Review: ‘Sunday in the Park With George,’ a Living Painting to Make You See

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/23/theater/review-sunday-in-the-park-with-george-jake-gyllenhaal.html

Version 0 of 1.

He is a thorny soul, a man neither happy nor particularly kind, and not someone you’d be likely to befriend. But when the 19th-century French painter Georges Seurat, reincarnated in the solitary flesh by a laser-focused Jake Gyllenhaal, demands that you look at the world as he does, it’s impossible not to fall in love.

Or something deeper than love — closer to religious gratitude — is the sentiment you may experience in the finale that concludes the first act of the marvelous revival of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s “Sunday in the Park With George,” which opened on Thursday night at the newly restored Hudson Theater.

We have watched a restless day of rest in the park of the title, where an assortment of flâneurs and poseurs have become steadily more fractious and discordant.

But after the shouting and the frenzy, a breathtaking and infinitely consoling harmony descends, as a living painting is assembled out of a most inharmonious crowd. Though you’re feeling anything but sad, you realize there are tears on your cheeks, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning musical from the 1980s suddenly feels more incisive and urgent, even necessary, than ever.

This tableau vivant — which mirrors the composition of Seurat’s most celebrated painting, “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte,” and is repeated at the end of the second act — doesn’t qualify as the usual happy ending found in musicals. That’s because the quiet ecstasy the scenes inspire has little to do with the lives of the show’s characters and everything to do with what outlives them.

That, in a word, is art, which insists you look again at the muddle of the familiar and perceive the rhymes and patterns that you never noticed before. “Give us more to see,” sings Seurat’s mistress, Dot, played by the luminous Annaleigh Ashford, in a plea filled with hunger and hope. At a moment when government arts subsidies are again under siege in the United States, “Sunday in the Park With George,” directed with blood-racing immediacy by Sarna Lapine, makes an emotionally irrefutable case for the importance of seeing through the awakening gaze of the artist.

Not that this “Sunday,” presented in an earlier version at New York City Center last year, is in any way didactic or issue-driven. On the contrary, this interpretation comes across with more personal, in-the-moment intimacy than any I’ve seen, including the dazzling Broadway debut of 1984, which starred Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters, directed by James Lapine (Ms. Lapine’s uncle, as it happens).

The latest incarnation is far less opulent. The re-creations of Seurat’s masterwork are not nearly as sumptuous or literal as they were in the original.

Designed by Beowulf Boritt (set) and Clint Ramos (costumes) — with essential contributions by Tal Yarden and Christopher Ash (projections) and Ken Billington (lighting) — this “Sunday” retains the frills-free elegance of a concert presentation (like the current revival of “Sunset Boulevard”). The excellent orchestra remains onstage, concealed for much of the performance by a scrim, on which images of Seurat’s worldview materialize.

This paring down shifts the emphasis from what we see to how we see, and I don’t think anyone will feel the poorer for the trade-off. The dynamic of the show is looking, bringing the wavering and the elusive into focus. You could even say that the show’s star is not so much the isolated, obsessive Seurat as it is his eyes.

Consider some of the descriptions of Seurat’s stare, as offered by his fellow Parisians. “Like a flash of light, right through me,” says a soldier (Claybourne Elder) whom Seurat once sketched. “But how George looks,’’ says Dot, his frequent model. “He could look at you forever. As if he sees you and doesn’t all at once.”

Living up to such accounts isn’t easy. But Mr. Gyllenhaal translates the intensity that has characterized his most memorable screen appearances (including “Brokeback Mountain” and “Nightcrawler”) into a searing theatrical presence, in which his eyes are his center of gravity. He embodies one of Seurat’s favorite artistic dictums, “concentrate,” with an unwavering focus that seems to consume and illuminate the dark.

Of course, it takes more than a great stare to anchor a musical. The revelation of the City Center “Sunday” last November was that Mr. Gyllenhaal had the vocal chops to deliver what is one of Mr. Sondheim’s richest and most intricately composed scores, ravishingly performed here by the orchestra, under the direction of Chris Fenwick.

Mr. Gyllenhaal invests every note he sings with the rapt determination of someone trying to capture and pin down the elusive. Watch Seurat at work, dabbing specks of color on his canvas, and listen to the vigor (and rigor) with which he invests the repetition of those colors’ names.

Yet you can also sense a different, less cerebral urge tugging at his attention, and it’s embodied with gorgeous precision by Ms. Ashford (a Tony winner for “You Can’t Take It With You”). Her performance at City Center was charming; this time, it’s much more than that, delivered with both spontaneous warmth and an anatomical exactness that suits a veteran artist’s model and is matched by her eloquent singing.

The extraordinary and undeniable chemistry that flows between Dot and Seurat is not based in the usual mind (his) versus body (hers) dichotomy. Mr. Gyllenhaal’s Seurat may be routinely described as cold and distant, but he’s unmistakably a sensualist, too. And while Dot may be unlettered, Ms. Ashford makes you appreciate the acuity of her insights into what George is and does. When they sing the duet “We Do Not Belong Together,” it feels more heartbreaking than ever because they in fact so perfectly complete each other.

The supporting cast, so generously laden with marquee talent it’s almost an embarrassment of riches, includes Ruthie Ann Miles; Phillip Boykin; Robert Sean Leonard; Brooks Ashmanskas; and, as Seurat’s self-involved elderly mother, a very touching Penny Fuller (whom I saw as Eve Harrington in “Applause,” one of my first Broadway shows).

They all ground their characters with quick, vivid strokes that avoid both sketchiness and caricature. Make that two sets of characters. These performers all return in the second act to become members of the art world of the late 20th century, a realm in which another artist named George (Mr. Gyllenhaal again) is feeling increasingly ill at ease and creatively blocked. Ms. Ashford shows up as Marie, his nonagenarian grandmother, who is also Dot’s daughter and, she insists, Seurat’s child.

The conventional wisdom has always been that the second act of “Sunday” is far weaker than the first, more gimmicky and glib. Ms. Lapine’s production suggests that point of view is dead wrong.

For one thing, the art that the latter-day George produces, a light installation called a chromolume, has usually been rendered in terms that feel satiric and cheesy, and certainly unworthy of any heir to Seurat. (The second act begins at the Art Institute of Chicago, home to “La Grande Jatte” and to George’s latest installation.) For this production, though, its creators have come up with a gasp-making pyrotechnic rain of multicolored lights, which finds the pointillism in fireworks.

Even more important, though, is the emotional conviction — the anguished, hopeful yearning — that Mr. Gyllenhaal and Ms. Ashford bring to their parts here. For once you understand completely how these characters are extensions, on many levels, of the people we met in the first act and how crucial vision, in all sense of the word, is to their lives.

“Can’t you see the shimmering?” Seurat asks of his painting. There is no canvas on the stage. But of course you see the shimmering. It’s right there in his eyes.