Sunday in the Park with George Review
Image credits: Paul Ashley www.paulashleyphotography.co.uk
4.5/5 stars
Sunday in the Park with George is a slow burn with a light touch. It felt strange walking into this musical of almost endless Sundays on a Wednesday night in a frantic Cambridge term, and then it felt necessary. The ADC production, directed by Dylan Evans and produced by Eva Lemmy, is on from Tuesday 7 to Saturday 11 February, and it’s by no means your typical razzamatazz American musical – if anything, though, this makes it all the more worth taking seriously. Tungsten Tang’s set is carefully designed, from the initially understated staging emerge abstract trees, ‘colour and light’ – executed by Christopher Wordsworth – and a canvas, one that the cast comes to literally and metaphorically fill.
The titular ‘George’, played with a quiet luminosity here by Eoin McCaul, is the French pointillist painter Georges Seurat (1859-1891), whose paintings of Parisian bathers you might well recognise. Perhaps surprisingly for us, he was dismissed or deemed too radical by most contemporaries, and died suddenly very young.
The musical, a collaboration between Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, traces George’s relationship with his girlfriend and Dot (a pointed choice of name given George’s chosen style of art?), portrayed in this production by Annie Stedman with a compelling combination of energy and dignity. George is ‘bizarre, fixed and cold’, unable to look up from his work even for date nights, and later, more important occasions, and yet there is humanity there.
The script gives credence to the idea that this artist is genuinely misunderstood; he desperately tries to communicate through his art, including to his friend-cum-rival Jules. Ironically, the only one who does understand him (other than, perhaps, his mother) – that is, Dot – also understands that this opens a gulf between the two of them. In her words, she is ‘unfinished’ and he is ‘complete’, as if they are two works of art that can’t quite settle together. Without giving the game (and the flash-forward second act) away, the narrative unfolds through the microcosm of Sundays, in the park, with George. This proves to be quite the breeding ground for goings-on: Dot contorts herself to keep still as his model, George’s mother Old Lady pesters her Nurse (‘where is the tree?’) and reminisces, young women flirt with soldiers, a German couple bicker, an artist couple fail to impose ‘discipline’ on their daughter, a Boatman models for George with his dog, and then protests, and American tourists simper towards their new favourite baker Louis – to whom Dot later takes a shine.
This tapestry makes for, intentionally I think, quite a disparate feel to the ensemble: couples and trios saunter off here and there, only to fall out and run off in new configurations. Amidst this backdrop the two principals unassumingly and self-evidently shine. Their voices are individually both flawless – dextrously managing rapid lyrics and sustaining longer, challenging lines – and McCaul’s number ‘Finishing the Hat’ especially stood out for me. Here, they also complemented one another beautifully: McCaul’s voice is so rich and yet comes from such a calm figure that it seems almost effortless, while Stedman brings verve and clarity right from her opening number. Her ability to convey a joke or a new thought within the nuances of a single note provides intrigue that lifts the show throughout. The moments of ensemble singing felt, at least compared to many musicals, further between, but the sections of playful quips in the park did delight.
Special mention must also be made for Charis Lister’s Old Lady, whose number with McCaul late in Act I brought both wisdom and vulnerability to the performance – and delved, movingly, into a lower vocal register. There were a number of memorable character portrayals: Hugo Gregg and Jas Ratchford were wonderfully odd as Franz and Frieda, Isaac Jackson and Freya Cowan unbearably snobbish as the rival artist couple, and Emily Sparkes and Theo Chen perfectly insufferable as the American tourists.
At the close of Act I, the whole ensemble assembles into a tableau to mimic George’s most famous painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Their combined effect, protesting over and over it’s ‘so hot’, they’re uncomfortable, the others are talking ‘drivel’, is to resist the ‘balance, light and harmony’ that George strives for. It’s through this struggle that Sunday’s urgent questions crystallise. How does George get his critics and loved ones to connect the dots of his work – ‘connect, George’ – and see the new colours he’s pointing to? How is Dot supposed to live with a man who sees her but doesn’t really see her? And what does it all matter, if no one likes or gets your work, and, as was Seurat’s misfortune, life is terribly short, so you don’t have time to explore the ‘so many possibilities’ you once had? The answer that Sunday gives, preserved through a book that was once Dot’s, is simply this: leave behind two things, ‘Children and Art’. Like this production, they will speak for themselves.
Tickets still available here: www.adctheatre.com/sunday