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
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