`Sunday in The Park': This One's No Picnic
By Lloyd RoseWashington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 22 1997; Page D01
The Washington Post
The most rarefied, the most intellectual, the most daring, the most difficult, the most contentiously beautiful -- are these descriptions the same as saying that the first act of "Sunday in the Park With George" is the best thing Stephen Sondheim has yet written? If he's to your taste, your taste is already dark -- and the taste of "Sunday," which opened Sunday at Arena Stage, is smoky and austere even for Sondheim. Yet there's something in his acidulousness that's richer and more satisfying than sweetness. The Arena production is directed by Eric D. Schaeffer of Signature Theatre (which co-produced the show), who, despite a superlative track record with Sondheim, fails to master the material here. It's still great material.
First produced in 1984, "Sunday in the Park With George" was the first collaboration between Sondheim and James Lapine. The show was inspired by Georges Seurat's pointillist masterpiece "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte," itself a radically intellectual work. Impressionism had already turned the scientific lens of optics on painting; Seurat went even further in his experiments, working with dots of paint to render a complex visual color field. He was denounced as cold, ugly, arrogantly unwilling to please. Sound familiar? "All head, no heart/ No life in his art" is the sung description of Seurat's work, and no one familiar with Sondheim's career can miss the autobiographical resonance.
In Act 1, Seurat (Sal Viviano) paints and paints and neglects his mistress, the rather too cutely named Dot (Liz Larsen). She leaves him. He keeps painting. Not much of a plot, you'd say, and you'd be right, but the "plot" of Act 1 is an exploration of the birth of modernism, that once-so-authoritative aesthetic that is beginning to look as quaint and of-its-time as the bustle and the monocle.
The central myth of the modernist aesthetic was the artist as a Promethean demigod waging existential battle to bring something true to unenlightened humanity, and usually scorned, if not actually punished, for his attempts. "Sunday in the Park With George" takes this rather silly myth at face value, but it's also full of the anger, dissatisfaction, curiosity and perverse optimism of modernism: Everything that had gone before was a lie; the truth could be found by simplifying, dissecting, seeking out art in previously despised territory.
So Sondheim and Lapine's Seurat spends his life banging his head furiously against "reality," attempting to break through the pieties of received information. What is seeing? he asks. What is color? What is perception? Obviously this is a guy who spends most of his time up in his own head -- i.e., not a very dramatic character -- and unfortunately Viviano tries to convey this remoteness by making the character subdued. The musical's Seurat is meant to fascinate women and arouse the envy and wonder of other male artists, but Viviano is the opposite of charismatic.
As it happens, Sondheim's brilliance assures that the music gives us the character even if the actor doesn't. Songs such as "Color and Light" and "Finishing the Hat" are both playful and agonized, antic with invention but tense and unhappy with frustrated yearning. Sondheim echoes and pays tribute to the defiant dissonance of the early modernist composers such as Stravinsky. His famous atonality isn't merely melancholy here, or merely sour, but charged with the hope of a new aesthetic world to come.
Act 2 takes place in that new world, and it turns out to be less brave than everyone hoped. It's 1996, and Seurat's great-great-grandson, also named George (also Viviano), is unveiling his newest kinetic sculpture at a tony art museum. Almost immediately it becomes apparent that the major problem with "Sunday in the Park With George" is that it's a one-act musical with a second act. The modern George doesn't seem to have any aesthetic, just a soppy longing to do something "new," and he feels awfully, awfully sorry for himself. One of Sondheim's most famous songs, "Putting It Together," is sung by George: It's one long complaint about how damned hard it is to have to toady for grant money and patronage.
Viviano is more vivacious and likable in this act, but if ever there was a character impossible to care about, it's whiny little George. He mourns his grandmother, and visits La Grande Jatte, and has a talk with Dot's ghost, and fails utterly to make the audience care whether he finds a new artistic path or just walks into the Seine and drowns.
Director Schaeffer has done extraordinary productions of Sondheim in the small Signature space in Arlington. Just last spring he directed Sondheim and Lapine's "Passion" and made it work thrillingly, something Lapine himself had failed to do on Broadway. A few seasons back, his "Into the Woods" was galvanizingly intimate, as if he felt the music in his synapses and spinal cord. Disappointingly and puzzlingly, his work here is flat.
He has superb support from set designer Zack Brown, lighting designer Allen Lee Hughes (whose work is an astonishing mixture of bold shifts of intensity and almost achingly fragile color tones), and his longtime music director, Jon Kalbfleisch. Liz Larsen is a wonderful singer who makes the absolute most of Dot's often difficult songs, and the supporting cast is basically strong.
But the show remains presentational rather than dramatic. True, the second act is probably unworkable, and the first act is, to put it mildly, challenging -- but no more challenging than Act 2 of "Into the Woods," which Schaeffer pulled off with flippant ease. Everyone is entitled to his off shows, and Schaeffer will no doubt come back stronger than ever. In the meantime, this is still a chance to see a masterwork.
Sunday in the Park With George. Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, book by James Lapine. Sound; Timothy Thompson. Costumes; Patricia Zipprodt. With Dana Krueger, Donna Migliaccio, Wallace Acton, Robert DuSold, SuEllen Estey, Lawrence Redmond, April Harr Blandin, Sherri L. Edelen, Netousha N. Harris, Roxanne Orkin, Carter Calvert, Daniel Patrick Felton, Christopher Monteleone and Andrew Ross Wynn. At the Kreeger Theatre, Arena Stage, through June 15. Call 202-488-3300.
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