Not Quite Able to Connect the Dots

WASHINGTON -- Despite its initial acclaim, the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Sunday in the Park With George” isn’t revived nearly as often as many of Stephen Sondheim’s other landmark musicals. So it was one of the most anticipated entries in the current Sondheim Celebration at the Kennedy Center, especially for those who recall being deeply moved by it in its 1984 premiere.

Eric Schaeffer, artistic director of the ambitious festival, selected “Sunday” as one of the two musicals he’s personally staging. It’s sad to report that Schaeffer’s production accomplishes little except to reveal some of the reasons the show is so seldom dusted off.

For a musical that lasts two hours, 45 minutes, “Sunday in the Park” has a surprisingly sketchy book, especially considering that it was written by James Lapine, who also wrote Sondheim’s heavily plotted “Into the Woods.” That its two acts are separated by a century reinforces this quality.

Act 1: In the 1880s, the French pointillist artist Georges Seurat, obsessed by his painting “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte,” drives his mistress, Dot, out of his life and eventually--after she’s pregnant with his child--to America. Act 2: Dot’s great-grandson George, a divorced American conceptual artist, feels his own creative well running dry but is inspired to move on to a new phase of his work by memories of his great-grandmother and her life.

Of course, not every other Sondheim musical has as driving a plot as “Into the Woods” or “Sweeney Todd.” But those that don’t usually offer empathetic characters who are caught in a dramatic situation that inspires richly ambivalent feelings in both the characters and the audience. Not so with “Sunday in the Park.” At least in Schaeffer’s staging, Raul Esparza’s 1880s George is a resolutely cold fish. He doesn’t appear to have inward feelings for Dot that must be overcome in order for his art to triumph. Melissa Errico brings everything to the role of Dot that Bernadette Peters brought to the original, but she can’t establish the link with George all by herself.

The weakness of the dramatic core in the first act makes the antics of the supporting characters--the people whose momentary poses are being caught for posterity in Seurat’s painting--feel less like comic relief and more like tiresome padding. Perhaps it’s unfair to expect them to be more fleshed out; Seurat himself didn’t worry about that in his painting. But this is a nearly three-hour event, not a painting, and these characters are much more one-note than the smaller roles in most of Sondheim’s oeuvre.

The first part of the second act remains as brilliant as ever. First, in “It’s Hot Up Here,” Seurat’s subjects gripe about the downside of being recorded for posterity. Then we move forward to the introduction of the contemporary George’s latest mixed-media piece, “Chromolume #7,” and his acerbic “Putting It Together” number, in which he offers his cynical guide to the politics of the modern art world. For this production, the “Chromolume” is largely unseen, although we see the reactions of the art crowd who have gathered for its unveiling.

Esparza looks appropriately lean and hungry as the later George, and Errico convincingly alters her former voice and stance to play George’s grandmother. But the second half of the second act, which had seemed so poignant in the original production, doesn’t work nearly as well here. Although George is inspired to “Move On,” he has been established as such a superficial, callow guy that it’s hard to have much confidence that he will find a new, worthwhile subject.

The disguised autobiographical statement contained within “Sunday”--compare Sondheim’s professional and personal dilemmas to Seurat’s--is fascinating for anyone who admires Sondheim’s work. But this production makes it look as if the other layers of meaning in this musical have diminished with time. Call it “Sunday on the Stage With Stephen.”

“Sunday in the Park With George,” Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C. In repertory through June 28. (800) 444-1324 or www.kennedy-center .org/sondheim.