Rain Matkin and Eli Yaschuk in 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

Last night in a packed theatre I got a chance to see the only musical in the repertoire where the rhyme of “rapturous” and “capture us” floats through the air.

To help support 12thnight.ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.

Both apply to the experience of Jim Guedo’s MacEwan University production of Sunday In The Park With George, Stephen Sondheim’s groundbreaking, mysteriously emotional, 1984 masterwork. In the repertoire it is, of course. But Sunday in the Park With George is so rarely staged — its technical, theatrical, and musical challenges are particular, rarefied, and daunting — it’s a special occasion to see it. And the audience in the Triffo Theatre was full of people who know the music through and through, and whose eyes mist over at the first chord of the swelling ensemble anthem Sunday, but who’ve never seen a production live.

It’s inspired by a modernist painting, Georges Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon On The Island Of La Grande Jatte. It captures, in Seurat’s signature pointillist style, well-dressed French suburbanites in a park on a sunny day off, just hanging out. There’s a kind of haunting stillness to it, and a shimmer that results from the points of colour applied, like dots, for the viewers to assemble in their minds. And Sondheim and playwright James Lapine, in this their first partnership, aim for a theatrical and musical equivalent. Wrap your mind around that.

It’s not a narrative per se, but the figures in the painting come to life, and criss-cross the “canvas” with things to say and to sing. And at the centre there’s the story of the artist, George, intensely immersed in his art, sketching and painting and neglecting his lover Dot, who’s modelling for him, and longing for something more than the artist gaze and exhortations to “concentrate.”

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.

The optics are intricate. It starts with the blank canvas (the first word in the musical, spoken by George, is “white.” And the sophisticated design of Guedo’s production, the joint achievement of Ross Nichol (set), Travis Hatt (lighting), Matt Schuurman (video), is a matter of screens, and washes where the dots accumulate and assemble into scenery — trees, and grass, and people beautifully costumed by Deanna Finnman. It’s artistic creation in motion. “Composition. Balance, Light. And harmony.” And Act II, which happens a century later, reveals what happens when the search for something passionately new and original becomes co-opted by the marketplace — a struggle that has been part of Sondheim’s own life, as you read in his two-part memoir.

Eli Yaschuk as George in 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).

The cast of 17, student actors about to graduate from the theatre arts department, create vivid characters who emerge and retreat into the scenery in a captivating rhythm under Guedo’s direction, with choreography by Amber Borotsik. They’re led by wonderful performances from Eli Yaschuk as George, fierce and prickly in his intensity and focus, and Rain Matkin as Dot, lovestruck and knowing, quick-witted and chafing in frustration as she fantasizes about being a Follies girl.

Both are strong singers, with a feel for delivering a song. Remember their names; you’ll be seeing them soon in cast lists across Edmonton theatres. In fact Yaschuk and Matkin will star in Radiant Vermin, already announced in the upcoming season at Northern Light Theatre.

Rain Matkin as Dot in Sunday In The Park With George, MacEwan University Theatre Arts. Photo by Lindsey Tran, @understudystudio_. Set designer Ross Nichol, costume designer Deanna Finnman, lighting designer Travis Hatt, video designer Matt Schuurman.

The music of Sunday in the Park is complicated and jagged, veering from the lyrical to the a-rhythmic and off-centre in its intervals, with silent moments of anticipation. The actors and an orchestra of six (who are non-student pros) negotiate the difficult score under the musical directors Steven Greenfield and Shannon Hiebert. And the sound design of David Bowden does it proud.

There is something moving about seeing young actors, on the brink of professional careers, tackle a musical that’s all about the magic, and the loneliness, of being an artist. “However you live, there’s a part of you always standing by, mapping out the sky finishing a hat, starting on a hat….”

Sunday In The Park With George runs through Sunday on MacEwan’s Triffo stage in Allard Hall. Tickets: tickets.macewan.ca.

MacEwan has just announced an upcoming season that launches with Tracey Power’s Glory, a Jazz Age hockey story directed by Amber Borotsik in the Tim Ryan Theatre Lab Oct. 30 to Nov. 3. Leigh Rivenbark directs Heathers The Musical in the Triffo Theatre Nov. 27 to Dec. 3. Jim Guedo’s Theatre Lab production of the highly original Dave Malloy musical Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 runs Feb. 12 to 16, 2025. And the season finale (March 26 to 30, 2025) is The Prom, directed by MacEwan alumnus Byron Martin, the artistic director of Grindstone Theatre. Subscriptions and tickets: tickets.macewan.ca or 780-497-4470.

•At the Fringe’s Backstage Theatre … tonight and Saturday, is a celebration of Indigenous “winter storytelling,” ᐋᒋᒧᐃᐧᐣ âcimowin. It’s led by Elder Jerry Saddleback, a venerable repository of ancestral wisdom, followed by performances from the distinguished  actor/playwright Sheldon Elter, and MC Red Cloud who weaves personal narrative and hip-hop in his storytelling. Tickets: fringetheatre.ca.