When I look at you, what is it that I see? A face, certainly. Hair, probably. Clothes, hopefully. If I\u2019m observant, I might notice more subtle flourishes \u2014 a sense of style, an air of disappointment. But the one thing I won\u2019t ever see is what I\u2019m actually looking for: you, the backstage observer who wishes I would quit staring at you like that.<\/p>\n
So it goes in \u201cSunday in the Park with George,\u201d Stephen Sondheim\u2019s 1985 musical based on the life of French artist Georges Seurat. In Susannah Martin\u2019s excellent production, running through Jan. 25 at Shotgun Players\u2019 Ashby Stage, George (Kevin Singer) is hugely likable, even if the stare is a little off-putting.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Seurat, drawing on his era\u2019s advances in vision science, was an early pioneer of pointillism, composing his scenes from arrays of multicolored dots that, at a distance, appear to blend into distinct, luminous shades.\u00a0<\/p>\n
So George lives for \u201ccolor and light.\u201d That\u2019s the phrase he sings on loop while stabbing his brush at the huge, backlit scrim representing his latest painting, \u201cA Sunday on La Grande Jatte.\u201d Meanwhile, in her room beneath the studio, George\u2019s lover Dot (Marah Sotelo) is feeling snubbed: She angrily blots her cheeks with a powderpuff \u2014 dot-dot-dot \u2014 in perfect sync with George\u2019s brushstrokes.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The moral here \u2014 swipe left for artists \u2014 plays out over the show\u2019s first half. We follow George through many Sundays of sketching random Parisians in the park while Dot mopes around nearby. As their relationship disintegrates, George\u2019s masterwork grows into its final form.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A snappy second act follows, leaping forward in time to show us George\u2019s great-grandson \u2014 also named George \u2014 as he struggles to market his work in the 1980s art scene. Certainly, George\u2019s Cyclotron (designed by Sydney Parnell) wins the prize for coolest prop ever: It spins and sparks like a short-circuiting lunar lander, requires a full-time electrician and is, understandably, a hard sell.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This production pays careful attention to what the two Georges have in common. While both can happily spend hours gazing enraptured at passersby, making contact is another matter. The younger George chants it to himself like a mantra: \u201cConnect! Connect!\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s not so easy when your world is populated by cartoon characters. Among the Sunday residents of the park are a pair of giggling shopgirls who think they can catch boyfriends by pretending to fish, an American couple with plans to buy their own pastry chef, and a one-eyed boatman (understudy Nico Jaochico, in a standout performance) who regales George with cynical theories about human nature. \u201cOne eye and no illusions,\u201d he boasts, with an unavoidable wink.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It\u2019s good, old-fashioned slapstick and amazing. This ensemble is uniformly talented. They seem to be inventions of George\u2019s relentless mind, which encounters faces and mannerisms and instantly caricatures them.<\/p>\n
The effect is intensified by Nina Ball\u2019s clever scenic design, which blurs the lines between people and the places they inhabit. Earnest, if simple-minded, Soldier (William Brosnahan) strolls through the park arm-in-arm with his comrade:\u00a0a full-sized cutout of a soldier. In one entertaining number, George sketches a dog, clears his throat with a few \u201cwoofs,\u201d and begins to romp around narrating its inner life.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Dot is kind of into it. \u201cHow George looks!\u201d she gushes, watching him work. The remark is double-edged: the way George peers, the way George appears. And we can\u2019t help but admire him, too. Singer, as George, with his warm basso voice and intense gaze that cuts around the theater like a searchlight, strikes us as someone bothered by beauty and trying very hard to be good.<\/p>\n
He also seems to be somewhere on the spectrum, which feels topical. Refracted through George\u2019s eyes, the world looks like nothing we\u2019ve seen before. Late in the show, when a discouraged George wants to quit artmaking for good, Dot reminds him of the value of his singular perspective: \u201cGive us more to see!\u201d she sings. I\u2019d second that \u2014 we all benefit from having different kinds of minds around.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When I look at you, what is it that I see? A face, certainly. Hair, probably. Clothes, hopefully.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":91535,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[764,2240,143,145,144,32220,50588,44324,50589,1058,3240],"class_list":{"0":"post-91534","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-oakland","8":"tag-berkeley","9":"tag-musicals","10":"tag-oakland","11":"tag-oakland-headlines","12":"tag-oakland-news","13":"tag-shotgun-players","14":"tag-sondheim","15":"tag-sunday-in-the-park-with-george","16":"tag-susannah-martin","17":"tag-theater","18":"tag-theatre"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91534"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91534\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/91535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}