Seeking Order, Design And Tension

It’s a stunning moment: Georges Seurat is standing behind a scrim, facing the audience, his hand vibrating as he dots his canvas with specks of dazzling pigment. 

“More light,” he says. “More color.” His new technique, pointillism, enthralls him, even as it appears to offend the vanguard of 19th-century artists in France, the impressionists, who laid on paint with strokes of pigment, swiftly, it seemed, perhaps impulsively. 

“Sunday in the Park with George,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, who wrote the book, is itself theatrically groundbreaking.

But, like the artist, Seurat, the play is repetitive, limited and self indulgent, dwelling on a character who puts work ahead of everything else in life. And Joshuah Patriarco plays Georges in Act I of “Sunday in the Park” as a growly, bearded fellow with a vision he cannot let slip for a moment. His mistress and model, Dot (Alex Heinin), cannot reach him. Nor can the prospect of fatherhood, nor his critics like Jules (Bob Greenberg). He pursues order, design, composition, tension and balance. He tells us this repeatedly. And Sondheim and Lapine, I suspect, are reaching for the same dimensions in this work.

The effort is aided mightily by a huge projection of “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte,” Seurat’s sublime painting of 19th-century Parisians, very restricted and vertical, at their leisure in sun and shadow. 

By the end of Act I, all the characters in this musical are set out on the stage to parallel those in the extraordinary painting.

“More dots, more trees,” Georges cries, setting the scene, and a tree drops into place from the flies.

Director Andy Weintraub played every angle to make this musical work, sliding characters in on small sets, and  pets, too (a runty dog and a monkey on a chain), across the stage, investing in a fine orchestra directed by Paul and Joanne Schubert and leaning mightily on Seurat’s art. “Bathers at Asnières” appears splendidly with its doughy, pale figures lounging by a river. 

Many in the cast are very fine: Faith Compo as the old lady stands out and so does the wonderful Lisa Lynds as Mrs. Blair Daniels, a tourist seen toting the “Mona Lisa” back to America. And Patriarco seems a little less a caricature in Act II in which he plays George, Georges Seurat’s fictional great grandson, an inventive 21st-century artist harried by the demands of 21st-century critics, museums and sponsors.

The singing is fine and the orchestrations are particularly affecting, adding some of the tension Sondheim and Lapine, like the artist, were seeking here.

This is a big, adventurous and brave production and the images shine.

“Sunday in the Park With George” runs at Rhinebeck’s Center for Performing Arts in Rhinebeck, NY, through Jan. 25. For tickets, call 845-876-3080.