Thursday, May 22, 2008
Sunday in the Park with Julie Andrews
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
I have something nice and personal to report, for a change. Being shown to our seats at an evening performance of a revival of Steven Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George, at the Roundabout, we could not even enter our row – our center seats were occupied. After some shouting back and forth between the ushers and the occupant, the elegant gentleman sent his tickers up for the attendant to examine. The seats were right, but the performance was a matinee. With much apologizing, the man and his lady companion came out. Imagine everybody’s surprise, when the theatergoers recognized her, that British jaw, short curly graying hair, trim figure in a gray pants suit. It was Julie Andrews of My Fair Lady and Sound of Music fame. Of all people, it was my fate to throw one of my two all-time favorite musical actresses out of her seat. Another surprise, five minutes later they were seated in front of us, in two of four empty house seats. I can be as nonchalant as any New Yorker, but this was too much. I lost my cool and finding a working pen in my pocket, shamelessly asked her to celebrate our adventure by initialing my program. I now own a George program, inscribed "Thank you for understanding! Love Julie Andrews," which will be kept inside the sleeve of my original beat-up vinyl 1955 My Fair Lady vinyl record, with Andrews, Rex Harrison and Stanley Holloway. A truly gracious lady, I never got to tell her how I stood in line for eight hours for a standing room ticket, to hear her; another mysterious event got in the way - at intermission a Roundabout rep whisked Julie and her companion away. We acquired four new neighbors, who probably paid brokers’ ticket prices at $140, according to another neighbor, in NYC from Des Moines just for the shows. As for George, this revival is stunning although a bit hard to follow, but here goes.
There has always been respect if not love here for George Sondheim, lyricist/ composer of edgy musicals (b. 1930), product of an unhappy family life, who as a youngster attached himself to fatherly lyricist Oscar Hammerstein and composer Milton Babbitt and learned the trade by composing school musicals and gofering for Richard Rodgers. At 25 he wrote the lyrics for Leonard Bernstein and Arthur Laurent’s West Side Story, two years later for Jule Styne and Laurent’s Gypsy, and in 1962 had his own successful musical on Broadway, A Funny thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, starring Zero Mostel, never stopping. Roundabout has revived many of his works: Company, a 1970 mixed message about family life, Pacific Overtures, a 1973 opus about Admiral Peary and Japan’s emergence from a primitive Asian monarchy into a world power, and Assassins, a 1990 true downer of the killers of American Presidents singing out their motivations. None of Sondheim’s melodies are hummable, except for Send in the Clowns, in the pleasant 1973 A Little Night Music, popularized by singer Judy Collins.
Now for the 1984 George, based on a huge 1886 painting by the pointillist Georges Seurat (d. 1891 at 32 from cirrhosis), which depicts, in shimmering light points of pure color, Parisians out for a stroll in the park of the Island of La Grande Jatte, stiff bourgeois men and women mixed with simple people, shop girls and soldiers. In the first act George poses his lonely model Dot among the gentry, moving among the people for his composition, and halfway through you notice that some players appear on the stage in multiple projected images, acting independently of the live persons, presumably an invention of the British producing company, Menier Chocolate Factory, whose 2007 revival won five 2007 Olivier Awards. Roundabout imported this production, along with leading British singers David Evans and Jenna Russell, excellent but hard to decipher, given Sondheim’s parabolic lyrics and music.
As the plot progresses, Dot (Jenna) reveals that she is pregnant and has found a kind baker who will take her to America. George does not care, and that brings on the 2nd Act, with Dot’s great grandson George, an artist, opening a lights show at a museum. Dot’s daughter Marie, his grandmother, in wheelchair, contributes earthy observations, and multiple copies of George converse with museum board members, directors and poaching out-of-state curators. This is a scathing critique of the arts scene, and George wants out, to do his own art, without having to court patrons.. In the 2nd half he succeeds, after Marie has passed away, landing on Grande Jatte, the park now surrounded by glass-walled structures. Figures from his family past flow past and tell him not to be intimidated and follow his bent in art, just like his great-grandfather did.
Julie Andrews, product of a different positive and upbeat Broadway, was noted applauding enthusiastically the ambivalent and darkly weighted Sondheim messages (although one might argue that G. B. Shaw, conceivably a Sondheim icon, was not upbeat, and had noir edges even in Pygmalion, the My Fair Lady’s prototype). Follow your own destiny, greatly simplified, appears to be the message of the Sondheim play, sort of affirming the author/composer’s own life and art patterns.
Sunday in the Park with George is playing at the Roundabout’s Studio 54 Theatre, 254 West 54th Street, Jan. 25-June 25, 2008
I have something nice and personal to report, for a change. Being shown to our seats at an evening performance of a revival of Steven Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George, at the Roundabout, we could not even enter our row – our center seats were occupied. After some shouting back and forth between the ushers and the occupant, the elegant gentleman sent his tickers up for the attendant to examine. The seats were right, but the performance was a matinee. With much apologizing, the man and his lady companion came out. Imagine everybody’s surprise, when the theatergoers recognized her, that British jaw, short curly graying hair, trim figure in a gray pants suit. It was Julie Andrews of My Fair Lady and Sound of Music fame. Of all people, it was my fate to throw one of my two all-time favorite musical actresses out of her seat. Another surprise, five minutes later they were seated in front of us, in two of four empty house seats. I can be as nonchalant as any New Yorker, but this was too much. I lost my cool and finding a working pen in my pocket, shamelessly asked her to celebrate our adventure by initialing my program. I now own a George program, inscribed "Thank you for understanding! Love Julie Andrews," which will be kept inside the sleeve of my original beat-up vinyl 1955 My Fair Lady vinyl record, with Andrews, Rex Harrison and Stanley Holloway. A truly gracious lady, I never got to tell her how I stood in line for eight hours for a standing room ticket, to hear her; another mysterious event got in the way - at intermission a Roundabout rep whisked Julie and her companion away. We acquired four new neighbors, who probably paid brokers’ ticket prices at $140, according to another neighbor, in NYC from Des Moines just for the shows. As for George, this revival is stunning although a bit hard to follow, but here goes.
There has always been respect if not love here for George Sondheim, lyricist/ composer of edgy musicals (b. 1930), product of an unhappy family life, who as a youngster attached himself to fatherly lyricist Oscar Hammerstein and composer Milton Babbitt and learned the trade by composing school musicals and gofering for Richard Rodgers. At 25 he wrote the lyrics for Leonard Bernstein and Arthur Laurent’s West Side Story, two years later for Jule Styne and Laurent’s Gypsy, and in 1962 had his own successful musical on Broadway, A Funny thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, starring Zero Mostel, never stopping. Roundabout has revived many of his works: Company, a 1970 mixed message about family life, Pacific Overtures, a 1973 opus about Admiral Peary and Japan’s emergence from a primitive Asian monarchy into a world power, and Assassins, a 1990 true downer of the killers of American Presidents singing out their motivations. None of Sondheim’s melodies are hummable, except for Send in the Clowns, in the pleasant 1973 A Little Night Music, popularized by singer Judy Collins.
Now for the 1984 George, based on a huge 1886 painting by the pointillist Georges Seurat (d. 1891 at 32 from cirrhosis), which depicts, in shimmering light points of pure color, Parisians out for a stroll in the park of the Island of La Grande Jatte, stiff bourgeois men and women mixed with simple people, shop girls and soldiers. In the first act George poses his lonely model Dot among the gentry, moving among the people for his composition, and halfway through you notice that some players appear on the stage in multiple projected images, acting independently of the live persons, presumably an invention of the British producing company, Menier Chocolate Factory, whose 2007 revival won five 2007 Olivier Awards. Roundabout imported this production, along with leading British singers David Evans and Jenna Russell, excellent but hard to decipher, given Sondheim’s parabolic lyrics and music.
As the plot progresses, Dot (Jenna) reveals that she is pregnant and has found a kind baker who will take her to America. George does not care, and that brings on the 2nd Act, with Dot’s great grandson George, an artist, opening a lights show at a museum. Dot’s daughter Marie, his grandmother, in wheelchair, contributes earthy observations, and multiple copies of George converse with museum board members, directors and poaching out-of-state curators. This is a scathing critique of the arts scene, and George wants out, to do his own art, without having to court patrons.. In the 2nd half he succeeds, after Marie has passed away, landing on Grande Jatte, the park now surrounded by glass-walled structures. Figures from his family past flow past and tell him not to be intimidated and follow his bent in art, just like his great-grandfather did.
Julie Andrews, product of a different positive and upbeat Broadway, was noted applauding enthusiastically the ambivalent and darkly weighted Sondheim messages (although one might argue that G. B. Shaw, conceivably a Sondheim icon, was not upbeat, and had noir edges even in Pygmalion, the My Fair Lady’s prototype). Follow your own destiny, greatly simplified, appears to be the message of the Sondheim play, sort of affirming the author/composer’s own life and art patterns.
Sunday in the Park with George is playing at the Roundabout’s Studio 54 Theatre, 254 West 54th Street, Jan. 25-June 25, 2008
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 3:08 PM 
