The 2009 Quotable Spring Arts Guide
We spotlight this season's bright stars. And they had something to say about it.
By Steve Wiecking and Christopher Werner
THEATER
Stage Painting
When the 5th Avenue Theatre receives director Sam Buntrock’s stirring Broadway revival of the Stephen Sondheim musical Sunday in the Park with George, it’s giving Seattle a look at something only a few audiences have ever seen.
Though the show won a Pulitzer after its premiere in 1984, Sunday was no hit and never received a New York remount until the 32-year-old Buntrock, a Brit whose background includes animation, offered it something new: dazzling computer projections that gracefully depict the gradual emergence of a work of art. We witness the sketches, erasures, coloring, and leaps of imagination on painter Georges Seurat’s canvas and inside his mind as he creates the mid-1880s pointillist tour de force A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. In the first act, that process alienates Seurat’s lover, aptly named Dot. Act Two jumps to the 1980s, where another artist feels paralyzed by self-doubt. This George, however, at last hears what Dot—and all of Seurat’s other enduring dots—has to say.
The 5th Avenue will be the only venue to host Buntrock’s production outside of New York and London (where it originated). His staging here features a Seattle cast (New Yorker Hugh Panaro, as both Georges, is the one exception; local favorite Billie Wildrick plays Dot). And there’s something else that neither of the other intimate productions offered: a full orchestra playing the original orchestrations. This is a choice opportunity to experience, as the show’s glorious penultimate song suggests, “the care and the feeling and the life” of not just one masterpiece, but two. —SW
April 21–May 10, 5th Avenue Theatre, 206-625-1900; more info
“You take for granted the way Sondheim writes melody, but you’ve got to make your emotional turns every word and a half. And that kind of challenge is a dream. I thought I was going to have to give that up when I moved here from New York—but the best part of New York followed me back.” —Billie Wildrick, “Dot” in Sunday in the Park with George
“The New York producers of the show saw that we had it scheduled and called us to say, ‘Is there any way we can work together on this?’ We have to bring over the London team that created the projections. There’s a tremendous amount of equipment to rent. And our team has been working on this for months. It takes us into technical realms we’ve only barely dipped our toes into before.” —David Armstrong, 5th Avenue Theatre producing artistic director
“I feel what we’re doing serves the piece. It’s not an add-on. I have a foot in both [animation and live performance], which gives me an advantage in integrating the animation.” —Sam Buntrock, Sunday in the Park with George director, to The New York Times
Published: February 2009
