Terrific New Theatre's Splendid SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE: A Stage Review

Forty years ago, Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine unleashed on the world a difficult, demanding, rapturous musical called Sunday in the Park with George. Developed Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons, it was Sondheim’s return to the musical theatre after the initial failure of Merrily We Roll Along. Part Broadway and part avant-garde, Sunday was a major step forward for musical theatre writing and remains one of the relatively few musicals to have won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Over time, Sunday happily found its place in the repertory of American musicals, so it’s hard to imagine now how groundbreaking it was in 1984. Sunday’s score was hard on the untrained ear to those who wanted simple, jaunty melodies, so much so that when Jerry Herman won the Tony that year for La Cage aux Folles, he used his acceptance speech to denigrate Sunday, which is now regarded as not only one of Sondheim’s finest works but a masterpiece of the American stage.

Terrific New Theatre chose Sondheim’s groundbreaking work for their own groundbreaking in a beautiful new performance space on the north side of Birmingham. I’m happy to report their production is a marvel. David Strickland has provided what should be the template for doing Sunday in a small space with no proscenium. He and musical director Michael King have assembled a top-notch cast of actor-singers to bring this intimate look at artists’ lives to shimmering life.

Act I of the show focuses on George Seurat, the forward-thinking and critically ignored French artist and his model/mistress Dot, who loves George despite his inability to connect with her on a normal human level because of his work on A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, the famous pointillist painting. Act II flashes forward a hundred years to a possible descendant of George (also named George) who navigates the world of modern art and produces endless light inventions that have made him stagnant. Feeling he has nothing more to say, he is confronted by his forebears and is urged to break through to something new.

Being a Sondheim aficionado, I spent some time with the libretto and score before venturing to the theater. Not a single beat is missing from TNT’s production. From the seamless way George stalks the park and gives voice to his models to the long, uncomfortable silence before a single note of the Act II opening number is played. While one can still innovate, Sondheim’s works require productions faithful to the text and there is little to find fault with here.

Caleb Clark and Kristen Campbell are so splendid in their respective roles that one almost thinks they’re not acting at all. They have gone past performance into living the roles. Clark’s full-throated George (eschewing Patinkin-like falsetto) is a triumph of craft, as close to perfection in singing and acting as possible. Campbell seduces the audience each time she is onstage, taking us with her on every emotional plane from her neglected Dot to the reminiscing Marie.

Birmingham theatre legend Celeste Burnum plays George’s mother (and an art critic in the second act) and brings deep emotion and feeling to both her scenes and her gutwrenching duet with George, “Beautiful.” The two Celestes of Act I (played by Alex Hawkins and Harmony Grace Leverett) are endlessly funny in their scenes with Blake West as the slightly “odd” Soldier. Ryder Dean, perhaps, stands out as one of the most colorful onstage—first as the coachman Franz in Act I and as George’s longsuffering technical assistant Dennis. Both are fully realized characters by a natural talent.

While Holly Dikeman’s Yvonne is expertly played (and her Naomi a highlight of the second act), there might have been more depths in the character of Jules than Chris Carlisle had yet to plumb prior to opening—though he more than makes up for that facile performance in a hilarious Act II bit as the museum director.

For many years, even theatre people felt like Sunday was a great first act with a second act let-down. Enough time has passed that this initial conception has thankfully been completely railroaded. The entire meaning of Sunday lies in its experimental second act and that it is given the equal weight it is due is much to the production’s credit.

The few things one could quibble with—the unnecessary “dance” during “Everybody Loves Louie” in which one could only hear the creaking of the upstage platform or the way Dot did not seem to change her gait while pregnant—can be dismissed as few shows are seldom perfect. Some deficiencies could not be helped—the score is played in a reduced instrumentation by a fine ensemble, but the score did suffer from the lack of original orchestrator Michael Starobin’s idiosyncratic percussion and the terrible lack of French horn. This Sunday, though, is the closest thing to perfect Sondheim I’ve seen live.

In the end, I go to the theatre to be moved. I don’t want something clever, intellectual, brain-tickling, preachy—anything of that kind. I go to be emotionally moved. So, I suppose, the finest compliment I can give this production is that I was in tears as the end of each act, listening to a remarkable chorus sing “Sunday” from the feather-soft opening to its miraculous climax. I think this is a sold-out show but go onto the theater and get in line to see if somebody has the gall not to show up. You won't regret it.

The final performances of this Sunday are tonight and tomorrow at 7:30pm and Sunday at 2:30pm. Photographs courtesy Steven Ross.

Sunday in the Park with George

Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim

Book by James Lapine

Directed by David Strickland

Musical Direction by Michael King

Musical Staging by Tahauny Cleghorn

Terrific New Theatre

2112 5th Ave N; Birmingham, AL 35203

Netflix and Cold Cases: Two Reviews

I have occasionally made comments on this blog that America has become a sick nation in its ravenous appetite for true crime. It is obvious, from some of my posts, however, that I suffer from the same sickness. I suppose this is due to the fact that nothing excites me more than to see Netflix dropping another of its three-part docuseries which, almost always, are well made, enlightening, and (oddly enough) fun to watch—you know, in the sick way.

The streaming platform has been dumping them left and right recently, from an overview of the Menendez case which counteracts the events portrayed in Ryan Murphy’s atrocious miniseries to two of its most recent and best—Phil Lott and Ari Mark’s This is the Zodiac Speaking and Joe Berlinger’s Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey.

Both share the hallmarks of a well-made docuseries—new information from today’s hindsight, never before seen (and never before considered) photographic evidence, and hope that the cold cases discussed might come to a close in the near future.

This is the Zodiac Speaking **** out of ****

The Zodiac killer, like Jack the Ripper, has come to be an example of a case in which most people have simply thrown up their hands with the realization that it may never see a light at the end of the tunnel. Instead, this series focuses almost exclusively on a well-known suspect, Arthur Leigh Allen, and the people who knew him.

With laser sharp focus, Lott and Mark make their case, through dozens of talking head interviews, with journalists, criminalists, and a family known as the Seawaters who were acquainted with Allen and were also victims of the once prisoned (and now deceased) pedophile with violent tendencies. You leave the series dizzy with hope that old samples of DNA may finally nail Allen, even if it’s from beyond the grave.

In this way, it shares a lot of similarities with HBO Max’s adaptation of the late Michelle McNamara’s unfinished tome, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, in which an amateur sleuth (the wife of comedian Patton Oswalt) gave a name and set the stage for the arrest of the Golden State Killer. We are familiar with films, like Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line, in which the documentarian penetrates the truth in a way the courts cannot and changes the course of criminal history. One waits for the fallout of This Is the Zodiac Speaking.

Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey ***½ out of ****

One filmmaker whose works have led to such exonerations is Joe Berlinger, the co-director of the Paradise Lost documentaries. He is to Netflix what Alex Gibney is to HBO. While his films are rarely as intelligent or penetrative as Gibney’s, they are visually arresting (even with the camera glued to nothing more than an audio cassette spooling forward) and do what great documentaries do—ask better questions, rather than giving concrete answers.

The cases of the 1990s have exploded in recent years. Suddenly, Menendez, Simpson, Ramsey, and other cases with dubious outcomes, have been investigated more thoroughly. Again, with hindsight—away from the flickering lights of the hype—you have time to go deeper than ever in these cases and come out seeing things which were impossible to notice at the time.

The greatest revelations of Cold Case involve the systematic way the Colorado police fed journalists the fodder to support their own conclusion—that John and Patsy Ramsey were the killers. A famous South Park episode even included them with Simpson and Gary Condit, portraying them as liars who knew what happened and withheld information. Berlinger’s docuseries refutes their assumed guilt with an almost scientific method of dissecting what was going on behind the scenes.

Ramsey’s case, with her youth alone, will always be one that touches hearts and the damnation with which Berlinger rains down on the police is exquisitely rendered. The series perhaps doesn’t give us the light at the end of the tunnel Zodiac provides, but it most certainly exonerates the parents, one of which (by the grace of God), no longer must live defending herself.

*****

I’m not sure what draws normal audiences to these dissections of extreme violence. I don’t know what draws me except to say, in these days of uncertainty, I turn more and more to non-fiction, to truth telling. I would much rather see another three-part doc than a lazy fictional movie of which we are about to have an avalanche in time for Christmas. Filmmakers such as these go after the truth. My hat remains forever off to them.

This is the Zodiac Speaking

Netflix, 2024

Directed by Phil Lott and Ari Mark

Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey

Netflix, 2024

Directed by Joe Berlinger

The Holiday Season: A Prose-Poem

The cold is finally here. Jackets and layers. The quickening of the dark. The sense that something special is drawing near. Christmas has moved up a little each year. It used to be no decorations went up until the day after Thanksgiving. Now, pretty much every house, town, and most stores are already decorated. The music is already on the radio. Most people are just giving themselves over to it. We’ve had a rough few years and need the holiday season.

During Halloween, I simply mourn the fact that children of today will never know the crowded streets and roads with kids roaming to every house in search of candy. They only know trunk-or-treats. Their parents have a reason to be scared, but it wasn’t always that way.

Christmas will always hold a special place in my heart as my three-year-old Christmas is my first memory. It will always hold a special place for religious reasons. It holds a special place because there are wonderful novels, films, and television specials that spin heart-notes of nostalgia. A bright spot in the bleak midwinter indeed.

Thanksgiving has become overlooked as something we are all duty-bound toward but is not all that exciting: eating too much (sometimes with people we can’t stand) and watching football. There is a simple pleasure in this that maybe just doesn’t hit the world of today where so many families are broken. Yes, family sometimes drive you crazy, but they can also ground you to your roots and, if you’ve been blessed with a good home from whence you came, the time should be relished.

Of course, over the years, the table has gotten both smaller and bigger. My father and his enormously joyous presence are sorely missed, but the addition of my nephew’s wife adds to the joy of the family gatherings. Even dogs and grand-dogs and the odd cat. Again, I know not all families are like mine—the kind where you sincerely desire to be around your flesh and blood—and I mourn for those who settle for Friendsgiving parties or no longer have their family.

I plan to do a lot more thinking and less talking this Thanksgiving. Meditating on the things for which I’m grateful and simply smiling at the faces around me, which are all bound by familial ties and even look a little alike.