An exploration of art

Thirty years after its Broadway debut earned praise for changing the way audiences looked at musicals, "Sunday in the Park With George" continues to resonate. If anything, the musical based on the life of 19th-century painter George Seurat seems to be even more relevant today, especially for artists.

"(Artists) are constantly having to fight against reality TV, the Internet and other attention-grabbing forms of entertainment, so the idea of live performance, I think, is at risk," said Paul Mitri, professor of theater at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, who is directing the student production at Kennedy Theatre.

"’Sunday in the Park’ is a great way of asking, Why is art, all kinds of art, important to us? And then, since it is a live performance, it extrapolates back to there."

"Sunday in the Park With George," by playwright James Lapine with music by Stephen Sondheim, is based on Seurat’s most famous work, "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte," a painting that shows a crowd of bourgeois Parisians relaxing in a park. The painting employed a technique known as pointillism, in which Seurat used thousands of brushstrokes to create small points of color. Viewed up close, the painting seems to be an abstract expression of discipline and technique, but viewed from a distance, the figures and landscape emerge in vibrant and energetic color.

The painting was seen as a statement against the soft-edged indefinition of Impressionism, which had been the rage in mid-19th-century France. Seurat saw his work as bringing science into art, and he based his work on scientific studies of color that were then emerging.

The musical, meanwhile, was the creators’ — particularly Sondheim’s — own revolt against the prevailing traditions of Broadway productions.

"It’s not like ‘Man of La Mancha,’ it’s not like ‘Oklahoma,’ it’s not like ‘La Cage aux Folles,’" Mitri said. "In many ways Sondheim was taking on his critics and saying, ‘Here you go! Here it is!’"

"Sunday in the Park" debuted in 1984 to critical acclaim. It was nominated for 10 Tonys, and although it won just two — for sets and lighting — it immediately was recognized for its innovative, personal style. It ultimately won a slew of Drama Desk Awards and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

"Mr. Lapine and Mr. Sondheim have made a contemplative modernist musical that, true to form, is as much about itself and its creators as it is about the universe beyond," wrote Frank Rich of The New York Times.

Mitri felt that he had performers this year who were capable of handling Sondheim’s demanding musical. The two leads in the musical, Tim Callais (George Seurat) and Leiney Rigg (Dot), have had starring roles in local theater productions as well as at UH, and both plan to go to New York in the near future to seek work as artists.

For this production, the leads face the unenviable task of trying to make older audience members forget Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters, the original leads, whose outstanding performances were memorialized in a made-for-television production.

Mitri told his young cast to forget everything they knew of that production and to make this one their own.

Callais took that to heart by doing extensive research into Seurat’s life, coming to some intriguing conclusions.

"I believe that there were some undiagnosed mental illness issues that were just 100 years before the technology came out to diagnose that sort of thing," he said. "So I’m working with him having some sort of Asperger’s, autism, ADHD."

Callais said Seurat exhibited many characteristics of such conditions; he was reclusive and socially awkward, and got absorbed in his work to an unusual degree. In the musical, such behavior is in many of the songs, particularly one about two dogs.

"I completely take on the personality of both dogs," Callais said, "and they sing together at the same time, so it’s like he completely gets lost in his work. He lives inside his work."

Callais said artists will relate to the play, and admitted that he himself also related.

"As an actor we like to think of ourselves as artists," he said. "With the cookie-cutter roles, and what someone might call the ‘tits and teeth’ work, underneath all that we want to create, like George says, something that is new and something that is our own."

Rigg plays Dot, a former prostitute who becomes the frustrated mistress and model of Seurat. In preparing for the role, Rigg created a back story for Dot as someone whose father blamed her for her mother’s early death and who consequently seeks approval from men.

She enters into a relationship with Seurat as of a victim but also as a woman in a transitional stage of life.

"For Dot, it’s choose the path of completion, and for her, being complete is having a family," Rigg said. "Prior to George, she was prostituting. Then she meets George, and she gets out of that lifestyle a little bit … and now she gets a taste of that comfort and she likes it."

Rigg also faced vocal hurdles singing a role written for Peters, whose distinctive mezzo-soprano could cut through a theater from the highest to the lowest register, and who could patter as well as any scat singer. "It’s the most challenging music I’ve ever had to learn in my life," said Rigg.

"Sunday in the Park" is noted for its set design. It required a re-creation of Seurat’s monumental work, seen in its entirety at the end of the first act.

Graduate student and set designer Jennifer Eccles found an inventive way to incorporate Seurat’s personality into the design.

"The biggest theme I got was George’s disconnection from the people around him," she said. "I tried to explore that in the set. I took the painting, and just to make things more difficult for myself, I decided to cut it up like a jigsaw puzzle.

"In the beginning he has all these blank canvases, in all these different shapes, and so by putting the painting on that, the actor could move these canvases and pieces around, so it shows these different pieces and they’re all sort of fragmented and disconnected. And then at the end they would all come together and create this one painting."