At Theatre Lawrence, ‘Sunday in the Park with George’ shows that ‘art isn’t easy’

Making art is hard. And a lot of the time, the artist’s best-laid plans go awry.

Jamie Ulmer, executive director of Theatre Lawrence, had a particular artistic vision for producing Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s famous musical, “Sunday in the Park with George.”

For the first time ever, the community theater would mount a concert version of a musical, minus costumes, sets and choreography. As Ulmer initially envisioned it, the show would be presented bare bones, with just actors and musicians on an empty stage, reading lines and music from scripts and scores.

But that’s not quite what theatergoers will see at three performances this weekend. In keeping with the musical’s theme of the difficulty in creating art, this version of “Sunday in the Park with George” will be much different than Ulmer originally intended.

Parts will be memorized, actors will act, and even the traditional show-stopping Act One finale, a reenactment of the crowded Parisian park from artist Georges Seurat’s classic Impressionist painting “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” will materialize onstage — aided by a video projection of the painting.

Hey, it’s art. Things don’t always go as planned.

“When we got the talents of this cast, and honestly the inspiration of the material, it just began to progress more and more and more,” Ulmer said in an interview. “… For the most part, this is staged almost the way that I would have staged it if we had all the sets and the costumes.”

First performed on Broadway in 1984, “Sunday in the Park” won the Pulitzer Prize for drama the following year. Somewhat surprisingly, given Sondheim’s fame and long list of classic musicals (“Sweeney Todd,” “Into The Woods,” “Follies,” “Company”), it’s only the second Sondheim show produced in Theatre Lawrence’s 47-year history, along with a long-ago production of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.”

Sondheim’s musicals tend to be complex and intricate, and “Sunday” has a reputation as one of his most idiosyncratic and difficult creations.

It tells the fictionalized story of Seurat (played at Theatre Lawrence by Daniel Denton and named “George” in the play) and his muse, Dot (Nora Kerwin), as Seurat broods about the difficult life of an artist and attempts to paint his 1884 opus, which today hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago — you may recall its cameo in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”

The script and music echo Seurat’s pointillist style — his paintings were vast compositions of tiny dots of color — and it’s hardly a standard dramatic narrative, as figures in the painting chime in with their own stories and complaints. 

“There’s just the quirkiness of a song like ‘Color and Light’ that really is pointillism in song, as [George] is going, ‘Red, red, red, red, red, red, orange, orange, blue, blue, blue,’ and Dot is singing her kind of counterpart of that,” Ulmer said. “And you listen to it the first time like, what am I hearing? And then you go back and you allow yourself to hear it and you’re like, oh, this is so complex and this is so just fascinating and just fun to listen to.”

And then things get really weird: the quirky second act (which some productions eschew, but not Theatre Lawrence) fast-forwards a century to tell the story of George and Dot’s great-grandson, also named George, as he struggles to bring to life his own art, a laser-light sculpture called “Chromolume #7.” The two acts are tied together by young George’s laments about the difficulties in creating art, finding funding and dealing with critics — all of which, he discovers by conversing with Dot’s ghost and reading one of Dot’s old notebooks, echo his great-grandfather’s travails. In art, some things never change.

All of this is sung over perhaps Sondheim’s most sumptuous score. And while the composer initially claimed that the show wasn’t really autobiographical, Ulmer says that in later life — Sondheim died in 2021 — he admitted that its meditations on the difficulty of artistic life mirrored his own feelings.

“It’s just so interesting that he’s making that observation about himself, really at the height of his career,” Ulmer said. “Like he says in the song” — Act II’s centerpiece, “Putting It Together” — “art isn’t easy.”

Even in the somewhat stripped-down version Theatre Lawrence is presenting, “Sunday in the Park with George” isn’t easy, either. The production has 15 actors playing a multitude of parts, and musical director Jared Martin oversees an 11-piece onstage orchestra. Theatre Lawrence has even moved the grand piano from its lobby to the stage for a richer sound.

“When it’s an actual piano and the lid’s open and you just hear those notes resonating with the singers, it’s just really something special,” Ulmer said.

Also special, he said, is the power of Sondheim’s music, presented by a cast he’s particularly proud of, a mix of Theatre Lawrence regulars and newcomers.

“The finale of Act One is just one of those moments that gives you chills, especially when they hit those notes just right and the chord resonates and you can hear the overtones that are created,” Ulmer said. “Like no one is singing that note — it’s just those notes are all in perfect harmony and it creates these other notes. It’s so just so fun and so exciting to work on a show like that.”

The cast feels the power too, he said. “There’s a moment near the end of Act Two that the other night, as we were running it, you could see the rest of the cast sitting in their chairs upstage,  where some of them were wiping tears,” Ulmer said. “The way that George and Dot sing to each other, and the way the voices blend, you’re just like, oh my gosh, this is just a beautiful moment.”

Ulmer, who took over Theatre Lawrence almost two years ago, has been pushing innovation at the community theater, including a recent “Suitcase Stories” series of short plays inspired by stories written by Lawrence elementary school students. He’s hoping that “Sunday in the Park with George” leads to more concert-style productions at the theater. 

“It has been a really fun creative challenge, because there have been a few times where I’ve had to stop and say to myself, ‘Nope, we’re concert staging,’” he said. “But then also, oh, let’s that strip all that away, and let’s just allow the performer to stand there and sing the song. …

“But one of the, I think, just beautiful things about doing a musical in concert is that it really forces the performers and the audience to focus on the material, focus on the music, focus on the dialogue, because you don’t have the spectacle of everything else,” he said. “So you’re just keying in on that, and it can make a show incredibly impactful — especially a show that really talks about art, like this one does, and the creation of art and the obsession that art can sometimes create in us.”

Sunday in the Park with George will be presented at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Feb. 7 and Saturday, Feb. 8, and at 2:30 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 9 at Theatre Lawrence, 4660 Bauer Farm Drive. All tickets are $25 and available through the theater box office or online.

Mark Potts (he/him) is a former reporter and editor for the Associated Press, San Francisco Examiner, Chicago Tribune and The Washington Post.

Latest Lawrence news:

MORE …