Last weekend in the ’92 Theater, 2^nd Stage presented “Sunday in the Park with George,” a Stephen Sondheim musical that investigates the ideas and mythologies surrounding artists. For better or worse, the focus of “Sunday” is all there in the title: an artist and his one moment of glory.  “Sunday,” which centers on the hazy life and legacy of 19^th-century pointillist painter George Seurat, is named for what has become one of his most famous works: the grandly idyllic “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte, 1884.” Though Seurat has since grown famous for his innovative technique–which used tiny dots of color to create complex, shimmering hues on a sprawling, perspective-confounding canvas–the approach was less appreciated in his time.  What’s more, the first act of the show links Seurat’s fussy, precise methods to an obsessively controlling and self-centered personality.  Only when he is alone and in the process of creating does he find pure joy, as he does when he sings, in a trance, “There’s only color and light.”  Sondheim’s music, which was rendered with pleasing sharpness by an orchestra (under the direction of Alex Pfeifer-Rosenblum ’10), echoes Seurat’s uneasy relation to the world.  Songs flirt with artful melody only to be interrupted by clashing voices and dissonant keyboard (played by the especially skillful David Zeng ‘09).

The transcendent moment comes at the end of the first act, when all the characters gather in the park in various states of emotional turmoil, only to be silenced by a suddenly authoritative and serene Seurat.  He arranges them perfectly, after which they sing a beautiful song, “Sunday,” which would be a simple ode to the pastoral scene were it not for Sondheim’s indescribable music.  Voices rise in sudden, glorious harmony.  In this, Seurat finally achieves his moment of bliss, something lasting; finally, he’s in control.

The second act of the play takes a major shift away from the first, focusing on another George (Seurat’s great-grandson) in a modern-day milieu with his own artistic and personal worries.  Yet it ends with a reprise of “Sunday,” with no significant change from the first act.  The musical comes full circle, though it also cuts corners.  Various conceptions of the Role Of The Artist In Society, both damning and uplifting, are tossed about, but Sondheim and librettist James Lapine seem to be in an awful hurry to get back to this one: the artist as a kind of god, inscrutable to those recreated in his image yet ultimately redemptive and harmonizing.  Sondheim’s songs reflect the tensions and contradictions that attend such a sweeping portrayal, but Lapine’s book is frustratingly noncommittal about them.  The supporting characters are not warped and odd enough to register as the perceptions of a creative mind, but they aren’t sympathetic and developed enough to attain full human status apart from their role as George’s subjects.

Unsurprisingly, those thrilling songs were the best part of 2^nd Stage’s production, which was directed by Christopher Ceccolini ’11.  In both iterations of “Sunday,” the staging was quiet and graceful, and the singers, who in a few other places struggled with Sondheim’s insane dissonant lyricism, came together beautifully.  No loud Broadway stylings were necessary; the passionate clarity and togetherness of the voices was plenty.

Also unsurprisingly, the production was less successful in tackling the underwritten characters and relationships.  The actors took interesting but sometimes clashing approaches to these roles, yielding uneven results.  For instance, Daniel Debonis ‘12’s squealing, cartoony German accent in his role a servant in the first act was hilarious, as were Howe Pearson ‘12’s gruff outbursts as a soldier on his day off, but these outlandish characterizations unsettled an already-wavering tone.  

Still, “Sunday” was held together by a number of solid performances. In particular, Nemo Allen ‘12 hit a perfect note between comedy and emotional volatility as a coarse boatman with no tolerance for sissy artist types.  As both Georges, Alek Barkats ’12 was slightly reserved in tackling the songs, but his understatement paid off in a beautifully-shaped characterization – intensely cold and inward in the first act, then deeply neurotic and uncertain in the second.  And Barkats abandoned his composure when needed, most hilariously in a song where Seurat morphs into two dogs he’s in the process of painting.  As Dot, George’s frustrated lover in the first act, Sara Schineller ‘12 was delightfully poised, delivering Dot’s rambling soliloquies with charming matter-of-factness; however, she seemed emotionally distant, thanks in part to Lapine’s sketchy characterization.  Her shining came in the second act, when she played the modern-day George’s grandmother, Marie–the show’s most eloquent spokesperson for the redemptive power of creation.  Marie explains that Dot used to say “children and art” were the only things worth leaving behind; Schineller sang sweetly, with just a hint of sobbing: “This is our family, this is a lot/ After I go, this is all that you’ve got… Listen to Mama, children and art.”

As I’ve indicated, I’m highly skeptical of the art-centric mythology this musical presents.  It’s a credit to Ceccolini’s production that, in the end, I was convinced anyway.  An elegant set that both embodied Seurat’s distinctive, painterly way of seeing and framed it critically, designed by Jeremy Berkowitz ‘10, along with lighting design by Liam Stansen ‘10 that was strikingly sensitive to artistic subjectivity (especially in the cool, cloudy illumination of Seurat as he painted behind a scrim), communicated a feeling of wonder at the mystery and power of art.  It was easy to overlook flaws, both in the ambitiously large-scale production and the thematically overflowing musical itself, when the momentum of Sondheim’s music and of Ceccolini’s conception pulled so strongly toward something so beautiful.  Near the end of the play, I knew that the final “Sunday” reprise was coming, and yet I felt an undeniable tingling as an evening with wrong and right notes aplenty came full circle – back to the beginning, the transcendent source.  “White.  A blank page or canvas.  So many possibilities…”