Cast of Sunday In The Park With George, MacEwan University Theatre Arts. Photo by Lindsey Tran, @understudystudio_. Set design Ross Nichol, costume design Deanna Finnman, lighting design Travis Hatt, video design Matt Schuurman.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

“There’s a part of you always standing by, Mapping out the sky, Finishing a hat….”

Something rare and special is happening this week at MacEwan University: a production of Sunday In The Park With George.

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There is an elusive magic about Stephen Sondheim’s groundbreaking 1984 Pulitzer Prize winner. For one thing it’s a musical inspired by a painting, and a landmark modernist painting at that: Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, by the French pointillist painter Georges Seurat. For another, the musical, the first partnership between Sondheim and playwright/director James Lapine, is about art and the making of art, artists and the shimmering possibilities of what they see as they create.

“It’s a musical that speaks especially to artists, to musicians, to painters, to any discipline of creative artist,” says Jim Guedo, who directs the production of Sunday In The Park (17 actors and a live orchestra of six) that runs on the Triffo Theatre stage Thursday through Sunday. “It really resonates; if people invest in it, it’s a beautiful thing.”

Everything about Sunday In The Park is unusual in a musical. The lyrics, as Sondheim has put it, “are one long uninterrupted sentence, with a through line.” There’s no story; it captures the figures in the Seurat painting as characters, as well as Georges the artist painting them, in a sort of theatrical equivalent of pointillism, where separate points of colour add up in the viewer’s mind. Georges and his neglected lover Dot: theirs is, as Guedo puts it, “a love affair that finally gets resolved a century later in Act II, where the artist is an American sculptor, a great-great grandson of Seurat, creating multimedia pieces for the voracious commercial art marketplace, struggling to claim his own vision.

The musical gets a place of honour on Guedo’s bucket list, he says. Forty years ago Guedo saw the original Off-Broadway production of Sunday in the Park in New York. And since then “I’ve made it my goal in life to see every major production I could …” on both sides of the Atlantic. When people ask him, as they do, “what’s your favourite Sondheim?” his answer is “on a great day, it’s Sunday in the Park With George; if my mood is darker it’s Sweeney Todd. To me these are the two peaks of Sondheim.”

Sunday In The Park With George, MacEwan University Theatre Arts. Photo by Lindsey Tran, @understuystudio_. Set design Ross Nichol, costume design Deanna Finnman, lighting design Travis Hatt, video design Matt Schuurman

With the exception of a 2005 Tim Ryan production at MacEwan in its pre-university college days, Sunday In The Park has never been done in Edmonton. “Now we actually have the space (the spanky new Triffo Theatre,” and the talent honed in the course of a four-year degree program, “we’re able to make this happen,” Guedo says.

His inspiration was the pared-down-to-essentials 2017 New York production starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford. “It was reverse engineering,” he says of the MacEwan production Edmonton audiences will see starting Thursday. “I had to find a staging that would be evocative but simple,” given constraints of budget and time. Under the monitorship of heavy-hitter working theatre professionals like videographer/projection specialist Matt Schuurman and costume designer Deanna Finnman, for example, students are both on- and backstage, in the cast and the crew.

After the flop of Merrily We Roll Along in 1981 (a flop that has been reversed by this year’s Broadway production), Sondheim had found himself at a low ebb. As Guedo points out, partnering with Lapine “kickstarted him…. When he looked back at everything before and after James Lapine, there was a seismic shift, a new frame of feeling. He started to dig more deeply, get more emotional, more vulnerable. He turned to family, to children, to art,” witness Into The Woods (1987) and Passion (1994).

There is something mysterious about the effect that Sunday In The Park has on audiences. I’ve been lucky enough to see it twice, once in London and once in New York. It is not a sad show but both times, the audience, myself included, cried almost all the way through. Why? We were never quite sure. Guedo thinks it’s the way the characters are “captured … in a perfect moment that’s just transcendental. A moment that captures the best versions of someone.”

“It’s what would ring through the minds of these characters if they knew they’d be in a work of art that would last forever . that they were part of something bigger.”

In the course of a 45-year (and counting) career, Guedo thinks “you can count on your hands the shows — you know the keepers — and the moments that will last forever, etched into your mind.” He thinks of Philip Seymour Hoffman as Willie Loman in Death of a Salesman. Or “the moment of seeing Angela Lansbury and Len Cariou rising out of the pit in Sweeney Todd.”

“What we do (in theatre) is transitory. But when it hits and sticks….”  Sunday in the Park is like that, he thinks. “It’s about people trying to create something new.” And it’s about the cost of being an artist. “People don’t realize how hard it is,” says Guedo. “It’s about what you knowingly choose to give up, the collateral damage…. George knows what he’s sacrificing. There’s a cost to it.”

“A great show for the fourth-years to end on,” he says of his graduating theatre students. “A show that validates them, a show about making art.”

Guedo’s production of Sunday In The Park With George runs Thursday through Sunday in the Triffo Theatre in Allard Hall, at MacEwan University (11110 104 Ave.). Tickets: tickets.macewan.ca.