Such is my enthusiasm for Kokandy Productions’ exquisite little Chicago staging of Stephen Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park with George” that I wrote down five different opening paragraphs, or organizing principles, if you will. They’re crucial in the reviewing business but never more so when you believe in a show enough that you want the reader not just to keep reading your jottings but to actually go to the show.
My first involved three gentlemen sitting a few seats away from me last Friday in the basement of the Chopin Theatre. Clearly, they were musicians, given that their fingers played most every note of Sondheim’s score (“Finishing the Hat,” “We Do Not Belong Together,” “Sunday”) with their thighs serving as their pianos. Clearly, they knew this show backwards (as do I, in all immodesty). I watched them out of the corner of my eye as their eyes moistened as they came to see that director Derek Van Barham not only had a plethora of original ideas to invigorate those who have seen too many Act 1 recreations of the Georges Seurat painting, “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grand Jatte,” a visual that the show suggests but does not demand, but that he understood far better than most the devastating emotional landscape of the show.
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My second was to begin with the magic of the Chopin Theatre, a charmed space that seems to bless all who work there. Specifically here, thanks to this cast and the music director Nick Sula, but also to this room, you will be immersed in Sondheim’s music as never before. The show is so well sung and played that you can just close your eyes and enjoy. But then you would not see what visual ideas — very much of the classic Chicago variety — Van Barham has up his sleeve in a show that seems not so much to be performed about the painting, although that is actually true, but from within the canvas, stretching out as it does across time.
My third was to note that of all the musicals in the world, “Sunday in the Park with George” contains the most advice for living. If you are pondering a big career decision, or wondering whether it is worth sacrificing a promising but unproven relationship for a big professional opportunity, then you could spend a fortune on therapy or just drop much less cash and head to the Chopin Theatre instead and listen to Sondheim, who was in this show speaking mostly to himself — but such was his level of genius that his advice simultaneously is universal.
Most specifically, the show is a reminder that you must keep moving on, keeping your eye on the next thing, banishing imposter syndrome and ignoring critics (I know, I know). They have their job and their place, he says in the show, but fear and stasis are the agents of the devil.
During a CBS television interview with Ed Bradley, playwright August Wilson once said that the work came first, even above his own family. I remember being shocked by that, but that is to a large extent what “Sunday in the Park” is about. It imparts the famous Sondheim truth that children and art are the only legacies worth having, but the famously precise lyricist does not say “art and children,” so there is that. Either way, the central question of the night is whether George fails in life by failing to look up from his canvas. Sure, you might say. But we remember his art, not his personal life.
That brings me to my last idea, which was to make the whole thing revolve around Missy Wise Vanderzee’s deeply moving performance as Dot/Marie. I mean no disrespect to Kevin Webb, who plays George and who captures precisely the dilemma of the character throughout, and who embodies just the right mix of insouciant determination, foolhardy arrogance and musical tenderness.
George, of course, is both Sondheim and the everyman artist. But Dot here is the teacher, the one who really carries both the wisdom and the pain, the consequences of loving a genius incapable of the ordinary, you might say. If you love someone whose head is often in the clouds, she’s there to talk to you all night, and if you are that person, well, just the same.
Toward the end of Act 2, Van Barham intuits that all that now matters is Dot singing to George, surrounded by both music and an audience. That’s what he simply delivers and it is a phenomenal scene in a deeply moving show.
Hey, Sondheim has people in Chicago. Not only is it safe to go and move your fingers, but it’s a small revelation.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic
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Review: “Sunday in the Park with George” (4 stars)
When: Through Nov. 1
Where: Kokandy Productions at the Chopin Theatre 1543 W. Division St.
Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes
Tickets: $55.20-$65.87 at kokandyproductions.com