Review: SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE at Pasadena Playhouse

Composition. Balance. Light. And harmony...talk about kicking off a six-month celebration of Stephen Sondheim with a mighty and legitimate bang.

SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE, the Pulitzer Prize-winning first collaboration between Sondheim and librettist-director James Lapine is quite possibly the Everest of the composer's oeuvre. Not SWEENEY TODD. Not CANDIDE. Not the less accessible earlier works like MERILY WE ROLL ALONG or PACIFIC OVERTURES. This one: the composer's purest depiction of the conflict between art, artistry and commercialism, the work that is so very admired and - given the show's vocal and technical demands - so very difficult to bring off.

Undaunted, The Pasadena Playhouse has drawn the curtain on its 2023 Sondheim Celebration with a lush and poignant rendering of SUNDAY. Directed by Sarna Lapine (James Lapine's niece), the production is a west coast remount of her 2017 Broadway revival with an entirely new cast, but with the same technical team. So while we don't get Jake Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford, we do experience the work of scenic designer Beowulf Borrit, costume designer Clint Ramos, lighting designer Ken Billington and projection designer Tal Yarden. This is no small thing since SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE is a musical about a specific artist's world and artistic vision - George Seurat's - a vision which any major staging of SUNDAY is at some pains to recreate. In other words, we need to see some rendering both of the painting "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" and - through the character of Surat - the world of that painting.

The centerpiece of the "blank canvas" that is Boritt's bare stage is a sloped rear curtain which houses Yarden's projections. Detail elements of Seraut's paintings are lit delicately into focus. The first dress worn by Dot (Krystina Alabado), Seurat's mistress and model, is a rich blue. The deeper we get into the completion of Seurat's masterpiece, the more Ramos's vibrant costumes worn by the park-goers (soldiers, boaters, fine ladies) brighten up the stage. Both George Seurat, and his great-grandson who we met in 1984 (both played by Graham Phillips), spend the entirety of the play in black. But that's George. "Artists are bizarre...fixed...cold..." Alabado's Dot sings to her lover in the opening song, "I like that in a man...fixed...cold."

The wonderful first act of SUNDAY finds George trying to impose some sort of aesthetic order onto the life of his painting - the only thing he can control - while his romantic life is falling into disarray. So George sketches various park visitors (some unaware, others against their will), neglecting Dot who he promises to take to the follies. Instead, he toils obsessively to "finish the hat," (a song that has become something of a Sondheim thematic catch phrase). As Dot eventually loses patience and takes up with Louis the Baker, George works on, more at ease chattering away with a couple of dogs that he's sketching than with people. In Act 2 - less interesting - we fast-forward to 1984 where Seurat's great-grandson, who is also an artist also named George, unveils a multimedia "chromolume" that pays tribute to the painting. The nature of the art-commerce struggle has changed in two hundred years, but not so very much. The second act is a bit heavy-handed in its didacticism, but the song "putting it together" is an awfully terrific way of bringing that messaging home.

Phillips brings an easy blend of moodiness and awkwardness to the titular artist. You get why the ladies of Paris find this George alluring and mysterious as well as inaccessible. With the original Broadway production immortalized on American Playhouse, George's first portrayer, Mandy Patinkin, is a brutally tough act for any actor to follow. But Phillips, who sings powerfully and has been upping his southland stage game recently, carries the show quite ably.

Ditto Alabado, whose sensuousness and humor as Dot give these proceedings a sweet dose of humanity. The actress beautifully taps into Dot's desire to be loved and valued (truthfully, the character deserves better than George) and she snaps off some old lady burns in Act 2 in the role of Seurat's daughter, Marie. Michael Manuel is strong as Jules, the lesser artist whose approval the insecure Seurat is continuously seeking.

SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE is a musical full of characters (besides George) who are disoriented, nostalgic or somehow lost. At the close of the first act, during the song "Sunday," George ushers everybody gracefully into his or her proper place on his completed canvas. It's a beautiful sequence, sublimely staged. And it's immediately undercut, after intermission, as the characters who are now permanently in place on the canvas air their petty gripes in the comic number "It's Hot Up Here."

Sondheim was indeed a master. The Pasadena Playhouse has put one of his masterworks on shimmering display.

Photo of Graham Phillips and the company of SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE by Jeff Lorch

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