This is an excellent article from Opera News about Sunday in the Park with George. It may give you some tips on how to reapproach the show, when you watch or listen to it again.
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.
Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop.
