From the Dramaturg’s Desk: A Deep Dive into SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE
Director’s Note by Ethan Heard
“Anything you do, let it come from you, then it will be new. Give us more to see.”
I treasure this lyric as a mantra. In a season about artists making art, Sunday in the Park with George stands as the definitive piece of music theater on the topic. Personally, it’s my favorite show.
I first directed Sunday in 2012 as my MFA thesis at Yale School of Drama. Preparing this new production for Glimmerglass, I revisited my old notes — and the memories they carry. At the time, we reached out to Stephen Sondheim about the possibility of using a smaller orchestration. To our delight and surprise, he recommended that our music director, Dan Schlosberg (then a composition student), create a new arrangement: “Michael Starobin [the original orchestrator of Sunday and Assassins among many others] will happily advise you.” And Michael did, with extraordinary generosity. I remember visiting his home and listening as he and Dan discussed “the clarinet in bar 82” and how to bring out a motif more clearly. We soaked in every word. That collaboration planted seeds for future work. When I co-founded Heartbeat Opera in New York with my friend Louisa Proske (director of this season’s Tosca), Dan joined us as Co-Music Director and resident arranger.
In graduate school, I was approximately Seurat’s age when he painted A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. A central question in the musical struck me to the core: How do you balance art-making with life-building? Seurat in Act One and George in Act Two represent opposite ends of a spectrum. Lapine and Sondheim’s Seurat is a “genius”: visionary, obsessed, solitary, indifferent to financial success, and willing to sacrifice everything to “finish the hat.” George, the great-grandson they invented for him, is a showman: splashy, commercially successful, but disconnected from his inspiration. Leaving school, I hoped to land somewhere in between — and with a romantic partner.
Thirteen years later, I’m a busy artist still grappling with this question — still navigating the tension between joyfully “mapping out a sky” and worriedly “putting it together.” But now, I’m also a husband, and — just recently — a father.
Returning to Sunday as a parent, I find Marie’s wisdom more potent than ever: “There are only two worthwhile things to leave behind when you depart this world: children and art.” I also feel the story’s tragedy more acutely. Seurat dies at 31 — uncelebrated, unpartnered, and unable to greet or even acknowledge his daughter. (What motivates that choice — pride, fear, guilt?) As Dot and his daughter depart forever, he pleads with himself: “Connect, George, connect.” A century later, his great-grandson echoes those exact words. Fortunately for him, Marie’s red book, and the notes scribbled in the back, help him connect the dots…
In America today, artists and arts organizations are in crisis. As costs soar and government funding dwindles, some performing arts companies are fading away and many artists are choosing other paths. Now more than ever, we need to champion artists and to remember why art matters. We gather in community to feel something together, to harmonize together, to cherish what connects us.
The whole team and I invite you to enter the world of our hat. May it delight you. May it move you. And may it remind you — like it reminds me — of the beauty and necessity in trying to connect.
Sondheim’s Secret by Michael Ellis Ingram
“Good artists borrow, great artists steal.” A version of this aphorism has been credited to innovators from Pablo Picasso to T.S. Eliot, Igor Stravinsky to Steve Jobs. The influence of one creator on another shows up in many forms: Artists may sample, elaborate on, or react against the work of their peers and predecessors. Georges Seurat’s vision, while undeniably unique, developed in conversation with the visions of so many others — painters of his time, anonymous sculptors of antiquity, scientists concerned with color theory and vision. Likewise, Sondheim’s singular musical drew on a wide range of influences, explored here by Michael Ellis Ingram, who conducts the Glimmerglass production.
Make sure no one is looking over your shoulder when you read this. I’m about to tell you a secret…
Stephen Sondheim drew from a dozen different 20th-century styles of classical music to create the inimitable sound world of Sunday in the Park with George. There are lush gardens of sound, as in the late chamber music of Gabriel Fauré and harmonies too achingly beautiful for words. There are dense thickets of rhythm in which every instrument plays a different motif simultaneously, as in that first great climax of The Rite of Spring. Sondheim translated Seurat’s obsessive pointillistic brushstrokes into the mesmerizing minimalistic grooves of John Adams and Philip Glass. (Incidentally, Steve Reich, that other pioneer of minimalism, shared a 40-year friendship of mutual admiration and inspiration with Sondheim.) There is the kind of yearning, distinctly American dissonance you hear in Copland and Bernstein; it makes you feel homesick wherever you are. There are unexpected, heart-wrenching modulations found only in the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, which Sondheim called his “desert island” piece. (When you hear the duet “Move On” in Act Two of Sunday, think of “Oh Bess, Oh Where’s My Bess.”) There are subtly shifting planes of sound, sometimes perfumed like a Debussy prelude and sometimes inscrutable as a Schoenberg Klangfarbenmelodie. The vast world-building soundscapes of Holst and Sibelius, the controlled cacophony of Ives, the Parisian dance hall music sprinkled throughout Poulenc and Milhaud, Scriabin’s synesthesia-infused sound experiments, Puccini’s soaring lyricism — they all find their place in Sunday in the Park with George.
Speaking of Puccini — and please double-check that no one is eavesdropping — Sondheim didn’t like opera much. He found the acting static and complained that words in a foreign language stretched to the breaking point were not the best way to communicate with an audience. Nevertheless, voracious as he was in his stylistic appetite, Sondheim reached deep into the operatic tradition for inspiration while composing Sunday. He borrowed Rossini’s tongue-twisting patter for comedic effect and crafted multi-layered Mozartian ensemble scenes that dazzle the ear with their speed and contrapuntal virtuosity. He included cheeky little snatches of Viennese operetta reminiscent of Lehár’s The Merry Widow or Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus. His choruses conjure something sacred and anthem-like in the tradition of Verdi’s “Va, pensiero.” He put together a network of leitmotifs to rival Wagner’s Ring Cycle, combining and transforming them with kaleidoscopic inventiveness.
MORE TO EXPLORE
Give us more to hear: Conductor Michael Ellis Ingram’s playlist offers an aural accompaniment to his essay on Sondheim’s influences for Sunday in the Park with George.
Color and light… and lasers? In this blog post from the New York Public Library, see how different designers have interpreted young George’s Chromolume in both high-tech and low-tech, even human, ways.
Collaborating on Sunday was no walk in the park; in fact, Lapine called it a “complicated and occasionally painful” process. Hear from Lapine, Sondheim, Bernadette Peters, and many other artists in Lapine’s oral history, Putting it Together: How Stephen Sondheim and I Created Sunday in the Park with George, reviewed here in American Theatre magazine.
Sondheim as Rabbi: Gabrielle Hoyt explores what makes Sondheim’s musicals Jewish in her article for American Theatre magazine.
En pointe-illism: Director/choreographer Eamon Foley always envisioned setting the music of Sunday to contemporary ballet. Check out his music videos for “Color + Light” and “Finishing the Hat” featuring pointe dancers.
Is George Seurat a likeable character? Producer Katie Birenboim teams up with actress Talia Suskauer and director/choreographer Eamon Foley to discuss Sunday’s “essential problem” on her podcast, Call Time. (You can preview their conversation in this blog post on ArtsJournal.)
“In creating a work about a pioneer of modernist art, Mr. Lapine and Mr. Sondheim have made a contemplative modernist musical that, true to form, is as much about itself and its creators as it is about the universe beyond,” wrote Frank Rich in his review of the original 1984 Broadway production for the New York Times. Read the whole thing here.
With 100 years separating George Seurat from his great-grandson, Sunday presents two very different pictures of how to navigate the art world socially and commercially. Compare “The Role of the Artist” in this piece from Music Theatre International.