Sunday in the Park with George (1984)
Book: James Lapine
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In short: Sunday is an introspective, emotionally profound work about inspiration, creativity, art, and the legacy of a life. At the center of the story are Georges Seurat and his pointillist painting Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte (A Sunday afternoon on the island of La Grande Jatte) . This moving, artistic masterpiece received 10 Tony nominations and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Sondheim’s career is full of daring and unique scores,
Rick Pender (theater critic, author of The Stephen Sondheim encyclopedia)
but Sunday in the Park with George tops the list.
Overview Sunday in the Park with George - background and excerpts
Art isn’t easy.
Having just a vision’s no solution.
Everything depends
on execution.
There’s a part of you always standing by,
mapping out the sky,
finishing a hat.
Sunday in the Park with George holds a special place in Sondheim’s body of work, celebrated as one of his most artistically ambitious and emotionally resonant creations. Its lyrics delve deeply into themes that extend far beyond the narrative, touching on inspiration, creativity, the intersection of art and commerce, the toll of devotion to one’s craft, and the legacy of a life.
Plot Summary
Inspired by Georges Seurat’s pointillist masterpiece “Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte” ("A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte"), Sunday in the Park with George ’s first act imagines the painter’s life as he creates his groundbreaking work. It portrays George as a man consumed by his art, navigating strained relationships, particularly with his muse Dot (what's in a name?), and facing skepticism from critics unwilling to embrace his innovative style. The figures in the painting are brought to life and the act culminates with them stepping into their iconic places on the canvas.
The second act transports us to the present day, where George’s great-grandson—a contemporary artist—grapples with creative stagnation and his place in the modern art world. His elderly grandmother Marie, the daughter of George and Dot, provides both guidance and a connection to the legacy of his famous ancestor.
Music and Lyrics
The musical landscape of Sunday in the Park with George is both innovative and deeply expressive. Sondheim employed a “pointillist” approach to his composition, assembling short musical fragments—or “dots”—to create a larger emotional and thematic picture, mirroring Seurat’s technique of using dots of paint to form his artworks.
The score ranges from lyrical ballads to intricate, contrapuntal ensembles, featuring recurring musical motifs that represent specific characters and themes. For example, repeated melodic lines and harmonies underscore the connection between Georges Seurat’s life and work and that of his great-grandson, George.
Sondheim’s lyrics are rich with poetic beauty and philosophical depth, capturing the inner lives of the characters—their aspirations, fears, and conflicts. His use of internal rhymes, rhythmic nuance, and wordplay adds layers of meaning and enhances the audience’s emotional engagement.
Reception
The initial reception of the experimental show that is Sunday was mixed. Its artistic achievement was widely acknowledged, earning Sunday ten Tony nominations and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, making it only the sixth musical to receive the honor. However, despite running for 604 performances, the production incurred financial losses and was largely overshadowed at the Tony Awards by the more accessible musical Le Cage aux Folles. The show saw successful Broadway revivals in 2008 and 2017. These revivals addressed some of the original critiques, including the often-cited imbalance between the acts, with many arguing that Act I was stronger and questioning whether Act II was even necessary.
Pretty isn’t beautiful, mother,
pretty is what changes.
What the eye arranges,
is what is beautiful.
You would have
liked him.
Mama, you would.
Mama, he makes things
Mama, they’re good.
Just as you said
from the start:
children and art.
The choice may
have been mistaken,
the choosing was not.
White.
A blank page or canvas.
The challenge:
bring order
to the whole.
Through design.
Composition.
Tension.
Balance.
Light.
And harmony.
Anything you do,
let it come from you,
then it will be new.
Give us more to see.
Video excerpts (in show's order)
- Opening and Closing
The show begins with “Sunday in the park with George”, where Dot poses for George on the island, introducing both his obsession and talent as well as her love for him.
The musical concludes with “Move on”. In this cathartic moment, the modern George “speaks” with Seurat’s Dot as he searches for his own voice and inspiration. All the musical themes that have shaped their relationship throughout the show culminate here. While George loses Dot in the first act due to his choice of art and her choice for herself, “Move on” symbolically reunites George, Dot, and art.
This opening and closing sequence, performed back-to-back by Daniel Evans and Jenna Russell in the Tony Award-winning revivals on the West End (2006) and Broadway (2008), is featured here. The original production’s “Move On” is also included, combined with “Lesson #8”. - “Finishing the hat”
This number captures an artist’s ultimate moment of inspiration and focus while also reflecting on Dot’s departure and her insight that “there’s a part of you always standing by, mapping out the sky”. The music mirrors George's obsessive work and his pointillist style, with its meticulousness and repetition. This song exemplifies Sondheim’s ability to express a character’s inner emotions through a blend of lyrical beauty and rhythmic tension. - “Sunday”
The first act closes with “Sunday,” where all the characters take their places in Seurat’s painting and are immortalized in his masterpiece as they sing "forever". The song celebrates continuity and connection across generations, highlighting the lasting impact of art. With its lush harmonies and poignant lyrics, “Sunday” brings the first act to a moving conclusion, reinforcing the themes of creativity, dedication, and the human pursuit of meaning and connection. A staple in Sondheim tribute concerts, it was performed on Broadway after his passing. Versions from the original production, a concert performance, and the Dutch rendition by M-Lab (2010) with Alex Klaasen and Elise Schaap are featured here. - “Color and light” captures Georges Seurat’s intense focus and meticulous artistry as he works on his painting. Musical motifs represent the dots of paint in Seurat’s pointillist technique, while the lyrics and music contrast his artistic obsession with Dot’s longing for attention and affection.
- In “Putting it together”explores the complexities of creating art. Sondheim has rewritten the song for various occasions, including a version tailored to the film industry for the Academy Awards and another for Barbra Streisand, which appeared in the revue of the same name .
- The touching song “Children and art” features Marie, first speaking to her mother in Seurat’s painting and then sharing her memories of her mother with George.
- “Lesson #8” explores the modern George’s creative block as he searches for inspiration. Visiting the island from his great-grandfather’s painting, he finds it transformed and unrecognizable. Holding his grandmother’s (and Dot’s) language lesson book, George reflects on what is left of his ancestor’s legacy—and his own.
Stephen Sondheim about Sunday in the Park with George
“I found myself writing with more formal looseness than I had before, allowing songs to become fragmentary, like musicalized snatches of dialogue, but avoiding the static verbosity of recitative. I worried less about punctuating the piece with applause and concentrated more on the flow of the story itself.
Even more noticeable was the effect of my new partnership [with James Lapine, red.] on the tone of the work. I have often been accused of writing “cold” scores: intellectually acute but emotionally dispassionate, not user-friendly. Warmth comes in many guises, however, and one man’s passion is another man’s sentimentality. When I look back as objectively as I can at the shows I wrote before James and contrast them with Sunday in the Park with George and the others I wrote with him, it seems clear to me that a quality of detachment suffuses the first set, whereas a current of vulnerability, of longing, informs the second. It’s not that I prefer one to the other, but at this late date I can more easily understand the early and persistent reaction to my songs (although, I’m glad to say, the persistence seems to be wearing down with the passage of time).
With James, detachment was replaced by a measure of compassion. When I think of songs like “Sunday” or “Move On” or “No One Is Alone” (from Into the Woods), I realize that by having to express the straightforward, unembarrassed goodness of James’s characters I discovered the Hammerstein in myself—and I was the better for it.“
More Sunday in the Park with George: audio and video
Full shows/concerts
Boek
Go to More Sondheim for our Sondheim Archives.
Sunday in the Park with George in the Netherlands
Most recent large production
M-LAB
Opening: June 10, 2010, M-Lab, Amsterdam
Cast: Alex Klaasen (George), Elise Schaap (Dot) and others
Translation: Koen van Dijk
Director: Koen van Dijk
Audio and video
Reviews of Sunday in the Park with George
Original production (1984)
“In his paintings of a century ago, Georges Seurat demanded that the world look at art in a shocking new way. In Sunday in the Park With George, their new show about Seurat, the songwriter Stephen Sondheim and the playwright-director James Lapine demand that an audience radically change its whole way of looking at the Broadway musical. Seurat, the authors remind us, never sold a painting; it’s anyone’s guess whether the public will be shocked or delighted by Sunday in the Park. What I do know is that Mr. Sondheim and Mr. Lapine have created an audacious, haunting and, in its own intensely personal way, touching work. Even when it fails – as it does on occasion – Sunday in the Park is setting the stage for even more sustained theatrical innovations yet to come.” – Frank Rich, The New York Times (1984)
Broadway revival (2008)
“As a portrait of the artist as an embattled and rejected man Sunday has been read as a sort of apologia pro vita sua by Mr. Sondheim. Like his Seurat, Mr. Sondheim has been criticized for being chillingly cerebral and remote, for having, as the show’s lyrics put it, “no life in his art.” No one could level such objections at this Sunday, which celebrates both the bountiful chaos of life and the forms used to make sense of it.” – Ben Brantley, The New York Times (2008)
Broadway revival (2017)
“Now 34 years old, Sondheim and James Lapine’s art-world satire still cuts and its climax still brings tears. It began Sondheim’s late (and, arguably, most unguarded) period, including the daring innovations of Into the Woods, Assassins and Passion. Sunday remains a masterpiece that affirms the painful, isolating joys of creation, and the need to learn new lessons. Like a densely plotted canvas, it’s worth seeing, no matter where or how it’s hung.” – David Cote, Time-Out (2017)
“Lapine’s book, among the brainiest ever written for a musical, works innumerable trenchant variations on the theme of sacrifice for art. The show is also a demonstration of that theme, because Sondheim’s songs are so profound that they feel, even while unspooling in unbroken threads of human longing, as if they had left the realm of lived experience and entered a Keatsian plane of absolute truth-beauty far above our own. The lyrics constantly delight the ear while also dramatizing, in that very delight, the way art both exalts and erases. “Rapturous” and “capture us” are like the jaws of a trap snapping shut.” – Jesse Green, Vulture (2017)
