Finishing the Hat

I am feeling warm feelings today toward a particular piece of theatre. I feel it is one of the most richly complex and emotionally real pieces in American theatre.

SUNDAY in the PARK with GEORGE

From Wikipedia:

Sunday in the Park with George is a musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and book by James Lapine. The musical was inspired by the painting "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" by Georges Seurat. A complex work revolving around a fictionalized Seurat immersed in singleminded concentration while painting the masterpiece, its Broadway production was greeted with mixed praise by the critics, but it has enjoyed several major revivals.

Nominated for ten Tony Awards, the musical won only two design awards but won numerous Drama Desk Awards and the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The 2008 Broadway revival is the 2005-06 UK production first presented at the Menier Chocolate Factory.

STEPHEN SONDHEIM

I first fell in love with this show when I was about 15. Through all of my schooling and performing, it has maintained as my personal favorite. Something about it's search for beauty in art and the human soul, makes me want to cry.

Sondheim is a genius, if you didn't already know. His ability to marry music and lyric is unsurpassed by any other musical theatre composer. With Sunday in the Park....more than any of his other shows, he allows his complex, and surprisingly singable, yet atonal melodies really follow the emotional baseline of the characters. So often in musical theatre, the music is emotionally saying something contradictory to what the character is saying and feeling. Not in Sunday...

I hear the Broadway revival that opened last week is just as good, if not better than the original with Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters. It's an extension from a London production that won practically every Olivier Award(UK's Tony Award). I can't wait to see it. I have never actually seen a live production of it, only a video of the original Broadway cast. I hope this new production lives up to the visions in my head and feelings in my heart when I listen to or sing it in my world. I am glad it's getting another look after almost 25 years.

Here are links to purchase the Original Broadway Cast and the London revival production.

























If you haven't heard this score, please take a couple hours and enrich your life. If you want some ITunes selections, I would recommend...

Sunday in the Park with George - Bernadette at her best
Color and Light - a musically pointillist look at creation
Finishing the Hat - George's personal battle between art and human intimacy
We Do Not Belong Together - the best breakup scene in the world
Move One - the best breakup "closure" scene in the world
Sunday - pure genius


FINISHING THE HAT

Yes, she looks for me . . . . Good.
Let her look for me to tell me why she left me
as I always knew she would.
I had thought she understood.
They have never understood, and no reason that they should.
But if anybody could . . . .

Finishing the hat--how you have to finish the hat.
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.

And how you're always turning back too late
from the grass, or the stick, or the dog, or the light
How the kind of woman willing to wait's not
the kind that you want to find waiting
to return you to the night, dizzy from the height
Coming from the hat
Studying the hat
Entering the world of the hat
Reaching through the world of the hat like a window
Back to this one, from that.
Studying a face . . . stepping back to look at a face
Leaves a little space in the way, like a window
But to see . . . it's the only way to see

And 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
Starting on a hat.
Finishing a hat.
Look, I made a hat--
Where there never was a hat!


Other musicals of note by Stephen Sondheim - My favorites - all amazing!

A Little Night Music
Sweeney Todd
Company
Into the Woods
Passion