Broadway is a jungle; if your show doesn't rake in Tonys, it's days are numbered. I fear for "Passing Strange" which was overshadowed by "In the Heights," though its chances are buoyed by having won big prizes from the New York Critics Circle and others. A first casualty is the revival of Stephen Sondheim's "Sunday in the Park with George," which closes Sunday - I got a ticket for today's matinee, and was entranced. I don't imagine there's ever been as perfect a use of media. To tell the truth I was agush with tears within the first minute, so beautiful was the surge of Steve Reich-like pointillistic music, and the miracle of the set turning from a deep room into a sketchpad on which Seurat drew and erased and redrew the horizon and trees at La Grande Jatte.I didn't rush to see it before, in part because neither Sondheim nor Seurat is a favorite of mine. I'm not sure that's changed, though Seurat's fascinating as ever, and some of the music and words delighted:
... Finishing the hat,
How you have to finish the hat.
How you watch the rest of the world
From a window
While you finish the hat.
Mapping out a sky.
What you feel like, planning a sky.
What you feel when voices that come
Through the window
Go
Until they distance and die,
Until there's nothing but sky
And how you're always turning back too late
From the grass or the stick
Or the dog or the light,
How the kind of woman willing to wait's
Not the kind that you want to find waiting
To return you to the night,
Dizzy from the height,
Coming from the hat,
Studying the hat,
Entering the world of the hat,
Reaching through the world of the hat
Like a window,
Back to this one from that.
Studying a face,
Stepping back to look at a face
Leaves a little space in the way like a window,
But to see-
It's the only way to see.
And when the woman that you wanted goes,
You can say to yourself, "Well, I give what I give."
But the women who won't wait for you knows
That, however you live,
There's a part of you always standing by,
Mapping out the sky,
Finishing a hat...
Starting on a hat..
Finishing a hat...
Look, I made a hat...
Where there never was a hat.
How you have to finish the hat.
How you watch the rest of the world
From a window
While you finish the hat.
Mapping out a sky.
What you feel like, planning a sky.
What you feel when voices that come
Through the window
Go
Until they distance and die,
Until there's nothing but sky
And how you're always turning back too late
From the grass or the stick
Or the dog or the light,
How the kind of woman willing to wait's
Not the kind that you want to find waiting
To return you to the night,
Dizzy from the height,
Coming from the hat,
Studying the hat,
Entering the world of the hat,
Reaching through the world of the hat
Like a window,
Back to this one from that.
Studying a face,
Stepping back to look at a face
Leaves a little space in the way like a window,
But to see-
It's the only way to see.
And when the woman that you wanted goes,
You can say to yourself, "Well, I give what I give."
But the women who won't wait for you knows
That, however you live,
There's a part of you always standing by,
Mapping out the sky,
Finishing a hat...
Starting on a hat..
Finishing a hat...
Look, I made a hat...
Where there never was a hat.
It's a wonderful idea in its way to imagine the lives of the ordinary people who appear in Seurat's "Sunday Afternoon at la Grande Jatte," at least until Act 2 which starts with them stuck in the painting, complaining that it's hot in there, though ultimately thanking strange Georges for giving them a kind of immortality. There's a basic melancholy here, redeemed (or just interrupted) only by art.
