and the girls are so rapturous.
Isn't it lovely
how artists can capture us?
- from "Children and Art," Act II of Sunday in the Park with George
This lyric captured my attention early this month when I took my friend Susan to see Sunday in the Park with George, a musical by James Lapine with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. The show imagines the creation of George Seurat's most famous painting in Act I. In Act II, a descendant of Seurat finds new meaning in that painting 100 years later. This was a staged symphony concert in Greenville, SC, beautifully sung and perfectly played.
The problem with these words about Seurat's masterpiece, sung 100 years after he completed it, is that it's all wrong. We know from Act I, in which Seurat sketches all the people that appear in his painting, that the girl wasn't "sweet" but an unmitigated brat, and the teenage girls were shrill gossips, not "rapturous." That artists can "capture us" is a nice thought and a neat rhyme, but Sondheim and Lapine seem to be undermining Seurat's achievement.
I saw the show on Broadway in 1985 and 2008, and many other productions. I've written many essays about aspects of the show. (Most comprehensive: "So Much Love in Their Words" (2021/09))
This time, I came away thinking how "attention" to what's there in the moment is itself a theme in the show that I haven't before -- er -- paid any attention.
One of the two central characters is George Seurat, a painter focused on his work -- to a fault, perhaps. At night, depicting a woman with a hat using tiny dabs of paint on his enormous canvas, he sings
...How you watch the rest of the world
from a window
while you finish the hat.
Mapping out a sky,
what you feel like, planning a sky,
what you feel when voices that come
through the window
go
until they distance and die,
until there's nothing but sky.
- "Finishing the Hat" Act I, Sunday...
For Seurat, his art is his "window" to the world "to see -- it's the only way to see!"
The woman is Seurat's mistress Dot. Modeling for him, Dot pays acute attention to all kinds of things: "a trickle of sweat"..."who was at the zoo?"..."I love your eyes." But Seurat, so attentive to his work, does not give Dot the attention she deserves. She leaves him for Louis the Baker because his "art is not hard to swallow" and he "makes a connection" to her. George is disappointed, but not surprised:
When the woman that you wanted goes,
you can say to yourself, "Well, I give what I give,"
but the woman who won't wait for you knows
that, however you live,
there's a part of you always standing by,
mapping out the sky,
finishing a hat... where there never was a hat.
There never was a hat, and the verse from Act II that caught my attention is all wrong. Has Seurat failed to pay attention to what's really there?
That's what the boatman says. He disdains both Seurat and Jules, Seurat's colleague: "Condescending artists observing, perceiving -- well, screw them." He confronts Seurat: "Who the hell d'you think you're drawing? Me? You don't know me." The boatman, referring to the patch over his right eye, boasts,
One eye, no illusion.
That, you get from two:
one for what is true,
one for what suits you.
- "The Day Off"
Seurat's answer to the Boatman comes much later in a duet with Seurat's mother. Throughout the first act, he has entered into the lives of the people he paints, actually singing some of their lines with them. (In Greenville, he even rolled around in the grass to experience the life of the boatman's dog.)
But from the first minute of the play, when he erases a tree, we have seen him revise reality.
The duet "Beautiful" begins with his mother's complaints about the Eiffel Tower, under construction, where she remembers trees. While he sketches, he sings to his mother, "Pretty isn't beautiful... pretty is what changes... What the eye arranges... is what is beautiful." He breaks through to her. She raises her voice, almost in panic, and sings, "Changing -- as we sit here! Quick! Draw it all, Georgie!"
In the very next scene, chaos erupts as all these prickly characters confront each other until Seurat calls for "Order!"
Everyone silences and turns his way, awaiting instructions.
Order is what Seurat has been paying attention to. Sondheim said many times in many interviews that an artist's job is "to bring order out of chaos." That idea is embedded in the first line of the play, that an artist's challenge is to "bring order to the whole. Through design. Composition. Balance. Light. And harmony." At the end of Act I, as the cast sings the stately anthem "Sunday," Seurat moves the characters into the positions familiar to us from Seurat's painting, giving the show its truly iconic moment, recognizable even in the photo from the stripped-down Greenville production. (My one quibble with this production: Where is Dot's hat?)
Order from chaos is revealed to be a core value of Sondheim, almost a religious creed, in a new book about Sondheim's "puzzle mind," Matching Minds with Sondheim, (New York: Bloomsbury, 2025). Author Barry Joseph found notes in the papers of Sondheim's biographer Meryl Secrest concerning a conversation that she skims in her book. She told Sondheim that she was "baffled" by his lifetime interest in games and puzzles.
During the conversation, Sondheim suddenly realizes something about himself that had not emerged in decades of therapy: that his interest in puzzles and games, and also in music, began when his father's infidelity and the jealousy of his "genuinely monstrous" (230) mother threw ten-year-old Sondheim's orderly world into chaos. Puzzles, games, and music composition all have at least one thing in common: "It's all about rules...It's about: 'The universe is not chaotic'" (Barry Joseph, Matching Minds with Sondheim, New York: Bloomsbury, 2025, p.231)
That comes close to sounding like a religious statement. Secrest followed up: Did Sondheim believe in God? No, but he allowed that the idea of religion is "such a wild poetic concept" (232). She tells him that she believes in God and an afterlife. His response is surprising, that such belief "may be true for some people and not others."
Is that child sweet, or the girls rapturous? Does Seurat see just what suits him?
He is paying attention to life in all its chaos, but also to the rules of design, composition, balance, light, and harmony. What he searches for, finds, and recreates on canvas is an ideal version of experience. He tells his mother, "You watch while I revise the world."
Seurat, a stand-in for any artist, is making a religious statement: "The universe is not chaotic."
Though Sondheim and Lapine don't include "love" in Seurat's vocabulary, Lapine concludes the play with George of the second act (a descendant of Seurat) reading Dot's handwritten notes about Seurat: "So much love in his words... forever with his colors... how George looks... he can look forever...."
I've written before that Sunday is as close as Sondheim ever came to making a religious statement. Now I'm more certain of that then ever.
