Years ago, when we were very young, we stood for a performance of Sunday in the Park with George.  Perhaps we were there to see Bernadette Peters, or maybe because the show had won the Pulitzer.  Oddly enough, given Mandy Patinkin’s oeuvre, we didn’t know his work very well.  And at evening’s end, we didn’t feel as if we had seen anything particularly revelatory.

Youth—and Sondheim—is wasted on the young.  From our current vantage point, we contend that only life experience enables one to fully appreciate the musical and lyrical genius that is Stephen Sondheim.  And as for Sunday itself, what does a callow youth know of artistic struggle—that is, unless he is Keats? 

Of course, therein lies one of the joys of aging—the opportunity to discover anew that which you previously had dismissed.  And to suddenly have your eyes opened, your ears alert—and your heart swollen with emotion—for your youthful folly and the lost in-between years—and for the beauty that unfolds on the stage in front of you, collapsing time and enveloping the audience, young as well as old.  

In the intervening years, the songs have become more familiar—through concerts and cabarets, from nights spent at the Oak Room and the Allen Room, and Sunday afternoons spent listening to show tunes.  And along comes a young man, Sam Buntrock, perhaps as young as Sondheim was while working on West Side Story, a youth wise beyond his years—and he sees Sunday through the eyes of a new century.  And you find yourself in a front-row seat on a Saturday afternoon—and from the moment George makes his entrance, you feel yourself enraptured.  It’s Buntrock’s sure-handed direction, the fluidity of the action, that transports us immediately to that park on an island in the Seine just outside Paris—and it’s Daniel Evans and Jenna Russell who take us deep into the hearts and souls of George and Dot, inhabiting their roles so completely as to have been borne out of previous existence.  And as the painting comes to life, as Seurat’s vision marries with Sondheim’s, and Buntrock’s, you feel a wellspring of emotion for the transformative beauty of art. 

For years, the wisdom of the pundits has had it that Sunday’s second act is weaker than the first.  A more simplified explanation is that the second act takes place in 1984—surely one of the more reviled years in American style.  What’s to be done about those clothes?  The lingo?  The stance?  It was the commencement of the nation’s final hubristic exhalations.  Junk bond kings ruled Sotheby’s, their frantically waving paddles sending art prices into the stratosphere.  Wisely, Buntrock minimizes our focus on such fakery—and sends us back to la Grande Jatte outside Paris.  And once George reconnects with Dot, across the years and miles, as they share “Move On,” that luminous paean to letting go, we feel firsthand the glory that comes from life examined through art.

Such is the incisive poignancy of Sondheim’s lyrics that even those with a heightened appreciation for Sondheim might find themselves unprepared for the jolt at show’s end.  For when it comes, when the stage is completely bare, and George presented anew with a white room, his final words provoke such a revelation, a cathartic epiphany of such joy that the audience nearly collectively gasps—with spontaneous jubilation.  Really, what more does one desire from theatre, from art, from life, than the promise of possibility?  Rarely has a show embodied more acutely the words that Fitzgerald used to close Gatsby, when he wrote of mankind’s “capacity for wonder.”  Indeed, it is wonder and awe that we take from this stunning production—and a rediscovered promise in life.