BWW Reviews: SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE at Elmwood Playhouse

David Chmielewski and Kimberly Hawkey gave beautifully touching performances in Elmwood Playhouse's aesthetically stirring production of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's musical Sunday in the Park With George.

Directors Claudia Stefany and Jennie Marino have worked wonders with their sets and lighting designers (Rob Ward, Chantale Bourdages and Mike Gnazzo) to pull off a small miracle in the limited Elmwood space, as a cast of nearly twenty moved, posed and sang fluidly throughout.

The Sondheim-Lapine fantasy, ever so loosely based on the life of artist Georges Seurat as he conceived and created his masterpiece "Sunday Afternoon on the Isle of La Grande Jatte" is a richly-textured work with moments of sublime beauty mixed with moments of anticipation, frustration, disappointment and disillusion. The angular structure of so many of Sondheim's phrases served to further illustrate the painfully exasperating artistic process.

The pointillist technique that Seurat develop and used in "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" was handled deftly and in visually stunning fashion. However, Stefany and Marino are especially careful not to allow the business of creation in the studio upstage the intensely personal situation unfolding between Seurat and his understandably impatient lover, Dot.

As a parade of trees, sailboats, dogs and monkeys appear and disappear, the story plays out as the terminally determined artist, obliviously ignores the wants and needs of his model/lover. But Dot is not alone in her solitude. All of the other characters in the story are mere subjects to George - objects that he needs to stand still while he sketches them. This treatment even extends to his own mother, whom he impassively yells at to hold still.

David Chmielewski, channeling his inner Mandy Patinkin, did a superb job of fleshing out George's inner discontent in Act One. He elicited more sympathy for George than usual, displaying the artist's pain and disappointment in a very visceral fashion. Some of the role's higher notes felt like they were just a bit beyond Chmielewski's comfort zone, but never enough to interfere with his committed performance. As Dot (and later Marie) Kimberly Hawkey was a delightfully fresh-voiced treat. She handled the difficult phrases which Sondheim constructed for Dot - designed specifically to make her appear nagging - with no difficulty at all and brought a pleasantly sonorous quality to a role than can sometimes come across "barky."

The supporting cast was one of the strongest Elmwood has assembled in quite a while. Special kudos to Steve Taylor as George's sometimes friend/sometimes rival Jules and Helene Gardner as his frequently disappointed wife, as well as Margaret Young as George's hilariously cranky mother and Maryann Felice as her dauntless nurse. The show requires a really strong ensemble to succeed and luckily, there was hardly a weak link in the cast.

Act One of the show - like the painting at its center and the artistic process on which it comments - is a masterpiece of design, form, color and light. Act Two is a bit more traditional and features a great deal of mundane ideas that we've all heard before about money, the commerce of art and the selling out to populism.

But Act Two features unquestionably the most beautiful song in the show, the ravishing "Move On." Ms. Hawkey delivered a gorgeously nuanced rendition, replete with all the pathos, words said and unsaid, that had been building in her character for the duration of the show.

Some say that "Sunday" is a show without a show-stopper, without a big love song or romantic duet. While that is true, the score features some of the most complex and sophisticated music of Sondheim's entire career. Complex and sophisticated are words that rarely heard about successful musicals these days, so special kudos to Elmwood for mounting such an ambitious production - and congratulations for pulling it off so successfully!

The production runs until Dec. 13th. Tickets are available at Elmwood Playhouse.com.

To post a comment, you must register and login.