A drizzle of subtle color, a shimmer-curtain of sound – and we are transported back to “Sunday in the Park With George,” the 1984 James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim musical, returning last night to the Roundabout Theater’s Studio 54.
But this is “Sunday” in a very different park – for it has been projected by its London-born director Sam Buntrock into a completely brave new world of computer-generated imagery.
The results, built into the designs by David Farley and the lighting by Ken Billington, and based on pointillist Georges Seurat’s iconic painting, “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte,” is one of the most visually amazing shows ever to reach Broadway.
So far as geek wizardry goes, Buntrock and his team of animators, led by Timothy Bird, have possibly reinvented the Broadway wheel.
The original “Sunday in the Park” was a kind of miracle – even if a broken-backed one. Despite its still feeble second act, it triumphs even more in this spectacular staging, originally created by Buntrock for the Menier Chocolate Factory, a famed fringe London theater.
“Sunday” is still far from your common musical. Its audacious theme is that of Seurat himself, and the struggle and sacrifice demanded by his art. As one of Sondheim’s numbers puts it: “Art isn’t easy.”
Seurat’s concern was demonstrating the inter-relationship between colors and light, and also in differently ordered perspectives of space. His art was pure distilled theater.
The musical’s first part describes the painting of the picture in 1884. It also creates a fictional life for the painter himself (Daniel Evans) and his totally fictional mistress Dot (Jenna Russell), who, impregnated with George’s child, emigrates to America with another lover, a friendly and tolerant baker.
So far, so good. Then almost total collapse.
The second act – set in 1984 – unfortunately finds George’s great-grandson in the modish American art world, fighting for the patrons and subsidies to finance his own clearly pretentious style of visual art.
The story now drifts off into highfalutin fatuity. Admittedly, Sondheim comes up with two of his best numbers here, and after suggesting a Debussy/Ravel romantic sheen for 1884, now cleverly produces for 1984 the equally time-appropriate, if perhaps over-obvious, influences of composers Steve Reich and Philip Glass.
Clever, but the act is also boring and pompous.
Evans and Russell – both brought over from Buntrock’s West End cast – seem to have Tony Award written all over them. Evans’ George nails the reserve and flame-like intensity of the loner artist, a creator personally short on relationships.
And it is a character perfectly, if abrasively, balanced by his model/mistress, Russell’s eternal, feminine Dot, who like Evans gives a precisely nuanced, very funny and expressively sung musical portrait. Other splendid vignettes come from Michael Cumpsty and Alexander Gemignani.
Do go and see this unmissably innovative piece of musical staging – but don’t blame me if, at the end, you feel you might have done better to leave at the intermission.
SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE
Studio 54. 254 W. 54th St.; (212) 239-6200.