one. I’m not saying it entirely worked for me; but the second act also boasts some glorious music, which feeds off of our appreciation from the first act and it was quite enough, thank you, to carry the day. And the play.

By the way, boys and girls, there is quite a lot of animation in the set design. I don’t mean technical animation in the painterly sense, I mean animation as in, well, animation, as in Pixar Studios (herein by an outfit named Knifedge). Although very interesting I don’t think it either enhanced or detracted from this musical; it’s just another facet of what, I’m sure, is becoming more and more the utilization of modern techniques in a lot of areas in the arts. And in ART (capitalized).

Oh, yeah, I guess it’s up to me to say it. I coerced my companions into having lunch at T.G.I.Friday’s (damn expensive cheeseburger), the sole purpose being that we would then be able to say that we did Friday’s on Saturday before Sunday. Forgive us our sins.