Perhaps you’ve seen plays that are essentially portraits of an artist. But have you seen a musical that’s a portrait of an artist at work? When the Santa Fe Playhouse takes on the Stephen Sondheim production of Sunday in the Park with George next month, they’ll inherit the job of not just replicating some of the most famous works by Georges Seurat, but also the mindset he had while creating them. Anna Hogan, the newest member of the theater’s artistic director triumvirate (see “Play the parts,” January 26), will be directing Sunday as her first Playhouse piece, and she says the work asks a lot of profound questions of the audience.
“It’s witnessing Seurat completing his paintings and asking what goes along with the artist’s pursuit of their work, especially when it’s unconventional or not commercial,” she says. “How do you continue to pursue something when the majority is indicating it’s not for them?” Those questions, as it turns out, were on the creators’ minds as they were writing the musical. Sondheim, a giant in American music, was coming off one of his biggest disappointments, Merrily We Roll Along , which ran on Broadway for just 16 performances in 1981.
Together, he and James Lapine, who would later write the book version of Sunday in the Park with George , spent a lot of time at the Art institute of Chicago studying Seurat’s famous 1884 masterpiece, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Grande Jatte . Sunday in the Park with George Lapin.