Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber Block, Geoffrey (large ebook reader .txt) 📖

heart.” “Louis’ thoughts are not hard to follow,” his “art is not hard to swallow,” and, unlike George, the baker is “not afraid to be gooey.” Also in contrast to George, Louis “sells what he makes.” In return, Louis, like his pastries, will perish without producing either art or (in a plot twist) children of his own. Louis also has the potential to become a better father than George, as well as a better provider and companion.

Putting It Together

In the final scene of act I, the uncompromising Seurat completes his great painting Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte after two years and many months of Sundays, an act marked musically by the completion of the opening horn melody that represents Seurat’s blank canvas (Example 15.2a) and its transformation into the song, “Sunday” (Example 15.2b).

Act II centers on a contemporary artist, still confronting old dilemmas of popular versus personal, more “sincere” art (remember Hammerstein’s emphasis on this quality in a song’s genesis). But this new George is a lot more like Louis in some respects. In stark contrast to the painter’s exceptional meticulousness, his great-grandson is rapidly turning out a series of similar and risk-free high-tech sculptures known as Chromolumes. The new George also shares with his forefather an inability to connect the dots of human relationships (a central task for both artists), but unlike Seurat, the modern George has managed to successfully negotiate the politics of art and has gained all the trappings of success, including the profit and fame denied the greater artist. Nevertheless, he is deeply dissatisfied with his own work.

Like the characters in Lady in the Dark who appear metaphorically in Liza Elliott’s dreams, many characters in Seurat’s life and painting reappear in the life of the present-day George. Seurat’s mistress, Dot, lives on as her daughter, the aged Marie. Seurat’s unsympathetic rival, Jules, metamorphoses into Bob Greenberg, the director of the museum that now houses Chromolume #7. Perhaps most tellingly, the Old Lady who turns out to be Seurat’s hypercritical but supportive mother in act I returns in act II as the perceptive art critic Blair Daniels, who, like Seurat’s mother, is able to see that the emperor has no clothes, but also like her act I counterpart believes in George’s talent and promise.

Example 15.2.Sunday in the Park with George

(a) Opening horn melody

(b) Opening of “Sunday” based on the opening horn melody

Sunday in the Park with George, 1986 film of the Broadway show. George, the painter based on Georges Seurat (Mandy Patinkin) (left), finishing his painting, “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” at the end of act I.

The connections between act I and act II are also musical ones, in which key musical material develops character and plot through dramatically meaningful thematic melodic reprises and transformations. One of the most audible examples is the music Seurat uses in the act of painting his masterpiece (“Color and Light”) in act I, which returns in an electrified version that marks the Chromolume music in act II. When the ghost of Dot returns at the end of act II to resolve her personal issues with George and to help the modern George “Move On” artistically, her music shares several prominent motives heard in “We Do Not Belong Together” that Dot sang in act I when she left the great artist in order to start a new life in America with Louis. To cite but one prominent example, “Stop worrying where you’re going” is set to the same music as the title and opening phrase, “We do not belong together.” The gossips in the museum in act II sing the same “I’m not surprised” motive in discussing the Chromolumes (“Putting It Together,” Part II) as Seurat’s contemporaries in act I (“Gossip Sequence”). The textual and musical phrase that George uses to express his discomfort at the heat in his studio in “Color and Light” becomes the foundation for the song the characters, now imprisoned and frozen forever at the Art Institute of Chicago, sing to open act II, “It’s Hot Up Here.” The obsessively repeated musical motive of “Putting It Together” (Example 15.3a) can be traced to the music associated with the phrase “Finishing the Hat” in the song of that name (Example 15.3b), and at the end of act I with its one note extension—from four shorts and a long to four shorts and two longs—as Seurat completes his canvas before the characters in the painting start to sing “Sunday” (Example 15.3c).68 These examples are only the most prominent of a much longer list.69

Sunday in the Park with George, 1986 film of the Broadway show. The picture frame descends to enclose the finished painting, “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” at the end of act I.

Just as Seurat’s mother evolves from a critical pose to an attitude of understanding and appreciation in act I, the childless Blair Daniels in act II—the act II George is both childless and divorced—rightly points out the meaninglessness and superficiality of recycling past successes and encourages the formerly vital artist to move on to something new. By the end of the evening, young George returns to La Grande Jatte and meets Dot, a deus ex machina figure introduced to help George change and grow as an artist and “move on.” Like the sadder-but-wiser characters in Into the Woods, George learns that he too is not alone, but rather part of a great tradition that includes the artistry of his great-grandfather and the wisdom of his maternal ancestors. Most important, he learns that his duty as an artist is to grow and develop his art and his humanity. The modern George has thus escaped the fate of Franklin Shepard Inc., the composer anti-hero of Merrily We Roll Along.

Example 15.3. “Putting It Together” motive from Sunday in the Park with George

(a) “Putting It Together” motive in “Putting It Together”

(b) “Putting It Together” motive anticipated in