Sunday in the Park with George DVD:
Oh
My
God! (where to start?)
This is a musical by Stephen Sondheim. Georges Seurat is often credited as being one of the founders of a painting style called "pointillism". The idea behind Seurat's pointillism is that you can create a painting comprised solely of "dots" of primary colors, and when standing from a distance, the human eye and brain will mix the primary colors to create the illusion of a wider spectrum of colors. Seurat's crowning achievement was his painting "Sunday Afternoon on the Isle Grande Jatte". Sondheim's "Sunday in the Park with George" is a fictional piece documenting the creation of this masterpiece.

When I first bought the CD of the musical, on the basis that it was a Sondheim, I hated it. I thought it was terrible, trite, amusical, ponderous, self-absorbed, boring, etc. I was planning to pass it off to my brother. But I gave it a chance in the memorable Summer of '91, and I would find myself hearing certain melodies and snippets in my head while taking the A Train to NYU for summer classes. I ended up obsessing over the show.

The show was a critical success, but it wasn't the Broadway hit expected of Sondheim. No boisterous dance sequences, no uplifting, tear-jerking message, no memorable songs that would go down into the pantheon of songs that would be forever imitated in musical revues and karaoke bars. The show was a meditation on life and art. And as Seurat's points of primary color created a masterpiece from afar, so the moments of our lives create the masterpieces of our lives upon completion. The music of the show imitates pointillism, using just points of notes to create a musical work.

We are the artists, with a blank canvas, and we create what we want to see. There's one number in the musical when Seurat is obsessing over "finishing the hat" and he's justifying losing his girlfriend to work on his art, and that finishing that hat is more important because that is the creation of life, what is meaningful, but in the end, he confesses that he's creating a hat "where there never was a hat". That was gasp-worthy for me.

I listened to the CD of the musical long before I found out that the stage production had been videotaped. Watching it adds so many more dimensions than just the CD. The staging and the lights are incredible as is expected of all great Broadway musicals, certainly Sondheim musicals. And I was tickled pink to see a "scrim" used brilliantly. A scrim is a piece of cloth used in theater, and when it's lit from behind, the audience can see through it. But when it's lit from the front, it looks like a solid piece of cloth. It's gimmicky, and if you gotta have a gimmick the key is knowing when to use it.

So all through the first act, we see glimpses of the elements that will comprise the final piece in the characters Seurat sketches on the island on a series of Sundays between 1884 and 1886. And in the final musical piece of the first act, Seurat brings all the elements/characters together and manipulates them until on the stage is a live rendition of Seurat's masterpiece.

Life as with music as with art: "Order design composition tension balance light . . . harmony".

And that's just the first act.

Strange. Contrary to the theme of my relatives not wanting me to have anything to do with their kids, which I'm wondering whether it's all in my mind, my sister-in-law just sent me this pic. It killed me to crop out my niece's face, but my sister-in-law once upbraided me for uploading a pic when she was but a baby and she has since given no indication that injunction is no longer in force. She's almost 14 now, so if anything it's even more absolute that I would need specific permission to upload any picture of her. 

She said this puzzle was one of the first things Tessa pulled out to do when New Jersey went under lockdown for the CCP pandemic. I got this for Tessa's birthday no less than 5 years ago. At the time I knew she was too young for it, but as always, then as now, I couldn't say when I would have another opportunity to give it to her. I fully expected the pieces to be scattered far afield in the chaos of childhood with four siblings in total, only to be found years later in various rooms, closets and cupboards of their house or lost in vacuuming or cracks in the sideboard. 

I love the painting, Georges Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte, in no small part due to the Sondheim musical Sunday in the Park with George (which I've geeked out about long ago in the early days of this blog). I've been collecting pieces with the painting on it for years, but it's gotten quite pointless (hahaha! geddit? pointless? ugh *clunk*) given my life circumstances. When I saw the jigsaw puzzle in Taiwan, my first thought was "me want", followed quickly with "but vhy? (Transylvanian accent)". So then I thought to get it as a present and give it to one of my brothers' kids. I felt it would be passing something on even though they wouldn't know why or the meaning it has for me.

So I was moved and tickled pink to see that Tessa had kept the pieces intact all these years (with help from her mom, no doubt) and finally completed the puzzle and that she's growing into a mature young lady, about to enter high school in the fall, CCP virus willing.

Still, I wonder about my sister-in-law and other brother sending me something about their kids for the first time ever recently. Also the smattering of superficial contacts by random people. And meeting up with both of the people I know in Taipei (I met up with the French guy last week). I doubt it has anything to do with the CCP virus and people wanting to connect in a time of crisis. I'm no doubt the bottom of the barrel of people anyone would want to contact for connection. Maybe some confluence in the universe resonating into these occurrences. They don't mean anything, they just happen.

On a sidenote, Stephen Sondheim's 90th birthday happened during the CCP pandemic and an online "concert" was organized amid the lockdown to celebrate it. Apparently even the critics who had doubts about it were impressed by the quality, and even people who don't like "show tunes" can appreciate the sheer brilliance of the songwriting in the way they are presented and described by the participants. Whenever participants described Sondheim's impact on their lives and career, I would think, "me too", even though it didn't become my life or career. From Broadway star to Hollywood celebrity to simple appreciative fan, Sondheim made us all equals in awe of greatness and the immeasurable gift he has given to American music and theater.