Review of reviews: Stage

Sunday in the Park With George

Studio 54, New York

(212) 719-1300

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★★★★

The original 1984 production of Stephen Sondheim’s musical about painter Georges Seurat “was a kind of miracle,” said Clive Barnes in the New York Post. Mandy Patinkin starred as Seurat; Bernadette Peters played his lover; and the composer’s shimmering score became an instant classic. With this revival, British director Sam Buntrock performs a second miracle, staging “one of the most visually amazing shows ever to reach Broadway.” Using digital effects and projections to re-create Seurat’s paintings on stage, he renders concrete the internal creative process that Sondheim’s lyrics merely describe. Sadly, Buntrock doesn’t solve the play’s biggest flaw: a “boring and pompous” second act that jumps from Seurat’s 19th century to the 1980s, when one of his descendants is struggling to make a name in the art world.

So leave at intermission, said David Rooney in Variety. But don’t miss the unforgettable first act. As we watch Seurat gradually create his masterpiece, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, digital projections bring the figures from the painting to life. They appear to shimmer into being, then arrange themselves at Seurat’s behest. We follow Seurat’s process brush stroke by brush stroke, “from the first flashes of light that accompany Sondheim’s opening chords—as a charcoal stroke slashes the back wall”—to the last detail of a woman’s hat. “As the picture’s components come together, the songs steadily acquire more body,” leading to a first-act finale that combines animation and live action to re-create Seurat’s iconic tableau.

The latter half of Sunday in the Park remains problematic, said Ben Brantley in The New York Times. But this production “goes further than any I’ve seen in justifying the second act’s existence.” Clever casting is part of the reason. In Act 1, Daniel Evans plays the socially awkward Seurat, while Jenna Russell is his working-class lover. In Act 2, Russell plays the grandmother to Evans’ struggling conceptual artist. Excellent performances by these two actors help draw parallels between the two men’s artistic processes. Creating art has never been easy, this musical seems to say. But a work of genius brings the disorderly elements of the real world into “exquisite, elusive balance”—if only for a moment.

The American Dream Songbook

Next Theatre, Evanston, Ill.

(847) 475-1875

★★★

Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti is a rarely revived masterpiece, said Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune. The brief 1953 operetta presciently picked apart postwar marriage—that “rickety, oft-overlooked pivot on which all-American dreams danced.” Suburban have-it-alls Sam and Dinah seem to be an archetypal American couple—until they realize that their marriage is a sham. James Rank and Karen Doerr stand out in these lead roles, showing us the downward slide as every aspect of the couple’s lives—from the kids’ school play, to the train ride, to the backyard barbecues—“turns into hell.” Director Jason Loewith’s “spare but effective production” of Bernstein’s original adequately underscores the work’s continued relevance. But Trouble in Tahiti is actually only one part of the evening’s entertainment. After intermission, Loewith presents us with a brand-new suite of songs by contemporary composers who extend and deepen Bernstein’s themes.

These new songs are a “mixed bag.” said Hedy Weiss in the Chicago Sun-Times. But there are bright spots, including Michael Mahler’s “The Rise and Fall of Britney Spears.” But the Tahiti material carries the night, “from the first jazzy, rhythmically irresistible riff of the music to the playfully sardonic lyrics evoking such fabled suburbs as Scarsdale, N.Y., and Highland Park, Ill.” Bernstein’s suburban operetta seamlessly merges high art and pop culture. With Songbook, Loewith gracefully “captures both extremes” and nicely contrasts the American dream in its current and former states.