Thursday, February 11, 2021
Theater: "Sunday," Sunday in the Park with George, Stephen Sondheim
Never has a song captured me on so many levels and left me with goosebumps every time I hear it. Sunday in the Park with George is one of the first shows I ever saw on Broadway, and "Sunday" finishes Act I by bringing together all the characters we've met as individual people as they stand and relocate and adjust as a growing ensemble and ultimately form a living, singing, haunting, as-close-as-humanly-possible re-creation of Georges Seurat's defining painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. The score of the entire show is peppered with quick little notes that evoke the peppered-dot painting style of Pointillism, and the dreamy lyrics meander through the endless combinations of colors Pointillist painters used to create light and shade and depth and movement in their work. And the last sung lyrics—"... on an ordinary Sunday!"—stand in gloriously stark contrast to the shimmering, fortissimo, every-possible-note chording in the orchestra that is powerfully, thrillingly anything but normal.
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I recall watching this on PBS shortly after it was recorded and was stunned by the ending of the first act. The show could have ended there and I would have been satisfied. Still get shivers thinking about it.
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