CABLE TV REVIEW : SHOWTIME SPENDS A ‘SUNDAY IN THE PARK’

Let’s face it, and be glad of it--you can’t fully capture a piece of musical theater on the screen. The film version of “A Chorus Line” certainly didn’t do so. Neither does Showtime cable’s very decent presentation of Stephen Sondheim’s and James Lapine’s “Sunday in the Park with George” at 8 tonight. (PBS will air it this summer.)

The cameras try to show us what we would have seen at Broadway’s Booth Theatre, but they must inevitably chop into separate shots--full shot, medium shot, close-up--what the eye can take in in one sweep on the stage. That’s especially wrong for the first half of the show, where we shouldn’t lose touch with the overarch of the green suburban park which painter Georges Seurat (Mandy Patinkin) is trying to arrange into significance. Like Seurat’s pouting model, Dot (Bernadette Peters), the camera can’t seem to settle down.

Nevertheless, this TV version does convey at least some of the fragrance and wit that “Sunday” had on the stage. What a disaster if they had tried to film it in a real park! But clearly we’re in a magical landscape, where cutouts and human figures are on an equal plane and where song comes as readily and as craftily (this being a Sondheim show) as speech.

If the first half of the show seems cold--a dismissal of the common herd except as cannon-fodder for the artist--the second half, set in 1984, recognizes the artist’s need to re-engage with the human family. “A little less thinking, a little more feeling,” Peters suggests in the whimsical “Children and Art,” and Patinkin as her grandson (also an obsessive artist, also named George) takes her point.

Here those close-ups aren’t distracting. “Sunday in the Park with George” needs the frame of the proscenium to lure the viewer all the way inside, but this isn’t a bad reproduction at all.

Showtime viewers can also see it Feb. 23, Feb. 28, March 3, March 8 and March 12.