Tonight James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim are chatting along with Bernadette Peters, Mandy Patinkin and Christine Baranski about the making of SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE. (You can still get tickets here!) Lapine just put out an oral history of the making of the show, and it's bound to be a fascinating conversation.
If you're not familiar with the show, the first act tells the story of the artist Georges Seurat and his model/lover Dot as he's painting his famous A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. You've seen it before.
The second act takes place 100 years later, and concerns his descendant, a sculptor/inventor who is stuck artistically and emotionally and finds new freedom in a visit to the site of Seurat's work. It's a show about being an artist and the challenges of relationship and creativity.
It's also a show about what is on the surface a pretty unlikable guy. Georges is ultra-controlling and more than a little cruel toward Dot. It's worth watching the first act just to see how Lapine and Sondheim endear us to him. They use two techniques, really: first, they start us with Dot, who is funny and beautiful and adores this guy despite how frustrating he can be. It's a great tip: If you want to make us care about a character, have someone else that we love adore them.
Second, the musical slowly lets us into his point of view on everything. We get him singing his colors as he paints, and just like that his obsessiveness becomes not a flaw but a point of fascination, a doorway into his imagination that only expands as the show goes on. Giving us glimpses into his mindset also reveals that he knows the pain he causes and what he is losing when Dot leaves him, which effectively transforms his actions from callous to tragic.
So yeah, great character work to look at in that first act.
But there's another technique here that you see sometimes in great screenwriting. Lapine and Sondheim concretize Georges' general obsession with getting every little detail right in a hat that someone is wearing. He refuses to go the Follies with Dot, losing her, because he has to finish the hat. Just the choice to do that, to ground Georges' obsession in one object, is a great writing choice. It puts flesh on the bone.
But then, at the start of Act II we get this wild limbo where all the people we met in Act I that Georges painted now sing about being trapped in his painting on a permanently hot day forever. It parallels the start of Act I, when Dot was complaining about the heat while she poses for Georges, but now it's this whole group of people that is upset. And near the end, Dot takes a step back from her own frustrations to thank Georges for, among other things, giving her a hat. The hat Georges was so obsessed with all along proves to be this gift he wanted her to have. And suddenly this is all of us aka me:
You know Daryl loves SUNDAY.
When you give emphasis to an object in a story, you endow it with power. And anything you do with that object after the fact ends up offering a greater emotional wallop as a result. The thing I love about SUNDAY is that it gives no hint that this turn is coming. It doesn't need to come; the hat has already served its purpose by being that part of Georges' drivenness that can represent the whole.
I'm eager to learn whether the idea was always there to bring the hat back in this new way. I feel like so often in early drafts of scripts we bury treasure without knowing it. One of the greatest parts about being a writer is finding those treasures and realizing there's so much more there still to use.
