Pictured above: Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine in front of New York's Booth Theatre.
Written by: Liz Bazzoli, Staff Writer
“The challenge: bring order to the whole through design.”- Stephen Sondheim
The year is 1981. Following a decade-long series of culturally defining shows like Company, Follies, and A Little Night Music, a 51-year-old Stephen Sondheim breaks his and director Hal Prince’s winning streak with Merrily We Roll Along. Panned by critics, the show flops, running for only 16 performances. A truly devastated Sondheim, whose compositions for the show receive a disproportionate amount of criticism, steps out of the spotlight, and considers leaving theatre entirely.
I don’t think I truly discovered Stephen Sondheim—or at least associated the name with any of his work—until my freshman year of high school. As a child raised on musical theatre, I had of course heard “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” and would regularly reenact “Send In The Clowns” in the back of my mom’s Mitsubishi, but that these songs came from the same man was lost on me. Sunday in the Park with George, a musical I only listened to because I thought it would impress my high school theatre director, was a gateway to a deeper and darker realm of dramaturgical influences.
Growing up as a shy, emotionally-reserved musical theatre kid, I felt a certain disconnect from the medium. I knew nothing about music, I was too clumsy to do anything that even resembled dance, and acting before an audience of my peers was an unfathomable horror. Still, I felt a connection to Sondheim and specifically to Sunday. Without even understanding dramaturgy, I still twinkled with the uniquely dramaturgical fascination for historical interpretation. I heard Seurat in conversation with Sondheim—they both spoke to me in a way that elicited a passion for artistic creation from which I had previously felt estranged. All I wanted was to find a way to answer back.
It’s 1984. Sondheim, now 54, hasn’t composed for Broadway since Merrily We Roll Along nor has he collaborated again with Hal Prince. The critical response to Merrily feels personal, as though Sondheim’s former friends and colleagues tried to catalyze career failure for him. Feeling alienated from New York’s theatre circles, Sondheim finds solidarity and mutual artistic respect in a young James Lapine. Lapine, whose career is on an opposing trajectory to Sondheim’s, just finished writing the book for William Finn’s March of the Falsettos and is now directing an avant-garde production of his own play, Twelve Dreams.
Sondheim instantly loves Twelve Dreams. Lapine’s nontraditional directorial style stands contrary to the Broadway old hats who bemoaned Merrily We Roll Along. The two immediately hit it off and agree to collaborate in creating a new musical. Sondheim wants to experiment with theme and variation; Lapine wants to do something French. Thus, the idea for Sunday in the Park with George was born. Sunday would follow a fictionalized Georges Seurat, now anglicized to “George”, as he works on his magnum opus, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Both men spend entire days at the Art Institute of Chicago analyzing—dare I say dramaturging—the painting to understand Seurat’s creative process. The painting beautifully portrays its subjects, but where is the artist?
A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte came at a point in Georges Seurat’s career where he was well-acquainted with rejection. As a pioneer of pointillism, a technique in which an artist paints in distinct brush strokes, Seurat stood apart from other Impressionist painters and subsequently struggled to find a sense of belonging in the movement. His prior painting, Bathers at Asnières, was rejected for exhibition at the Paris Salon in 1884. Undeterred, Seurat committed himself to the massive Sunday Afternoon in the same year. When the painting premiered two years later, exhibited at the 1886 Salon, it took the European art world by storm. In the span of two years, Seurat had cleared a space in art history for himself.
Stephen Sondheim, coming off his own devastating rejection, sees himself in Seurat. In Seurat’s painstaking flecks of paint, Sondheim sees the combined pain and liberation of art-making. The artist faces criticism and dismissals, but pushes on. So, just like a young Georges Seurat, Sondheim spins creative torment into gold and creates his own Tony-nominated, Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece.
Pictured above: A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jette by Georges Seurat.
I listened to Sunday in the Park with George every single morning on the drive to school. I knew the words by heart; “Finishing the Hat” was my most played song of 2018. I understood that Sunday was an almost entirely fabricated biography of Georges Seurat. Seurat died of diptheria at the young age of 31 and had no surviving children. Though a notable figure in the Neo-Impressionist movement, Seurat lived the standard life of any upper-class French art student. Yet, Georges Seurat was never truly Sondheim’s George. Sunday was never meant to be a biographical study of Seurat or his magnum opus but rather a study of artistry itself: the sacrifices, the undying passion, the maddening strives towards satisfaction. I loved Sunday because I was George. Stephen Sondheim was George. Georges Seurat was George. Sondheim’s historiography drew a connection from his own artistic struggles to the imagined struggles of an artist from a century prior. Sunday in the Park with George is confabulation as narrative in the purest form, and there is something distinctly dramaturgical in that practice.
It’s 2022. Stephen Sondheim died at the age of 91 in November of last year. I feel an inexplicable grief for a man I never knew nor ever had the faintest hope of knowing. My dramaturgical process is based in communicating with the dead. For me, grieving is a dramaturgical act. I’m a firm believer in time as a circle, not a linear path leading in only one direction. Sondheim and Seurat were just two guys who made pieces of art—some good and some considerably less noteworthy. Their artistic spirit, however, is ethereal, transcending time and space. Such is the nature of the artist—simultaneously a point of convergence for centuries of influence and the progenitor of future artists in their stead.
Historical interpretation is a delicate matter fraught with ethical considerations. As a result there is a precedent to distance oneself from the figures they cover. With Sunday in the Park, Sondheim challenged this limited style of interpretation by essentially self-inserting himself into the life of Georges Seurat. Historical figures do exist in their respective time periods but they also live on in their respective legacies. As a dramaturg, I want to convene with the voices of the past and future—I want to bring order to the whole. I understand that, in writing about Sondheim, I am projecting onto a dead man, but Sondheim did the same with Seurat. Dramaturgy is about channeling historical resonance, contextualizing the past for now. To some extent, that historical contextualization requires personal connection, and I see Sunday in the Park with George as emblematic of the dramaturg’s pursuit.
Love what you're reading? Subscribe to our newsletter!