The looks thrill

NEW YORK - Stephen Sondheim's clever and gorgeous musical

Sunday in the Park With George

is about Georges Seurat's painting

Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte

. Imported from London, this revival is fine and deeply moving, if more impressive visually than musically. A vintage Sondheim/Lapine collaboration (1984), the show has been dazzlingly restyled by 32-year-old director and London wunderkind Sam Buntrock.

The first act concerns Georges Seurat's Sunday visits to a little park in the middle of the Seine during which he sketched the people and animals he saw. Eventually, they would become the figures in the great painting - and 100 years later they would become the characters in Sondheim's play. Always downstage is Seurat, the silent, intense painter working against the acceptable mainstream fashion, scandalizing Paris with pointillism and neglecting his pregnant mistress/model, here wittily named Dot.

After we get to know these people, the play shifts from the 19th century to the contemporary art scene, where Seurat's great-grandson, also an artist, is showing his new work, a light sculpture called

Chromalume #7

- spectacularly realized here. Act 2, usually considered the weaker, is in this revival strongly dramatic, with the contemporary George a very recognizable Sondheim character - neurotic and lonely.

And because Buntrock is also a cutting-edge animator (known as Parlo in the world of commercial graphics and animation), the show is filled with gasp-inspiring digitized effects. Perhaps the most striking and meaningful comes at the start of Act 2, when the completed painting is hanging on a museum wall; the wall virtually recedes, as decade after decade of time is added to the distance between the picture and us. There are other startling effects - a sketch of a dog on a canvas moves - and sometimes it seems that the production is conjuring the artist rather than the artist's conjuring the picture. The burden and magic of creativity shifts here, but it's dazzling.

As Georges/George, Daniel Evans has an excellent voice, although he lacks the intensity and passion indelibly stamped on the role by Mandy Patinkin. As Dot, Jenna Russell is lovely but lacks the sexy sauciness and the warmth the role calls for (and that Bernadette Peters gave it); she is far better in Act 2 as George's grandmother. Although the cast members become an ensemble, they never become vivid individuals, except for Mary Beth Peil, who is very touching as George's mother.

Sondheim, as always, provides much to contemplate: about the connections between dots of pigment, notes of music, words of lyrics, and, further, the connections between the medium of paint and the medium of music, between the model and the actor, between the painter and the playwright. Art that exists in space - painting - and art that exists in time - music - combine to make an art that exists in both: theater.

As George sings in Act 2: "A vision's just a vision / If it's only in your head / If no one gets to see it / It's as good as dead / It has to come to light." The audience auditing and the spectator seeing:

Sunday in the Park

makes us realize that we are as crucial to art as art is to us.

Presented by Roundabout Theatre Company at Studio 54, 254 W. 54th St., New York. Tickets: $36.25 - $121.25. Information: 212-719-1300 or

» READ MORE: www.roundabouttheatre.org

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