Stephen Sondheim's Seurat musical gets the Santa Fe treatment

Jun. 21—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.

details

Sunday in the Park with George

* Thursday, June 27, through July 28; 7:30 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays

* Santa Fe Playhouse

* 142 E. De Vargas Street

* $30-$60

* santafeplayhouse.org

Lapine noted that the artist himself was the one person not represented in the painting, and that inspired Sondheim to take a whack at writing again. The resulting work won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and it takes on the innovative structure of re-creating not just Seurat's works, but also his inner life. In the second act, Seurat is dead, and the audience inhabits the life of a fictional future descendant.

"We see three images captured very intentionally. We're supposed to see them happen," Hogan says. "But throughout the first act, we're seeing George sketch with graphite and charcoal. He's doing studies in preparation for this big painting that he's doing toward the end of Act One. We see different moments of capturing different people, which is really interesting. And the show has a lot of convention; it's asking us to do tableau, the breaking of the fourth wall to talk to the audience, freezes, and things like that. It's giving us a lot to play with."

The cast has 15 actors, and they all play multiple roles. David Stallings has the tough task of portraying not just Seurat but also his descendant; Stallings says this is a play he's loved for his entire life in theater.

The first time he saw it, he was 14 and enthralled by the film version starring the Broadway play's original cast.

"My drama teacher gave me the VHS of Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters and said, 'If you haven't seen this yet, watch this.' And it was immediately a favorite," he says. "Having seen the Broadway revivals and honestly any Sondheim production I can ever catch — but especially this one — I think this is the funniest I've ever seen Sunday. We're approaching it with a lot of humor, and that humor buys us depth for the meatier, heavier moments."

Stallings, another member of the theater's artistic director trio, is the only member of the cast Hogan has worked with before. They know each other through their shared tenure in New York, where Hogan helped direct a version of Stallings' play The Baby Monitor. When Hogan moved to a new role as the artistic director of the Wallace Theatre in Levelland, Texas, she staged a version of the Sondheim play Sweeney Todd. Stallings auditioned, earned the role, and this is the first time since then that they've worked together.

"It was just such a beautiful production, and I was so thrilled that the first show I did was a Sondheim out of the pandemic," Stallings says. "And then when she applied for the position here to be one of the artistic directors, she was like, 'Should I?' and I was like, 'You should.' I think it's just wonderful that it's almost kismet that we're working together on a Sondheim again."

Hogan shares that enthusiasm. "David is a very intuitive actor," she says, "and I think we're really lucky to have someone like him in the lead, because it sets an example to everyone else about the pace we're committing to and the courageous approach of letting your instincts guide you."

The cast had five weeks to rehearse, and Hogan says the major elements of the scenic design will not change from act to act. Projection and lighting elements will depict the passage of time, and costumes will change as the cast moves through the centuries.

In the second act, Stallings inhabits a character not unlike the George of the first act, but this one has experienced success along with struggle.

"I always think that the way Sondheim structures his pieces, we're prompted in Act One with our characters achieving what they want," Hogan says. "Act Two is always the lesson; what do we do when we get what we want? I think we're prompted to wonder what does it really take for us as humans to find peace and happiness. Is it ever as simple as, 'I've done it?'"

Those are questions anybody in a creative profession can identify with, and as Hogan notes, they're questions that are always relevant in a city like Santa Fe. Seurat had been dead more than 90 years by the time he inspired Sondheim, who in turn has inspired countless generations of actors with his work.

"It's historical fiction," says Hogan of what makes the work unique. "It's not based off a movie. It's not based off a book. It was based off of an image and these two greats — the composer and the writer-director — they collaborated to envision this world. So it's truly an authentic original piece, and I think that's exciting to people. But that means that the rules and the expectations of it are a little bit more free, which I think is exciting, too, to a lot of artists."