The video is of poor quality, grainy, badly focused and framed, but for me it captures the power of theater to rise up in one moment on one night, a scene never to be repeated, and offer beauty and catharsis and a sense of gratitude that you had seen this.
Sondheim’s lyrics show us a park and water, grass, trees, and light, especially light, filtered through the painter’s perception. In so few words, he shows us the thing itself and the thing transformed by Seurat’s imagination.
The song “Sunday” begins with George Seurat, French Impressionist painter played by Mandy Patinkin, speaking, not singing, the 5 words that define a classical definition of beauty. The actors move into place becoming the subjects of his painting “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884.” He speaks over the opening notes, a wonderful repetition of piano and strings, and there too, the first of an exchange of poignant, fond, heartbroken glances with Bernadette Peters, his former mistress, the love of his life. Patinkin’s tremulous tenor carrying over the chorus, and they sing of passing through this perfect day, of pausing on this perfect day in this brilliant light which Seurat has labored to make into a painting that will keep it and them alive even after the day passes, even after their deaths, after his death. As they sing, they move, Patinkin conjuring the painting before us, its composition and arrangement of figures and detail, the slow procession of these nameless, cherished, ordinary, human beings, the trees dropping from the fly loft on the wonderful word “forever”, Peters’ voice breaking out, Patinkin’s voice answering, all the voices together rising into an exaltation, Peters and Patinkin looking into each other for such a long time, remembering, giving thanks, leaving each other, and then into the “Sunday, Sunday, Sunday”, the final “Sunday” stretching out and out, the bells ringing and Patinkin in one gesture making the painting, this creation out of light, real, perfect, miraculous.
Light is always a reverence. There are no ordinary human beings. There are no ordinary scenes. There are no ordinary days. All my adult life I’ve been trying to say this to myself but never, never, never with such clarity and harmony and beauty as Sondheim and Peters and Patinkin made on this stage on this one night in the spring of 1984.
Lyrics:
[GEORGE, spoken]
Order
Design
Tension
Balance
Harmony
[COMPANY]
Sunday, by the blue, purple, yellow, red water
On the green, purple, yellow, red grass
Let us pass
Through our perfect park
Pausing on a Sunday
By the cool, blue, triangular water
On the soft, green, elliptical grass
As we pass through arrangements of shadows
Towards the verticals of trees, forever
By the blue, purple, yellow, red water
On the green, orange, violet mass
Of the grass
In our perfect park
[GEORGE]
Made of flecks of light
And dark
And parasols
Bum, bum, bum
Bum, bum, bum
Bum, bum, bum
[COMPANY]
People strolling through the trees
Of a small suburban park
On an island in the river
On an ordinary Sunday
Sunday, Sunday, Sunday
