Drawing From Life.(Stephen Sondheim and Sam Buntrock on "Sunday in the Park with George")(Interview)

Byline: editor: Valerie Steiker

A spectacular London production of Sondheim's groundbreaking Sunday in the Park with George arrives on Broadway, writes Adam Green.

The theater director Sam Buntrock first encountered the musicals of Stephen Sondheim as a teenager in London, and, as he tells it, he was lucky to walk away with his vital organs intact. Into the Woods, he recalls, "knocked me up against the back wall of the theater." Assassins, he says, "seized me by the throat." As for Sunday in the Park with George: "I literally had to pull myself up off the floor."

In 2005, at the Menier Chocolate Factory, a tiny theater in Southwark, London, Buntrock returned the favor, working over the hearts of audiences and critics alike with his passionate, visually ingenious production of Sondheim's modernist masterpiece about the nineteenth-century modernist master Georges Seurat. Now, after an Olivier Award--winning West End run, Buntrock's Sunday in the Park with George comes to New York.

Under the inspired direction of Hal Prince, Sondheim had pushed the envelope with such bold experiments as Company (1970) and Follies (1971). In 1983, he and his new collaborator, the writer-director James Lapine, tore the envelope to shreds with the ravishingly elliptical Sunday in the Park with George, earning a Pulitzer in the bargain. The first act, set in 1884, shows us the genesis of Seurat's most famous work, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, using fragments of plot, character, language, and harmony--much as the father of pointillism had used dabs of color--to paint a portrait of the artist as a young obsessive who sacrifices everything to bring his vision to life. Act two, which takes place 100 years later, charts the creative and personal crisis of Seurat's (fictional) great-grandson, a conceptual artist, also named George, who must learn to connect the dots between past and present so that he can, in the words of the final song, move on.

The 32-year-old Buntrock, a London native who grew up with a bad stammer, connected a few dots of his own to find a fresh take on the show. "As a boy, I was good with a pencil, so it was very easy for me to get lost in the solitary world of drawing," Buntrock says. "My mother, in her infinite wisdom, sent me to a drama group, and when I was onstage I didn't stammer." Buntrock went on to study drama at Bristol University and staged an acclaimed production of Assassins in London. After a season as an assistant director at the Donmar Warehouse, he pursued a second career as a commercial animator. Then the two worlds merged. "I jokingly said that I wanted to direct Sunday in the Park with George, " he says. "Within about 30 seconds, I realized, Of course--I'm going to use animation to show Seurat's painting coming to life, and I'm going to open the show with the first charcoal-sketch line and end with the last dab of paint." The director turned over the CGI duties to Tim Bird, and the set and costume design to David Farley. Then he found a pair of leads whose warm-blooded performances earned each of them an Olivier last season.

As Seurat and, later, his great-grandson, the 34-year-old Welsh actor Daniel Evans steps into the smock and whiskers of the original production's Mandy Patinkin (he was good--I swear). Though Evans made his reputation in classical roles with the Royal Shakespeare Company, he confesses that he was a "closet Sondheim fanatic"--and he won his first Olivier for his performance in the 2000 Donmar revival of Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along. For his latest turn, critics have praised his gift for capturing Seurat's rueful self-awareness.