by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine

July 28-30 & August 4-6, 2005 at the Contemporary Arts Center

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In honor of the 75th birthday of Stephen Sondheim, our greatest and most influential living musical theatre composer, NSC is proud to present the long-overdue regional premiere of his Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE. 

This beloved work is rarely produced, due to its intense musical, technical, and visual demands, not to mention its strong ties to the iconic original Broadway production.  NSC is very proud to present a visually reimagined, multimedia production of this masterwork, designed by Pete Thornbury and directed by Alan Patrick Kenny. 

"Sunday is itself a modernist creation, perhaps the first truly modernist work of musical theatre that Broadway has produced ... a watershed event that demands nothing less than a retrospective, even revisionist, look at the development of the serious Broadway musical."- Frank Rich, The New York Times

"After Merrily We Roll Along 's devastating flop in 1981, Stephen Sondheim thought about abandoning the theater. He wrote one of his most beloved shows instead, Sunday in the Park with George . Sondheim and his new collaborator, librettist/director James Lapine, used George Seurat's painting "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte " as a way to tackle the issue of artistic creation itself. Both Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters play two different parts with brio, jumping across decades with ease, and they get to deliver some of Sondheim's most heartwrenching songs--"Color and Light," "Finishing the Hat," "Putting It Together," and "Children and Art." Sunday in the Park with George is one of the most intellectually ambitious musicals to ever hit Broadway--and one of the most emotionally rewarding . --Elisabeth Vincentelli, Amazon.com

THE STORY:
Stephen Sondheim's landmark 1984 musical Sunday in the Park with George is a fictional representation of maverick French Impressionist painter Georges Seurat's efforts to create his masterpiece, Sunday Afternoon on the Isle of La Grande Jatte . Seurat, originally played by Mandy Patinkin, is obsessed with his work, to the frustration of his mistress, Dot (originally played by Bernadette Peters). Along the way, we meet many other characters--whoever happens to be in the park that Sunday--who eventually become part of the canvas.

Act 2 fast-forwards 100 years. Patinkin now plays Seurat's great-grandson, George, himself a frustrated artist. In the score's best-known song, "Putting It Together," George (and Sondheim himself) explains the hazards of trying to create art while also confronting the reality of having to pay for it. In a search for inspiration, George travels with his grandmother--Seurat and Dot's daughter (played by Peters)--to the original island where Seurat created the painting. As with Sondheim and cocreator James Lapine's next collaboration, Into the Woods , Sunday is often criticized for redirecting its focus in the second act instead of letting the first act stand by itself as a complete work. The second act, however, is the emotional core of the show, as George confronts all the feelings his great-grandfather had repressed so many years ago.

Stephen Sondheim's brilliant score is remarkable for its combination of vivid colors (listen to his dots of sound that represent Seurat's pointillistic style of painting), character pieces, and sheer beauty. The cast is terrific, and the show, aced out of most of the 1984 Tony Awards by La Cage aux Folles , won the Pulitzer Prize for drama.