"On the page it looked... nothing... almost comic... 80's synth piano... finger cymbals... trembling strings... pallindrome motifs... like an 8-bit Atari game... and suddenly... a melody from beneath emerges from the beyond... and the lyrics make no sense in the least...... and yet the whole thing levitates in a state of grace..."
The lyrics of Sunday don't make any sense until you've seen the show three times, and it doesn't matter at all. When I saw Sunday in the Park with George in the summer of 2002, the performance of Sunday was one of those few numinous moments in my cultural life when I broke down in tears, only to turn to see if anyone caught me and realize half the people in my row were weeping too.
A lot of people think Sunday in the Park with George is Sondheim's greatest musical. It's much too inside baseball for that - a musical for the faithful rather than the public, but Sunday is his greatest song. With just a couple phrases, Sondheim does what most of the very greatest theater composers and playwrights can't do operating at their very best for two-and-a-half hours.
Nothing can prepare you for seeing the painting on which the musical is based at the Chicago Museum of Art. Sunday on La Grande Jatte is one of the world's greatest paintings, not because of the obvious technical magnificence and the herculean effort it took to create, but because of what all that technique and effort is for. It's not for some hallucinatory religious image or yet another landscape, it's to create life as people live it - tragic situations, comic situations, and people simply going about their business. Nobody in the painting looks at each other - perhaps that's an indication of loneliness, but it also means that every person in the painting has to be regarded uniquely. Every story this painting tells is of individuals, not groups. You watch these figures think their own thoughts, and if their life story proceeded alongside the figures with whom they're grouped, each figure clearly has a very different perspective on the same events.
Sondheim's musical is about the composition of that masterpiece, how it's assembled, and the deep human cost of getting it right. Every person involved in the arts knows that pain - nobody really wants what we do, and if you're really putting everything you have into it, nobody even sticks around for long to appreciate you, No matter how intense your connections to certain people at various chapters of your life, they all eventually leave, and it's back to the loneliness again, where your only real connection is to what you create. The characters you form and the ideal audience you imagine is your only real company.
And so for the first time, these characters, so reflective of their artist's loneliness, sing together and feel their connection to one another; they give thanks to their creator for their existence as we sometimes sing to gods in places of worship.
And even if it's on an intuitive level, every audience member seems to feel that grateful connection to whatever force created us in the deepest chambers of our hearts. 'Sunday' is one of those rare moments in art, in life, when there's a possibility of spiritual transcendence that needs no god. We are literally hearing the miracle of transubstantiation, done not for God, but for ourselves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JR-SWx5PboE&list=PLPmO34k5jrC9InA72RDOcN7vyMda8ivbL&index=10&fbclid=IwAR1iKe6XdcG5TJJ1TpcY1PhY6KrfX5oWI92XuoWRrYN8Y_JSB25-vUpYVdI
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