Sondheim's ravishing picture

10 April 2012

It is a rare musical that leaves me ravished or enchanted, longing to hear the sound of its finest music all over again.

Stephen Sondheim's Sunday In The Park With George manages the feat in a visually entrancing production by Sam Buntrock that works like magic.

Premiered in 1984, triumphantly produced at the Chocolate Factory last November and now offered for West End audiences, Sunday In The Park With George magically paints a picture in song, words, music and moving-image graphics of George Seurat's long-lost Parisian summer by the banks of an island in the midst of the Seine.

Computerised figures remarkably animate the stage's blank back-wall and appear on a bare white canvas. A painting speeds into rapid existence. Painted figures, brought amusingly to singing, speaking existence, are yanked in and out of the picture.

The technique brilliantly conveys the way an artist experiments. The glorious first act finale, Sunday, sung by the whole company, rises to an exultant Janacek-like crescendo of excitement as a tableau vivant forms to represent the completed painting.

The music, beautifully played by a fivepiece band, is at first jagged, terse and discordant, matching the 19th-century painter's pointillistic technique, but then it bursts out again and again into cascades of lyrical, joyful, shimmering string and piano sound.

I heard faint hints not just of Janacek, but of Stravinsky, Ravel and Copland - though not of Britten whom the composer claimed as a musical inspiration.

Sondheim scrutinises Seurat, famous for A Sunday Afternoon On The Island Of La Grande Jatte, and played by Daniel Evans with aloof, impassive self-absorption.

He shows how his obsessive immersion in painting cut him off from normal human contact, leaving him artistically fulfilled but alone after he refused to stop his distraught mistress, working-class Dot (a bemused Jenna Russell) from defecting with their infant to the local baker and America.

Their song, We Do Not Belong Together, blazes with anger, though neither Evans nor Russell, who sing with power and passion, find any way to convey the fact they are both hurt, unhappy people,-rather than leading characters in an everyday story of sexy bohemian folk.

James Lapine's book cannot altogether disarm the criticism that the second act, which leaps into the late 20th century, forms a disconnected coda to the first. Yet there is a vital emotional link between the two acts.

Seurat's fictitious great-grandson, also George, an American maker of sound and light sculptures, is burdened with his forbear's impersonal character. He returns to Paris and the transformed scene on the Seine where his great-grandfather painted. In a ghostly scene which has been condemned as sentimental - not least by me - he encounters the ghost of the long-dead Dot.

This wistful fantasy of make-believe now strikes me as a kind of hopeful atonement, an acceptance by the younger George that attachment to people in the form of love is as crucial to life as art.

Buntrock's production leans slightly towards comic caricature, with Simon Green's haughtily condescending painter and Gay Soper, a gruffly superannuated Lady Bracknell, as Seurat's mother. Yet these are mere blemishes on a enchanted evening that raises the status of the musical high.

Sunday In The Park With George

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