Theater: Sunday in the Park with George: Jake Gyllenhaal sings!
The current Broadway run of Stephen Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George (1984) is notable for a couple of reasons. It reopens the venerable, Tiffany-clad Hudson Theater (fresh colors, still limited knee-room), dark for four decades, and features the first Broadway musical run for Jake Gyllenhaal. Both debuts were terrific.
Sunday in the Park with George exemplifies the strengths and limitations of Stephen Sondheim, our greatest musical theater composer. Both the concept and much of the execution are cerebral (in a good way) and challenging. Hummable tunes are few and far between, as are emotional gutshots, but you exit the theater thinking about the meaning of the play and analyzing the choices the composer and director made. This musical arose from an unlikely source, after Sondheim saw the famous pointillist painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte (1884) by Georges Seurat at the Art Institute of Chicago and was provoked about who all these people were.
The musical's first act mixes (fake news) details of the painter's life with reconstructions of who some of these Sunday park-goers are, and how their stories interact. The score is interwoven, detailed, and ingenious. Sondheim musically depicts Seurat's pointillist technique, such as when Gyllenhaal sings staccato phrases as he paints. The act ends with a now-famous tableau in which the actors take on the exact poses seen in the painting, creating a tableau-vivante onstage (see this brilliant end to act 1 in the 1984 original here). The second act, perhaps a bit less successful, transports us to modern times as a counterpoint to the 1880s. The painting's characters are still there, but now imprisoned forever in the static painting on the walls of a museum (should art be static?). Various modern descendants of the first act protagonists now comment on the unsatisfying nature of modern art, most created for short attention spans, trendy movements, and fast cash (this was composed thirty years ago!). By the end of the show there is some reconciliation between Gyllenhaal's modern frustrated artist (i.e. Seurat's great grandson) and the past traditions of art in his family. Questions are raised regarding artistic integrity, what is art's role, and who should determine what is created and what is valued--critics, patrons, the public, the artist? This musical followed a period of rich productivity for Sondheim (1970's Follies, Sweeney Todd, Pacific Overtures) followed by a big flop (Merrily we Roll Along), after which he swore not to compose any more musicals. Luckily, he did continue, but this musical does reflect some of his existential angst of the time, perhaps an occupational hazard of the creative class.
This production was crisp, well directed, and well executed, following a modern trend towards stripping down the number of extras and orchestra players, focusing our attention on words and music while somewhat diminishing the grandeur of the original. Gyllenhaal was terrific, with a real tenor voice only occasionally taxed in high louder notes. He had a wonderful ability to color his voice timbre, with varying vibrato and color. I really enjoyed how all the singers could use vocal technique to act, and all with the precise diction needed for Sondheim's rapid fire, literate lyrics. Too many Broadway singers these days have exactly one vocal color, usually the monotonous, amplified light vibrato so favored in Les Mis and its ilk. Here, singing seemed a real extension of fine acting. Gyllenhaal has always been best for me in nerdy and/or brooding roles (Brokeback Mountain, Donny Darko), so playing the neurotic Seurat was a great choice. Annaleigh Ashford (Rent, Kinky Boots) was not as vibrant as Bernadette Peters was as Seurat's feisty muse Dot (get the name?) but was more refined and subtle, so a good match for Gyllenhaal. The visible 12 member orchestra (behind a scrim upstage) was excellent.
While Sunday in the Park with George ultimately does not fully engage your emotions, it does challenge you to think about what art and composition are and mean. This was much on my mind after seeing this year's Whitney Biennial, perhaps the most important survey of current American art. As I have noticed in recent trips to art museums around the world, millennial art seems to be less about challenging the senses and creating works of visual stimulation and beauty, than of being documents of political propaganda. Art must now have a message to be legitimate. Yes, well so did the art of Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin's era, and little of that is worth looking at years later. This era-specific trendiness is justly mocked in the Sondheim musical. Very few of the Whitney pieces on display lingered for me as visual creations, and I have no desire to see most of them again. At least one provoked me: a virtual reality piece in which you watched a man being brutally, graphically clubbed to death in 3D, accompanied by a Jewish chant; this at least achieved a feeling (queasiness) rather than neutrality, but its message was at the level of a comic book, as were many of the Biennial works. Politics is not new to art: Michelangelo's David had a lot to say about what Florence had become in the minds of its citizens--a new classical Greece. But its message was an overtone, and one can still enjoy the work without this cultural knowledge. I cannot say the same for the vast bulk of the works at the Whitney. Art is not just the working out one's political beliefs on paper, score, or instrument. It is a fundamental aesthetic reshaping of the world around us, and the best works challenge us visually, aurally, and emotionally. Sondheim's musical wrestles with these issues provocatively. The Whitney Biennial did not.
Sunday in the Park with George exemplifies the strengths and limitations of Stephen Sondheim, our greatest musical theater composer. Both the concept and much of the execution are cerebral (in a good way) and challenging. Hummable tunes are few and far between, as are emotional gutshots, but you exit the theater thinking about the meaning of the play and analyzing the choices the composer and director made. This musical arose from an unlikely source, after Sondheim saw the famous pointillist painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte (1884) by Georges Seurat at the Art Institute of Chicago and was provoked about who all these people were.
The musical's first act mixes (fake news) details of the painter's life with reconstructions of who some of these Sunday park-goers are, and how their stories interact. The score is interwoven, detailed, and ingenious. Sondheim musically depicts Seurat's pointillist technique, such as when Gyllenhaal sings staccato phrases as he paints. The act ends with a now-famous tableau in which the actors take on the exact poses seen in the painting, creating a tableau-vivante onstage (see this brilliant end to act 1 in the 1984 original here). The second act, perhaps a bit less successful, transports us to modern times as a counterpoint to the 1880s. The painting's characters are still there, but now imprisoned forever in the static painting on the walls of a museum (should art be static?). Various modern descendants of the first act protagonists now comment on the unsatisfying nature of modern art, most created for short attention spans, trendy movements, and fast cash (this was composed thirty years ago!). By the end of the show there is some reconciliation between Gyllenhaal's modern frustrated artist (i.e. Seurat's great grandson) and the past traditions of art in his family. Questions are raised regarding artistic integrity, what is art's role, and who should determine what is created and what is valued--critics, patrons, the public, the artist? This musical followed a period of rich productivity for Sondheim (1970's Follies, Sweeney Todd, Pacific Overtures) followed by a big flop (Merrily we Roll Along), after which he swore not to compose any more musicals. Luckily, he did continue, but this musical does reflect some of his existential angst of the time, perhaps an occupational hazard of the creative class.
This production was crisp, well directed, and well executed, following a modern trend towards stripping down the number of extras and orchestra players, focusing our attention on words and music while somewhat diminishing the grandeur of the original. Gyllenhaal was terrific, with a real tenor voice only occasionally taxed in high louder notes. He had a wonderful ability to color his voice timbre, with varying vibrato and color. I really enjoyed how all the singers could use vocal technique to act, and all with the precise diction needed for Sondheim's rapid fire, literate lyrics. Too many Broadway singers these days have exactly one vocal color, usually the monotonous, amplified light vibrato so favored in Les Mis and its ilk. Here, singing seemed a real extension of fine acting. Gyllenhaal has always been best for me in nerdy and/or brooding roles (Brokeback Mountain, Donny Darko), so playing the neurotic Seurat was a great choice. Annaleigh Ashford (Rent, Kinky Boots) was not as vibrant as Bernadette Peters was as Seurat's feisty muse Dot (get the name?) but was more refined and subtle, so a good match for Gyllenhaal. The visible 12 member orchestra (behind a scrim upstage) was excellent.
While Sunday in the Park with George ultimately does not fully engage your emotions, it does challenge you to think about what art and composition are and mean. This was much on my mind after seeing this year's Whitney Biennial, perhaps the most important survey of current American art. As I have noticed in recent trips to art museums around the world, millennial art seems to be less about challenging the senses and creating works of visual stimulation and beauty, than of being documents of political propaganda. Art must now have a message to be legitimate. Yes, well so did the art of Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin's era, and little of that is worth looking at years later. This era-specific trendiness is justly mocked in the Sondheim musical. Very few of the Whitney pieces on display lingered for me as visual creations, and I have no desire to see most of them again. At least one provoked me: a virtual reality piece in which you watched a man being brutally, graphically clubbed to death in 3D, accompanied by a Jewish chant; this at least achieved a feeling (queasiness) rather than neutrality, but its message was at the level of a comic book, as were many of the Biennial works. Politics is not new to art: Michelangelo's David had a lot to say about what Florence had become in the minds of its citizens--a new classical Greece. But its message was an overtone, and one can still enjoy the work without this cultural knowledge. I cannot say the same for the vast bulk of the works at the Whitney. Art is not just the working out one's political beliefs on paper, score, or instrument. It is a fundamental aesthetic reshaping of the world around us, and the best works challenge us visually, aurally, and emotionally. Sondheim's musical wrestles with these issues provocatively. The Whitney Biennial did not.
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