Sunday in the park with Georgecurrently running in a limited run at New York’s Hudson Theater starring Jake Gyllenhaal, is a completely politics-free film — a two-and-a-half-hour respite from contemporary anxiety, and a holiday on the banks of the Seine, bathed in sunlight and glorious beauty. harmony. Yet, without any effort at all, he presents one of the most compelling cases imaginable regarding the power of artists, and how deeply integrated their work is in a well-organized society. Art shows us, as George Gyllenhaal shows his mother in one of Act One’s most poignant songs, how beautiful life can be.
But instead of simply celebrating the fruits of creative labor, Sunday in the park It is a testimony to practical making art; A great peek inside the mind of someone wrestling with his genius. When the show debuted in 1984, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by James Lapine, it was interpreted as one of Sondheim’s most personal expressions, coming in the wake of his critical and financial bombshell, Cheerfully we roll along. George, the show’s hero, is obsessed with his paintings, to the detriment of everything else in his life. But as the series unfolds, moving from 19th-century France to 1980s Chicago, it explores the reasons behind his obsession with one single thought, and how George’s role as observer allows everyone else to see the world differently, too.
That’s largely because this revival, directed by Sarna Lapine (James Lapine’s niece), is so gorgeous and so emotionally rich, anchored by the performances of Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford as George’s lover and artistic model, Dot. The show is based on Georges Seurat’s 1884 pointillist artwork, “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.”“,” George is a loose version of Seurat, and his life is widely fictionalized. As he draws studies for Dot, who complains about the discomfort, the heat, and George’s intense focus on his work, projections of his drawings appear on a background on stage, so that the audience can view them in real time. Throughout George narrates his thought process: the challenge of bringing order and harmony to a blank canvas.
Gyllenhaal’s talents as an actor have been well documented by now, so it’s his vocal talents that might come as a surprise (note, if you haven’t already, that Cary Fukunaga’s short video Gyllenhaal sings “Finish the Hat” by George V. Hudson). His voice is rich, measured and emphatic. But it’s the acting behind it that really digs in, a brilliant mix of technical achievement and intense absorption in the role. When he sings about mapping the sky, sensing the sounds outside but getting completely lost in concentration, “feeling dizzy from the height” from falling back to the ground, you tend, like Dot, to forgive him everything.
Ashford, who won a Tony Award for the 2014 revival of the goofy comedy You can’t take it with youis the perfect foil for George as Dot: sassy, practical and endlessly charming. But she also conveys the exquisite pain of loving someone unreachable, and her chemistry with Gyllenhaal is pure. Toward the end of the first act, when George directs the many elements and characters to come together in a synergy of music and visuals, he places Dot at the front of the “painting,” as if to keep her close. But the supporting cast is also skilled at bringing comedic relief and balancing the show’s chemistry: Robert Sean Leonard as Jules, an accomplished artist; Penny Fuller as George’s mother, lost in nostalgia; Philip Boykin as an ugly and arrogant navigator. The peripheral characters are by nature fleeting archetypes, and are included to provide contrast with the more textured images of George and Dot.
The second act of Sunday in the parkwhich jumps forward to 1984 — with Gyllenhaal playing another artist named George, Ashford and his grandmother, Mary, Dot’s daughter — often seemed discordant after the first act was completed, but Lapine manages to make the two halves more symbiotic by emphasizing how George’s art is connected. With his great grandfather. Just as Seurat used pointillism and the science of light to create new colors and impressions, in 1984 George exhibited a light installation called “Chromolum” at the Art Institute of Chicago. Created by scenic designer Beowulf Burritt, the work looms above the audience in a dazzling display of highlights, textures and undulations above. Ashford, who seamlessly plays a 90-year-old Southern grandmother, illustrates George’s isolation and creative frustration in “Children and Art,” a song directed at her mother in the painting. The cracks in her vocals and the deliberate vulnerability in Marie’s voice make it one of the most poignant numbers on the show.
Modern-day George’s frustrations are different but rooted in the same concerns – unlike his great-grandfather, he must fundraise for his expensive, technologically advanced works, and respond to the criticism he inevitably receives. But in “Move On,” it becomes clear that the two are one and the same, struggling to make art that matters, and to do something new. The solution to the show comes from realizing that just doing the work is enough, everything else is out of the artist’s hands. This production, directed with great skill, emphasizes the value of struggle and the immortality of great art. It’s really powerful to have the experience, even briefly, of seeing the world through the eyes of a visionary.