How Stephen Sondheim Brought Neo-Impressionism to the Stage

Down in the left corner of Georges Seurat’s vast, instantly recognizable, and weirdly disconcerting painting of a crowded park on the banks of the Seine—so far down that his lower left leg is crisply guillotined by the canvas’s edge—a man lolls on the grass and smokes a long clay pipe. His plain cap and sleeveless orange tunic mark him out as, if not quite a ruffian, then definitely a day laborer. Much more than the genteel folk who sit nearby, or who amble through the greenery, he has earned the restful pleasure of staring out at a bright stretch of water.

Perhaps it was the strength of this man’s torso and upper arms that led James Lapine—when he transformed Seurat’s static figures from A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte into the rounded, living characters of Sunday in the Park with George—to suppose him a boatman. A curious fellow, this Parisian rower of the 1880s. He makes his living off the river—up it and down, or just across, he ferries people and things—yet chooses to spend his one day of leisure looking upon the place of his own employ.

Even more curious is that in leaping out of the picture, and onto the stage, he has acquired a black patch worn over his right eye. (Maybe it was always there but hidden because his painted self appears in left profile.) We spot it on the Boatman’s first entrance, as he strides downstage and drops into the sidelong slouch that will soon become his forever pose.

Actually, we don’t yet know that he’s a boatman; that is revealed later. But we do know that he sees with just one eye. Same with me, which doubtless explains why this character intrigues me so. With a single functioning eye, you don’t see the world like everyone else. You lose some peripheral vision. Your depth perception is off. Objects and people can look flat, not round. Nor do you travel through the world like most others because you are likelier than most to collide with objects both animate and inert. More than once I have discovered a wall on my left side from the sudden bang of my head against it.

I can well understand, then, why looking is such a touchy topic for the Boatman. He doesn’t want anyone doing it on his behalf, because even with his one eye he can see the world just fine. No wonder that the Boatman’s first lines are a spat with Georges about whether the Seine looks different on a Sunday. (By the way, I will use the French spelling for the Parisian painter in act 1 and the English spelling for his American great-grandson in act 2.) On his day off, the Boatman explains, he doesn’t gussy himself up and promenade through the park, as the others do, because unlike them he doesn’t want to be looked at. He wants to be left alone to look at the water. So when he spots Georges looking at him—and more than looking, sketching away—he turns angry. “Who the hell you think you’re drawing?”

His anger is born of pride. The Boatman, scornful of artists who claim a superior talent for “observing” or “perceiving” the world, insists that he is the one who sees it most clearly. He is the true artist. Not this bearded man before him, with his sketchpad and charcoal crayons. No, that man sees with two eyes, and one of them is bound to wander into illusion. With just one eye, though, there’s no wandering. The Boatman’s gaze holds fixed on “what is true.” And truth, of course, is the province of artists.

Anyone not creating art in an obvious way might hesitate to call themselves an artist. The artist, one might suppose, is an unusually gifted figure, a rare breed, a singular case. And they lead such odd lives. The dancer who all but lives in her studio. The composer who scrimps on heating to save up for a new piano. Or the novelist who nearly gets run over crossing the street because he’s lost in thought about how to fix that last sentence. One may admire them, or not—but these creatures are, all of them, unlike us.

Don’t believe it. It might appear that Sunday in the Park with George is playing an insider’s game, addressing itself only to artists in the formal sense. And, indeed, Georges’s credo—“Design. Tension. Composition. Balance. Light. Harmony.”—has been taken up by theatre artists especially. Two generations of them—and counting—have been inspired by Sondheim and Lapine’s work to create works of their own. (As a young director, I would listen to “Putting It Together” before every rehearsal.) Yet if Sunday lauds the artist’s way only to restrict it to a privileged coterie, then how could the rest of us not feel rebuffed? “Well, screw them,” the Boatman would retort on our behalf. Fortunately, though, there’s inspiration enough for all.

That’s why I’ve begun with the Boatman, even though he’s a minor character. Because he is, in his own crabbed style, speaking the truth. The truth that being an artist is a natural state of being. It’s bred deep in our bones, like an instinct, or a reflex, open to us from the start. Every five-year-old is a tiny untutored Picasso. (Or should I say, a small Seurat?) The only question is whether we nurture, or neglect, what is already there—the artist within.

*

This is not the dippy claim it may seem. I defy you to find a hint of dippiness in a gruff, eye-patched boatman who scares off polite little girls who just want to say hello to his doggie. Yet he’s the one who sees the world in ways that others cannot or will not—which is the gift, and hence the value, of a true artist.

At the top of the second act, the figures in Seurat’s canvas, as played by actors, break from their fixed poses as they react to news of his death. He died in March 1891, aged just thirty-one, never having sold a single painting. (In 2022, one of his canvases went at auction for nearly $150 million.) Some of the characters offer mild platitudes, while others barely recall Seurat’s hovering presence. It’s the Boatman who, with his flat vision, sees the matter in the round: “They all wanted him and hated him at the same time.”

Truth be told, Georges was a tad peculiar. Looking right at you, but rarely in the way you wanted to be looked at. Or staring at his blank page, or canvas, so immersed in its possibilities that he reneges on his promise to take you to the Folies Bergère, even though you are powdered and rouged and ready to go. Fixed, cold…bizarre. It’s hard to live with a man like that, as Dot—his lover, his model, his muse—tells us in her long first song, delivered while trying, but failing, to stand still in the heavy corseted dress that Georges makes her wear on this sweltering Sunday morning.

Flash-forward a hundred years—and cross, not the Seine, but the Atlantic. His great-grandson George, a trendy multimedia sculptor, hardly cuts a more appealing figure. True, he’s genial, but a practiced conniver too. Cocktail party schmoozing. Jockeying for the next commission. Busywork that is not itself the working of art. Worse, he breaks down as completely as his latest piece—a seventh “Chromolume”—when its voltage regulator goes haywire during its museum showing. For him, too, the lights have gone out.

How cheerless these artists are. One is a surly lifelong failure, the other a flashy success who has run out of ideas. Not a smidgen of natural charm between them. Neither comes close to Louis the baker, who shows just how lovable he is by marrying Dot, raising as their own the daughter she had with Georges, and then taking them both to a new life in America. We do, in the end, soften toward the painter and the sculptor—but they’re not easy to love.

I suppose that’s the point. We do need to find them a bit distasteful— or sad, or cold, or irksome—because we won’t then rush to hoist them onto a proverbial pedestal. We’ll keep that plinth of honor vacant for the time being. One day, maybe, they’ll deserve it—but not right now. Sondheim makes us wait a long time for their redemption. We wait two hours, and a hundred years.

While we’re waiting, the coachman Franz shares a few thoughts. “Work is what you do for others,” he explains to his wife, Frieda the cook. “Art is what you do for yourself.” His words are meant to demean artistic labor—a hobby merely, not fit or proper work—but actually, they exalt it. Lift it to the highest level of consequence. Artists do not respond, and certainly not with a trained obedience, to snapped fingers or to barked commands, noises only too familiar to a coachman or a household cook. Franz is right: art is what you do for yourself—but in the sense that only you can do it. And it’s the only you part of the task that makes it worthwhile. Dot, after the span of a century, sings it best: “Let it come from you. / Then it will be new.”

Many of us are in tears by that point. But it’s not due entirely to Dot and Georges realizing at last that they have always belonged together. We are moved, also, by the prospect of what might yet come from within us: all the creative newness that we have yet to summon forth.

*

How easily it could have gone wrong. An American musical about a neo-Impressionist French painting. Theatre that looks like an art gallery, and vice versa. Two linked stories whose link is hard to find. Sunday in the Park with George is not everybody’s favorite show. Certainly not the 1984 Tony Award voters, who gave it ten nominations but then heaped nearly all of the awards on Jerry Herman’s La Cage aux Folles. Still, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama—Sunday was only the sixth musical to receive it—must have felt to Sondheim and Lapine like the best of all possible consolations.

Yet this musical, for all its grand self-awareness, does not get lost within itself. Quite the reverse, in fact. Its high craft—song motifs, scenery slotting into place, characters who break the picture frame, and a little red book that returns at the end—creates not one particular Sunday, but all Sundays…a “forever” of Sundays. A forever of looking and noticing and being right where you are.

How can we not pay attention to a play that honors so elegantly the lost art of paying attention?

Attending to it, we might glimpse a blurring of the line that by tradition has separated the onlooker from the artist. Blurring was, of course, Seurat’s own method. Following, so he believed, the modern science of optics, he filled his canvas with clusters of unmixed paint—thickets of distinct dots—each a single color drawn from the eleven pigments on his palette. Seen up close, his paintings look chaotic and incoherent, a tangle of wild swirls. Yet at a modest distance, the viewer’s eye mixes all the colored specks—red, blue, yellow, green, orange, purple—into perceptible shapes, finding in tension a greater harmony. Suddenly, a black straw hat with a pink flower comes into focus. Then a shiny bugle raised to the lips. And look, look, there’s the bend in the river.

This is pointillism, as Seurat’s brush technique came to be known. That the optical mixing didn’t happen in precisely the way he supposed hardly negates his achievement: to turn the beholder of art into something nearly like its creator. To insist that what the eye “arranges”—receives, yes, but then puts together—is what is beautiful.

What the ear arranges too. By subtle design, Sondheim’s music echoes Seurat’s pointillist style. In “Color and Light,” we see Georges dabbing flecks of paint onto his vast canvas. Each dart of his brush is timed to each jab of the music, while the lyrics—“Red red red red / Red red orange / Red red orange”—name the colors as they overtake the white of the blank canvas. Later, in “Finishing the Hat,” when Georges sings of “stepping back to look at a face”—a slight, yet necessary, distance—we are meant to recall how Seurat’s own paintings are best seen at a measured remove, so that their swirls of “red red orange” will coalesce into recognizable shapes.

In the stunning act 1 finale “Sunday,” when Georges arrests the frenzy of the stage, and then compels it into the serenity of the finished painting, the music is that action. While Georges is busy rearranging his images, people included, into the fittest, most balanced place—a parasol here, Louis there, no, there—the music is busy with chords played one after another, in a pure adjacency of sound. At times the chords are so thick that seven of the eight notes in a major scale are played at once, like Georges crowding his canvas with every different hue at his disposal.

Sound itself glistens. Just as the painting needs time to resolve itself into an ordered design, so, too, the music needs its own time to nudge those abutting chords into a cadence, a progression toward a final release. And then, “boom”—Sondheim’s own word—it happens. Georges ends his conjuring with the word, and at the sound, we have been waiting for: “harmony.”

Our ears have listened for the notes to fall into place. Our eyes have merged the colors into a distinctness. Like Georges stepping back to appraise his finished canvas as the act 1 curtain falls, we, too, have stepped back to “look at a face.” Which, as Georges has taught us, is the “only way to see.”

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From How Sondheim Can Change Your Life by Richard Schoch. Used with permission of the publisher, Atria Books, a division of Simon & Schuster.  Copyright © 2024 Richard Schoch. All rights reserved.