RCA
1984
Sunday In The Park With George
About This Album
In the wake of the commercial failure of the 1981 Broadway musical Merrily We Roll Along, songwriter Stephen Sondheim sundered his relationship with producer/director Harold Prince, with whom he had worked consistently since 1970. For his next show, 1984's Sunday in the Park with George, he turned to librettist/director James Lapine. But he did not attempt a work that seemed to be more commercially accessible; on the contrary. Sunday in the Park with George was the first musical ever based on a painting. It was a fictional account of the creation of Georges Seurat's Impressionist masterpiece "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte," featuring Seurat, his mistress (supposedly a model for one of the figures in the painting), and other people depicted on the canvas. But what the show was really about was the relationship between the artist and the world, which meant that it actually explored the same subject as Merrily We Roll Along, albeit from a different angle. Here, the first act found Seurat's mistress, Dot, deciding to leave him because he was too devoted to his art, while in the second act, a modern artist and descendant of Seurat wrestled with many of the same issues.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,6,7,8,9,10,12,13,14 and 16)

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