Chills from a OBC: SITPWG
Chills from a OBC: SITPWG
Broadway Legend Joined: 4/9/04
Chills from a OBC: SITPWG#0
Posted: 1/8/05 at 12:29amWow. I just listened to a few songs from this and read the libretto and...my head is about to explode, but in the positive way. I got absolute chills - this came to a theatre last year near me...I can't believe I didn't see it. I almost freaking cried. How Sondheim captures every mood, and thought and character trait is just mindblowing. *shiver!*
re: Chills from a OBC: SITPWG#1
Posted: 1/8/05 at 12:32am
Oooo. How can 'Finishing the Hat', 'Move On' and 'Sunday' not give a person chills?
I then 'We Do Not Belong Together' is enough to make anyone cry.
Glad you liked it.
It's brilliant.
The whole score.
Not a single weak point.
The opposite of creation isn't war, it's stagnation.
re: Chills from a OBC: SITPWG#2
Posted: 1/8/05 at 12:33amThen you really need to see it. As much as I love the OBCR, it doesn't hold a candle to seeing it. The OBC DVD is available--I highly recommend it.
Broadway Legend Joined: 4/9/04
re: Chills from a OBC: SITPWG#3
Posted: 1/8/05 at 12:35am
I actually only listened to both versions of Sunday, Chromulume #7/Putting it Together, It's Hot up Here and Lesson #8 so it's funny it's none of the songs you listed. Can't wait to here those!!!
*DVD? YES! Thanks Lael!
re: Chills from a OBC: SITPWG#4
Posted: 1/8/05 at 12:36amYou're welcome. And make SURE you listen to the rest of those songs!
re: Chills from a OBC: SITPWG#5
Posted: 1/8/05 at 12:39am
This remains the only CD that's ever made me cry- Bernadette Peters is at the height of her powers here, and "We Do Not Belong Together" is just heart-wrenching.
And Curtain, the DVD is worth watching just for the opening scene. :)
re: Chills from a OBC: SITPWG#6
Posted: 1/8/05 at 12:42am*sigh*...the obcr is great and all, but I think Audra McDonald sang the crap out of that score at the Ravinia concert. I wish she recorded "Move On."
re: Chills from a OBC: SITPWG#7
Posted: 1/8/05 at 1:01amI absolutely loved every second of SITPWG when I was in it. It's such an incredible show. And I had no idea that Audra McDonald did a concert of it. Oh, what I would give to hear her sing "Move On".
re: Chills from a OBC: SITPWG#8
Posted: 1/8/05 at 1:05am
Both the OBCR and the DVD brought tears to my eyes on first enjoyment. You really must listen to the three songs Priest has pointed out: they are SUNDAY IN THE PARK's most powerful moments.
While we're talking about SITPWG, however, I need to get something off my chest (sorry to thread-jack): in the second act, what is the point of George's ex-wife? She's the most superfluous character in the show and, IMO, its biggest flaw. I understand why Lapine may want her around -- to emphasize how George cannot "connect" -- but her character is weakly sketched and is really just an appendage of a character who serves little dramatic purpose.
I actually find her a detriment to SUNDAY's book; without her, I think there would be a stronger focus on the relationship between George and Marie, which is a poignant variation of George and Dot from the first act. But the ex-wife keeps interrupting interactions between George and Marie and disrupts the ironic parallelism between the two acts. Having no sung lines, the ex-wife character is thankfully absent from the OBCR, which is why I think there's a stronger bond expressed on the recording than on the DVD.
Otherwise, SUNDAY remains my favourite Sondheim score and show.
re: Chills from a OBC: SITPWG#9
Posted: 1/8/05 at 2:06am
I love Chita Rivera, but Bernadette was ROBBED, I tell you, ROBBED!!!
This is my favourite show, and is one of the most brilliant ever written. It is funny, poignanat, thought-provoking and gut-wrenching. Just wonderful.
It often brings tears to my eyes. Sometimes from joy...Does anyone else choke up when they hear Mandy Patinkin's glorious voice flying over the glorious harmonies in "Sunday"? I find that such an overwhelming moment.
Stephen Sondheim is THE master!
Broadway Star Joined: 3/19/04
re: Chills from a OBC: SITPWG#10
Posted: 1/8/05 at 2:41amThis is also my favorite Sondheim show. Breathtaking and gorgeous - the DVD is must-have, for any theatre fan. The direction, the set, the lighting, the performances, the score, the book, and the MEANING - all brilliant. There is too much to say so I won't say any more than you must let this show become a part of your life. The honesty is enthralling.
re: Chills from a OBC: SITPWG#11
Posted: 1/8/05 at 3:14am
Hopefully I'm not infringing on your copyrights somehow, but I thought it deserved a place here! I give you...Abridged Sunday in the Park With George, by Paradox_Error!
Sunday in the Park With George
George: WHITE
A blank page or...
Colour and Light.
Dot: You spend too much time painting. I'm pregnant and I love you, but I'm leaving for America with the butcher.
George: I don't care/yes I do/no I don't. Painting is all I care about.
(finishes painting)
Now I've finished the painting I can die.
(he dies)
George: Hi everyone. It's now Act Two and I'm the descendant of the George in Act One, except I don't believe that I am. My great grandfather George was really talented, but no one liked him or his paintings. I'm really popular, but I have no talent. But my life sucks, because I have to keep "putting it together."
Marie: I'm in the Painting. Dot was my mother. I'm old and I'm going to die.
(marie dies)
George: Oh my god. I never saw that coming. I'm sad. Now I can't make my crappy light machines.
Dot: I'm a ghost. I think you're my lover, but I'm your grandmother. I'd kiss you, but audiences in America aren't ready for that. But they are ready for big cheezy Musicals starring a gay couple that never even show affection *mutters**shakes fist*. Anyway, move on yada yada yada.
George: Oh, I knew my character had a purpose: It was so we could have a final reprise of that really pretty Sondheim song! I know I'm supposed to say something here. Dot why did you write these strange words in your diary?
Dot: They are YOUR words. You say them all the time.
George: I do? Oh well. Order...(lists off a bunch of the Principles of Art)
WHITE
CURTAIN
re: Chills from a OBC: SITPWG#13
Posted: 1/8/05 at 6:12am
Jackson, Get off this thread!!!
(and I mean that with all the love and compassion in my heart 
)
Broadway Legend Joined: 6/7/04
re: Chills from a OBC: SITPWG#14
Posted: 1/8/05 at 6:20amOne of my favorites. And the closing of Act 1 always makes me teary.
re: Chills from a OBC: SITPWG#15
Posted: 1/8/05 at 6:29amSITPWG has a dvd!!! Why was I not informed?! *Hastily adds it to wish list.*
re: Chills from a OBC: SITPWG#16
Posted: 1/8/05 at 7:05am
I find the final scenes of Act 2 get me every time (Children and Art, Lesson #8, Move on, Sunday (reprise)).
When people say that Act 2 is unnecessary, I just think about those four songs, and I know that it is untrue.
Broadway Legend Joined: 5/18/04
re: Chills from a OBC: SITPWG#17
Posted: 1/8/05 at 7:48am
This is one of the BEST. The soaring harmony in 'Move On' between Peters and Patinkin sends chills up my spine.
Finishing the Hat...and the title song with the ensemble...God...just gorgeous.
Think I'll drag out my copy and listen to it in the car today!
Broadway Legend Joined: 12/4/04
re: Chills from a OBC: SITPWG#18
Posted: 1/8/05 at 7:57amPhilip Quast who played George in the London production with Maria Friedman has recorded FINISHING THE HAT on his Live at the Donmar album. There was also a terrific English documentary filmed at the time of the London premiere although I don't know where you'd find it. Very different set, a stylised version of the painting but same costumes. And we see a few of the numbers in rehearsal with Sondheim watching intently and giving notes to the performers.
re: Chills from a OBC: SITPWG#19
Posted: 1/8/05 at 11:32am
"SITPWG has a dvd!!! Why was I not informed?! *Hastily adds it to wish list.*"
son_of_a_gunn_25, Not only is there a DVD but on that DVD is an audio track with Sondheim, Lapine, Peters and Patinkin's commentary about the show. Great stuff!
By the way, you will also find a very good commentary track on the "Passion" DVD.
Broadway Star Joined: 3/19/04
re: Chills from a OBC: SITPWG#20
Posted: 1/8/05 at 12:28pm
Wildcat -
Quast did it in London? I'm surprised. How was he?
Broadway Legend Joined: 5/14/04
re: Chills from a OBC: SITPWG#21
Posted: 1/8/05 at 12:49pm
Yep, brilliant show and brilliant score. I recently read Deconstructing Harold Hill, and there's a chapter on Sunday that explains a lot of the nuances of the score very well.
I listen to Peters' We Do Not Belong Together almost daily.
Broadway Legend Joined: 5/15/03
re: Chills from a OBC: SITPWG#22
Posted: 1/8/05 at 12:56pm
I posted this a couple of weeks ago, but since there are people here who are coming to Sunday for the first time, I thought I would repost it. Hope those who have read this will indulge me. It verbalizes so much of what makes Sunday so moving to me personally, and sends me back in time 20 years ago to when I saw Sunday at a Saturday matinee two days after it had opened, and it reduced me to a quivering dish rag.
This article was in the August issue of Opera News on the occasion of the Ravinia concert version.
Tableau vivant: as the Ravinia Festival prepares to stage a new production of Stephen Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George, William R. Braun reflects on the musical that has meant more to him than any other.
Opera News August, 2004
All kinds of music and theater have been a vital part of my life for nearly forty years, but there have been only two times I sat in my seat and cried like a kitty. The first was Sunday in the Park with George. (The second was Wagner's Die Meistersinger, but why should I tell you all my problems?) There's never any one reason that a work of art takes over your life. Some of it has to do mostly with you; Sunday happened to be both the last LP album and the first compact disc I ever bought. But I had it bad. When the show was running on Broadway, I went often, but even when I was in New York for an opera or another show, I would drop by the Booth Theater just to make sure everything was O.K. I needed to see those big orange panels with the quotes from the reviews on them. And when the closing was announced, I immediately bought a seat for the final performance.
How could a musical possibly reward anyone for so long? For one thing, Sunday taught me a valuable lesson right from the start. When the show opened, in 1984, my Yale classmate Aaron Jay Kernis accosted me about it right away. "Oh, you have to go," he told me. "There's this number--he barks like a dog." I remember my reply, "What, 'he barks like a dog'? Why Aaron, how Victorian." I went, of course. Even though Aaron was still fourteen years away from his Pulitzer prize as a composer, I already respected his opinion. I saw the show--a rather long show and I hated it.
The show made me angry. It seemed to me that James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim had simply looked at Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte and drummed up a few lines about everything they saw. The dog, the parasol, the hat, the monkey--it just seemed like a lot of lists. This show was to become one of the great touchstones in my life, but the first thing it had done was to piss me off. Lesson number one: the things that will nourish you for the long haul are not necessarily the ones you're going to understand right away.
Why did I go back again? Why did I buy the album? It wasn't conscious. But after a spin of the LP, the show was knocking around in my head. It wasn't exactly that I was hooked--it was more that I was determined to crack the code. I decided that I liked one song, "Finishing the Hat," and I worked outward from there. Sunday was for me the same process in microcosm that Wagner's Ring cycle would be shortly thereafter. Nobody sits down and "gets" the Ring. Most of us start with the "Ride of the Valkyries" in Die Walkure. We can handle that. Then we can manage Act I--no Wotan's monologue, no Fricka, just a big love duet, really. Then we back up to Das Rheingold, with its film-music bookends, we learn the immolation scene as an excerpt on an aria album, and we add the "Forest Murmurs." In a few years, we start to take in the whole Ring. If it was too easy, we wouldn't pay attention, and if we hadn't invested so much in it already, we would give up at the first act of Siegfried.
Sunday, famously, is the bifurcated musical. Act I, set in 1884-86, speculates on the circumstances surrounding Seurat's creation of the painting. His girlfriend Dot (how people used to cringe at that name for the pointillist's love interest!) leaves him. His friend Jules, a fellow artist, is befuddled. During the final moments of the act, the song "Sunday," Seurat gathers everything around him into the grouping we now recognize as his masterpiece. Act II takes place a century later. The painting is hanging in a gallery, where the artist's great-grandson, also an artist named George, is unveiling an installation with the help of his grandmother Marie (Dot's daughter by Seurat). This George, artistically blocked, then visits La Grande Jatte, where in the finale Dot returns and mistakes him for his Famous ancestor.
The received wisdom on Sunday is that Act I is fun, if not much more than a trick, and Act II is dispensable. When you are really deep into Die Walkure, you don't care about the "Ride." You care about the Fricka--Wotan duet, the monologue and the Wotan-Brunnhilde scene after the Valkyries leave. (And the first time somebody tells you this will happen, you think he is insane.) In Act II of Sunday, Marie is tired from the ordeal of the gallery opening. She calls George "Henry." Quietly, and a little alarmed, he replies, "It's George, grandmother." She catches herself. "Of course it is. I thought you were your father for a moment."
The first time your mother momentarily doesn't recognize you, it changes you. When she no longer recognizes you at all, it changes you again. But what is a moment like this doing in a musical? At the end, back on La Grande Jatte, young George recognizes Dot from the painting, but she mistakes him for Seurat. She tells him, "You gave me so much." What is he to do? He allows her to give back anyway. For years, a woman of a certain age worked at the sheet-music store in downtown New Haven, and for years when I came in, she would smile the most dazzling smile at me and beam, "Hello, Paul!" Paul was the conductor of the chorus where I was the assistant, and he looked a little like me. But I could never say anything. She made me so happy; it made her happy.
The people at the gallery in Act II are the only characters in a musical who behave like people I know. There are the rotes who tell you way too much. "Harriet has just gone through a rather messy divorce," says Billy by way of introducing his girlfriend. People who don't know what to say still have to say something. Take Harriet's comment on George's work: "They are getting so large." But the line that really drew me into Sunday comes when a disagreement develops over one object in the painting. Blair Daniels, an art critic, attempts to cut off conversation. "I've read all there is to read about this painting," she begins. This musical first ticked me off, then made friends, then cut me off at the knees. (Lesson number two: stop reading. What do you think?) Eventually, Marie is left alone in front of the painting. We've learned that the figure in the right foreground is Dot, that she left him when she was pregnant with his baby. "Isn't she beautiful?" Marie sings. In a moment where I remember my heart literally skipping a beat, she goes on, "There she is"--she points at Dot, then points at other figures. "There she is, there she is, there she is--Mama is everywhere/ he must have loved her so much." And what, Dear Reader, will you leave behind when you go?
I haven't talked about the music. Sunday, defiantly, doesn't have a single song that makes much sense by itself. The score is a single piece made from just a few germinal ideas. There is a motive of pecking, stabbing thirds and fourths that represents Seurat dabbing away at his work. He first sings it at the words "blue blue blue blue/blue blue blue blue," the syllables piling up like dots of color, at the beginning of the song "Color and Light." (Soon he is blazing along--"Di-ag-ag-ag-ag-ag-o-nal-nal," he chants, syllables that cut a lightning bolt across my field of vision whenever I hear them or read them.) As Seurat works, Dot dabs with a powder puff, getting ready to go out to the Follies with him. She imagines herself as a Follies dancer. The motive now pumps away in the bass, half-speed for a can-can. At the end of the number, the dots pile up, quicker and more numerous, till they form chiming chords; it's the musical equivalent not of a black-out but of a white-out. Later, George is sketching his mother during the song "Beautiful." As he sings the lines "Pretty isn't beautiful, mother/Pretty is what changes," the chiming chords glide along in stately fashion, now smooth at quarter-speed. I've played this as an interlude in church and reduced people to tears, even without the words.
I became obsessed with a passage from the start of Act II. The figures in the painting are still lined up, motionless, in position from the end of Act I. Most of them bicker and complain--it's hot, it's boring--but Dot turns and sings a cool, smooth solo, beginning with "Hello, George" and ending with "Yes, thank you George, for that ... / And for the hat." It stuck in my head for years. It would repeat in a loop when I was jogging or falling asleep. It folded back on to itself as the pitches slowly climbed to the highest note on "hat" at the end. It was like an origami swan. And that first "Hello, George" had always been something Dot sang quickly as she chattered away, trying to get Seurat's attention. Now she sang it slowly and sweetly, the rising sixth taking up a whole measure. Seurat never sings this motive, but young George takes it up when he has to schmooze with the guests at the party.
The hat. Lapine plants it in our minds when Seurat explains his technique to Jules. Seurat breaks his Follies date with Dot: "I have to finish the hat." Then in the song, the thought-processes of composer, lyricist and character become palpable. The ideas get gradually longer each time--"Finishing the hat/How you have to finish the hat/How you watch the rest of the world from a window/While you finish the hat"--as the melodic line rises a step at a time. The second stanza has the same pattern, except for an added syllable: "Mapping out a sky/What you feel like, planning a sky./ What you feel when voices that come through a window/ Go/ Until they distance and die." That single extra "Go" on the second try (quietly ringing with "window") is Seurat's tiny bit of extra inspiration, and the stanza then spills into an extra line "Until there's nothing but sky." "Hot" has turned to "hat." And as the deed is done, "hat" turns for one moment to "height." The real achievement of this song is that you believe you are the only one who understands it. Seurat works all night in bad light because he must. I used to practice at 5 A.M. when I was an undergraduate. I would use a credit card (my first) to slip the lock on the music building. I still can't practice if I know that anyone can hear. There must be a half-million people who think they are the only one who understands "Finishing the Hat." Lesson number three: You're not as odd as you think you are.
Back when I played the album over and over, it used to bother me that in the song "Sunday," the voice of the little girl didn't blend with everybody else. Now I realize that I might never have paid attention to the song if it were merely pretty. When I went to the final Broadway performance, at the end of Act 1, as the picture was pulled together one last time, the woman next to me turned. "Jesus!" she said. At the time, I was angry at the intrusion; now I know that she crystallized the moment for me, like a snapshot. (Lesson number four: Why don't you lighten up once in a while?)
I used to go to see Sunday so often because I honestly believed that if I saw it enough, Dot and Seurat would end up together. I don't believe that anymore. But later, I worried that the next time I saw it, I might for the first time not find something new in it. Last week, I was playing the Debussy Violin Sonata, a piece I have known as a listener for twenty-five years and as a performer for eighteen. It's music that works with the transformation of tiny motives, just like Sunday. I had always been puzzled that the pianist never got to play the violinist's main motive in the third movement. ("I've read everything there is to read about this sonata.") I just found it, so slow and blatant that it hid in plain sight. Collecting these thoughts, I just found another correspondence in Sunday. Lesson number five: You're not done yet.
WILLIAM R. BRAUN is a pianist and author based in Connecticut.
re: Chills from a OBC: SITPWG#23
Posted: 1/8/05 at 2:26pm
That's quite a painting, William.
Thank you for sharing.
re: Chills from a OBC: SITPWG#24
Posted: 1/8/05 at 3:20pmi've never seen this show. i need to watch that dvd. i am an art lover. (saw some seurat paintings in an exhibit just the other day, in fact.) is there as strong an art connection in the show as there appears? or is it mostly about a relationship?
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