Theater review | "Sunday in the Park With George" is visually and musically rich but emotionally remote

Theater Review |

"Art isn't easy," goes the song "Putting It Together," which opens the second act of the Stephen Sondheim-James Lapine musical "Sunday in the Park with George," now playing at 5th Avenue Theatre.

Up to now, patrons have had it fairly easy with the Sondheim retrospective the company has been mounting. The Sondheim musicals recently staged here ("Into the Woods," "Sweeney Todd"), though inventive in their day, have had mainly linear plots, studded with some hummable show tunes.

Now comes "Sunday in the Park With George," in a visually splendid, musically enriching, yet not instantly engaging treatment by British director Sam Buntrock.

To those who prefer some of Sondheim's less-cerebral shows to "Sunday in the Park," you are not alone. But if you don't see this one through to the finale, you miss the full impact of a piece that can be off-putting yet extraordinarily interesting — and certainly unique, in Sondheim's canon.

Twenty-five years after its debut, this is still a stark departure from the Broadway conventions Sondheim has long had a love-hate relationship with.

The show opens with a semiabstract portrait of the daring 19th-century painter Georges Seurat (played here by Hugh Panaro), as he works on his pointillist masterpiece, "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte."

In the show's monologues and stream-of-consciousness numbers such as "Color and Light" Lapine and Sondheim do their version of the 1980s deconstructionist thing. They dissect creativity itself, as it relates to the (fictionalized) Seurat and his subjects, including his mother (Carol Swarbrick) and frustrated mistress Dot (Billie Wildrick).

In its second half, "Sunday in the Park" leaps ahead to examine a likely descendant of Seurat. This 1980s George (also Panaro) is a trendy sculptor, eager and frightened to take new artistic risks — as did Seurat, by mixing science and art in his controversial painting style.

In a heavily politicized and mercantile art world (evoked brilliantly in the "Putting It Together" number), George knows his critics, collectors and colleagues may turn on him.

The parallels between his dilemmas and Sondheim's own have oft been noted. But "Sunday in the Park" was not unappreciated. It won a Pulitzer Prize for drama, 10 Tony Award nominations, and had a two-year Broadway run.

Even so, top-notch revivals of the work are rare, given the technical demands (an epic painting conjured before our eyes), musical challenges (the score can get artily discordant) and departure from a standard narrative.

Adapting a production they originated in 2005 at London's Menier Chocolate Factory, then took to Broadway, Buntrock and designers Timothy Bird (projections), David Farley (sets and costumes) and Ken Billington (lights), supply excellent visual elements here — including delightful bits of animation.

The chamber pit orchestra, under Ian Eisendrath, aces the modernistic parts of the score, and the more lyrical, Ravel-esque passages.

The tightly choreographed ensemble players rise to the occasion. Panaro is a fiercely obsessive Seurat, with great vocals. But his rapport with Wildrick's fetching Dot is lightly sketched by Lapine and Sondheim to start with, and not made more vibrant here.

More poignant is the connection, in the 1980s segments, between Wildrick's grandma Marie and grandson Panaro. When she urges him to "Move On," to fearlessly embrace artistic challenge, it's a dab of the old Broadway schmaltz — and in this context, welcomed.

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com