Sunday In The Park With George (17 June 2006, Wyndhams Theatre)

People strolling through the trees
Of a small suburban park
On an island in the river
On an ordinary Sunday...

I caught Stephen Sondheim's "Sunday In The Park With George" last night at the West End. I haven't heard it in a long time, though I know it well - like the 9th, like many of Sondheim's musicals, this is a work that is an old friend, having accompanied me through some of my most significant moments - good and bad - in law school. And perhaps that is the best way to describe my uncontrollable excitement as I made my way to the theatre - as if I was going to meet an old and wonderful friend. The kind of friend one looked terribly forward to meeting even while wondering how we have both changed, the kind of friend whom one hadn't seen for a long time, yet completely confident that there will still be tremendous love and empathy.

And how much love, how much empathy, and how I cried. The tears started at the end of Act I, and from the second number in the second act I could not stop. "Sunday", baldly summarised, is a musical about the French pointillist painter George Seurat (the title "Sunday In The Park With George" is a take on his painting, "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte", above) and his relationship with his lover Dot, essentially interweaving art and love in paradoxical non-equations - Dot loves George because of his art ("But most, George, Of all,/ But most of all, I love your painting..."); George is unable to love Dot because of, well, his art:

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.....

Dot eventually left him but, married to someone else, nonetheless bore Seurat's daughter. The daughter's grandson, also named George and who has also become an artist, in turn takes up the story in the second act as George ponders on his lineage from Seurat and on his own artist's block, resolved only upon the appearance of Dot as a vision, as she sings to him to remember the beauty of the world that had inspired his great-grandfather to paint in his own way to convey shimmering light. Unlike the first act, love now no longer stands in the way of art, but becomes its conduit, its inspiration. And this is how the worldly meets the unworldly - children and art - yet both are the only ways through which we can conquer our mortality.

And that's why I think the story of "Sunday" is completely superior to (of all things) Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo. Fitzcarraldo has an astonishingly similar story trajectory in terms of a man with a crazy vision whom no one believed, who was obsessively motivated in his gargantuan projects only by beauty and art, who was encouraged and supported only by a woman who loved him, and who eventually triumphed in a way which can only make you cheer. Nonetheless, for all the similarities Fitzcarraldo has a complete absence of the humanism of "Sunday" which goes straight into your heart: one really gets the feeling that Herzog (and I'm probably not far wrong) pushes the crazy vision of Brian Sweeney Fitzcarraldo simply so that he could piggyback on it as his own mad ride - Herzog, after all, in making the film does every crazy thing Fitzcarraldo set out to do and enters every madcap adventure Fitzcarraldo got himself into. In the film, the human relationships are superficial and at best tenuous plot devices; the human motivations are obtuse, hazy and practically irrelevant. In almost every way possible, the filmmaker consumes his own work, starting from the mentality of "I want to drag a ship over a hill, so let's make a film about a man who wants to drag a ship over a hill."

And that is why one is a friend and the other is not. I could not watch Fitzcarraldo ten years later and cry because the intervening ten years make me reflect differently about a ship being dragged across a hill. But ten years can make me reflect differently about how two people can be together, and argue, and part; about how one faces death, ten years ago, ten years later, and yet another ten years later; about how work can be inspired, and fade, and possibly and hopefully inspired again; about how both the musical and myself have changed and yet again changed relative to each other; about how I can't wait to see it again, ten years from now, and cry, and cry, and cry again.


P.S. Jason, Scott, Sarah: Incidentally... do you know where "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte" is now hung?

Chicago.