One of only two Sondheim shows to be filmed and officially released on DVD, Sunday in the Park with George is one of the composer's most interesting plays. Co-written with James Lapine, Sunday in the Park is set half in the 1880s and half in the 1980s and is based on Georges Seurat's painting La Grande Jatte. The Seurat-inspired set and costuming is as beautiful as Sondheim's signature flowing melodies and wordy, introspective lyrics and this DVD is definitely worth a watch.
From Frank Rich at the New York Times:
IN his paintings of a century ago, Georges Seurat demanded that the world look at art in a shocking new way. In ''Sunday in the Park With George,'' their new show about Seurat, the songwriter Stephen Sondheim and the playwright-director James Lapine demand that an audience radically change its whole way of looking at the Broadway musical. Seurat, the authors remind us, never sold a painting; it's anyone's guess whether the public will be shocked or delighted by ''Sunday in the Park.'' What I do know is that Mr. Sondheim and Mr. Lapine have created an audacious, haunting and, in its own intensely personal way, touching work. Even when it fails - as it does on occasion - ''Sunday in the Park'' is setting the stage for even more sustained theatrical innovations yet to come.
If anything, the show snugly fitted into the Booth owes more to the Off Broadway avant-garde than it does to past groundbreaking musicals, Mr. Sondheim's included. ''Sunday'' is not a bridge to opera, like ''Sweeney Todd''; nor is it in the tradition of the dance musicals of Jerome Robbins and Michael Bennett. There is, in fact, no dancing in ''Sunday,'' and while there's a book, there's little story. In creating a work about a pioneer of modernist art, Mr. Lapine and Mr. Sondheim have made a contemplative modernist musical that, true to form, is as much about itself and its creators as it is about the universe beyond.
The show's inspiration is Seurat's most famous canvas, ''A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.'' That huge painting shows a crowd of bourgeois 19th-century Parisians relaxing in a park on their day off. But ''La Grande Jatte'' was also a manifesto by an artist in revolt against Impressionism. Atomizing color into thousands of dots, Seurat applied scientific visual principles to art. Seen from a distance, his pointillist compositions reveal people and landscapes in natural harmony. Examined up close, the paintings become abstractions revealing the austerity and rigor of the artist's technique.
Seurat, here embodied commandingly by Mandy Patinkin, could well be a stand-in for Mr. Sondheim, who brings the same fierce, methodical intellectual precision to musical and verbal composition that the artist brought to his pictorial realm. In one number in ''Sunday,'' Seurat's work is dismissed by contemporaries as having ''no passion, no life'' - a critique frequently leveled at Mr. Sondheim. But unlike the last Sondheim show, ''Merrily We Roll Along,'' this one is usually not a whiny complaint about how hard it is to be a misunderstood, underappreciated genius. Instead of a showbiz figure's self-martyrdom, we get an artist's self-revelation.
In Act I, this is achieved by a demonstration of how Seurat might have created ''La Grande Jatte.'' In a fantastic set by Tony Straiges - an animated toy box complete with pop- ups - Mr. Patinkin's George gradually assembles bits and pieces of the painting, amending and banishing life-size portions of it before our eyes. In the process, Mr. Lapine and the congenitally puzzle-minded Mr. Sondheim provide their own ironic speculations about who the people in Seurat's picture might be. The most prominent among them is identified as the painter's mistress (named Dot, no less, and radiantly performed by Bernadette Peters). The others include such diverse types as boorish American tourists, a surly boatman and a class-conscious German servant.
Yet most of these people are little more that fleeting cameos. As is often the case in Sondheim musicals, we don't care about the characters - and here, more than ever, it's clear we're not meant to care. To Seurat, these people are just models for a meditative composition that's not intended to tell any story: In his painting, the figures are silent and expressionless, and even Dot is but fodder for dots. Mr. Lapine and Mr. Sondheim tease us with their characters' various private lives - which are rife with betrayals - only to sever those stories abruptly the moment Seurat's painting has found its final shape. It's the authors' way of saying that they, too, regard their ''characters'' only as forms to be manipulated into a theatrical composition whose content is more visual and musical than dramatic.
As a result, when Seurat finishes ''La Grande Jatte'' at the end of Act I, we're moved not because a plot has been resolved but because a harmonic work of art has been born. As achieved on stage - replete with pointillist lighting by Richard Nelson and costumes by Patricia Zipprodt and Ann Hould-Ward - the ''fixing'' of the picture is an electrifying coup de theatre. Tellingly enough, the effect is accompanied by the first Sondheim song of the evening that allows the cast to sing in glorious harmony. The song's lyric, meanwhile, reminds us that the magical order of both the painting and this musical has transfigured - and transcended - the often ugly doings in ''a small suburban park'' on an ''ordinary Sunday.''
Act II, though muddled, is equally daring: The show jumps a full century to focus on a present-day American artist also named George (and again played by Mr. Patinkin). This protagonist is possibly a double for Mr. Sondheim at his most self-doubting. George makes large, multimedia conceptual sculptures that, like Broadway musicals, require collaborators, large budgets and compromises; his values are distorted by a trendy art world that, like show business, puts a premium on hype, fashion and the tyranny of the marketplace.
The fanciful time-travel conceits that link this George to Seurat are charming. Rather less successful is the authors' reversion to a compressed, conventional story about how the modern George overcomes his crisis of confidence to regenerate himself as a man and artist. When George finally learns how to ''connect'' with other people and rekindles his esthetic vision, his breakthrough is ordained by two pretty songs, ''Children and Art'' and ''Move On,'' which seem as inorganic as the equivalent inspirational number (''Being Alive'') that redeems the born-again protagonist in Mr. Sondheim's ''Company.''
The show's most moving song is ''Finishing the Hat'' - which, like many of Mr. Sondheim's best, is about being disconnected. Explaining his emotional aloofness to Dot, Seurat sings how he watches ''the rest of the world from a window'' while he's obsessively making art. And if the maintenance of that solitary emotional distance means that Seurat's art (and, by implication, Mr. Sondheim's) is ''cold,'' even arrogant, so be it. ''Sunday'' argues that the esthetic passion in the cerebrally ordered classicism of modern artists is easily as potent as the sentimental passion of romantic paintings or conventional musicals.
In keeping with his setting, Mr. Sondheim has written a lovely, wildly inventive score that sometimes remakes the modern French composers whose revolution in music paralleled the post-impressionists' in art. (A synthesizer is added for the modern second act.) The accompanying lyrics can be brilliantly funny. Mr. Sondheim exploits the homonyms ''kneads'' and ''needs'' to draw a razor-sharp boundary between sex and love; a song in which Seurat's painted figures break their immortal poses to complain about ''sweating in a picture that was painted by a genius'' is a tour de force. But there's often wisdom beneath the cleverness. When Seurat's aged mother laments a modern building that her son admires, the Eiffel Tower, Mr. Patinkin sings that ''all things are beautiful'' because ''what the eye arranges is what is beautiful.''
What Mr. Lapine, his designers and the special-effects wizard Bran Ferren have arranged is simply gorgeous, and the fine supporting players add vibrant colors to their pallette. Mr. Patinkin is a crucible of intellectual fire - ''he burns you with his eyes,'' says Dot, with reason - and the wonderful Miss Peters overflows with all the warmth and humor that George will never know.
Both at the show's beginning and end, the hero is embracing not a woman, but the empty white canvas that he really loves - for its ''many possibilities.'' Look closely at that canvas - or at ''Sunday in the Park'' itself - and you'll get lost in a sea of floating dots. Stand back and you'll see that this evening's two theater artists, Mr. Sondheim and Mr. Lapine, have woven all those imaginative possibilities into a finished picture with a startling new glow.
Technical Information:
Title: Sunday in the Park with George
Year: 1986
Country: USA
Director: Terry Hughes
Source: DVD9 Retail
DVD Format: NTSC
Container: .iso + mds
Size: 6.48 GB
Length: 2:25:01
Programs used: DVD Decrypter, ImgBurn
Resolution: 720x480
Aspect Ratio: 4:3
Video: MPEG2 @ ~5800 kb/s
Frame Rate: 29.97 fps
Audio 1: English- Dolby AC3 Stereo @ 224 kb/s
Audio 2: English- Dolby AC3 5.1 @ 448 kb/s
Audio 3: English Commentary- Dolby AC3 Stereo @ 192 kb/s
Subtitles: cc-English
Menu: Yes
Video: Untouched
DVD Extras: Commentary with Stephen Sondheim, James Lapine, Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters
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