Sunday in the Park With George (2006 London Revival Cast)
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Free Music Notes for Sunday in the Park With George (2006 London Revival Cast)
Free Music Review: Entirely unlistened to...
Hit: 4 Stars
Having only seen the show live and never heard the recording of the cast, I can only advise anyone thinking of spending money on this album to consider spending a few more pennies and hearing the experience live. Sondheim is an auteur I have never spent time listening to. I had always associated him with "what is not to like?" New York, an entity that has pervaded a great deal of modern culture. But reducing him to those kinds of parallels is to miss the sheer beauty of the man's gift for enlightened beauty. And therein lies the greatness of Manhatten before the turn of the last century. Boy did they have it good. Shame someone had to come along and make a right mess...there is beauty here. Enjoy it.Free Music Review: Admirable, but uneven
Hit: 4 Stars
On the whole, I'm somewhat nonplussed by the new Sunday CD. It's always great to have another recording of a cherished show, but there's always the danger that it will never live up to the original, even if the quality is in fact equal to or greater than.
The orchestrations are scaled down considerably. The performances are serviceable but undistinguished. One jarring difference in this recording is the use of English accents in act one. Yeah, I know: that's no different from using American accents on the original. The show is set in France, but French accents would be pretentious and distracting. (As the Italian accents were in the revival of Nine.) And I must concede that the use of various English dialects to show class distinctions is an interesting touch. George sounds somewhat posh to convey his education level, while Dot has more of a working-class, East End, almost Cockney feel to her. The Boatman speaks with a Scottish brogue. Perhaps as I listen to the recording more, this will grow on me.
In the second act, everyone speaks with an American accent, and the results are uneven. Daniel Evans as George does a creditable job, but Jenna Russell as Marie has an unconvincing southern drawl. (Dot and Louie moved to Charleston, after all.) And much of the rest of the cast are so exaggerated, they seem like parodies. Accents may seem like a minor point to focus on, but they're inescapable on the recording, and very distracting.
The recording is significantly longer than the OCR, but most of what's added is dialog, which I am not a big fan of on cast recordings. The Damn Yankees revival recording is practically ruined by excess verbiage. One welcome addition is a bonus track of the extended version of "The One on the Left," which involves the soldier(s) and both Celestes. It's quite fun, and it must have been cut for time alone, because it certainly fits nicely within the show. I'm going to program it in it's rightful place on my iPod.
Free Music Review: Simply wonderful!
Hit: 5 Stars
Reasons to Buy this Album:
The Leads: Daniel Evans and Jenna Russell are both Olivier Award-winning/nominated actors. They act beautifully on this CD, and have wonderful singing voices. Love or loathe their Broadway counterparts Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters, these two are less mannered, less "showbiz" and more "real".
The Supporting Cast: Gay Soper, Alasdair Harvey, Simon Green, Mark McKerracher, Liza Sadovy. You would usually find these people headlining in musicals, rather than playing small parts. You NEVER get supporting talent of this quality. Extraordinary. The younger actors are equally good, and boast some exceptional voices.
The Bonus Track: This witty song has not been heard since 1983. It is not some creaky old archive recording of Steve singing his own stuff. Rather, it is brilliantly sung by the actors themselves, who had built up a rapport during the length of the run. The lyrics are charming.
The New Orchestrations: Amazing. Sondheim once said, "It seems right to me that [the score to] Sunday in the Park with George is very spare. And that seems right, because look at what Seurat did - the score echoes the subject." It was always intended as a chamber piece, and the eight musicians on this album sound perfect. Yet the overall sound is not that different to the big orchestra of the Broadway CD. Everyone should be happy.
The CD Itself: PS Classics have done their usual incredible job. The Broadway album was let down by poor sound quality. Here, it sounds as if the singers are in the same room as you. You can hear every harmony, and as a result the big choral numbers like "Sunday" have never sounded richer. And the design! The booklet! The sleeve notes! The photographs! This is a beautiful item that should please every music theatre aficionado.
The Downside? Putting It Together could have been a little faster... Er... That's it.
Free Music Review: quite wonderful
Hit: 5 Stars
Quite wonderful, to my surprise. I say "to my surprise" not because, as many of my friends have said, the memory of Mandy and Bernadette is so strong. (My memory of them is very good, but not so strong that it doesn't allow for other interpretations.) I was mostly surprised how splendid this recording is because I've seen several London casts take on Sondheim shows, and have generally been unimpressed. (Some of the productions have been downright dreadful.) But this cast is strong, the orchestrations are lovely and restrained, and the flow of the CD itself is beautiful. You get not only a good sense of the strengths of the show, but of the merits of this new production, which seems to prize George's relationship to Dot and Marie and his mother as much as it does George's relationship to his art. When Daniel Evans sings, "George misses Marie," you believe it, and when Jenna Russell tells him later that he gave her "so much" (with a perceptible, audible ache in her voice), you believe her. And later still, when the great Gay Soper (whom I saw do Side by Side many moons ago) asks, "Has it changed much?", you really find yourself awaiting George's response. I could list a couple of things I don't like ("We Do Not Belong" sounds a little restrained, the Chromolume a little cheeky), but I finished the recording thinking, "I'd like to see this production."Free Music Review: Somewhat lackluster...
Hit: 3 Stars
"Sunday in the Park with George" is one of Sondheim's most difficult works. Not because of the music, which I like a lot, but because there's no getting around the fact that this show, to paraphrase a lyric, is a lot of density without much intensity. An exploration of the difficulties of the artistic process, the show, like its main character, the painter Georges Seurat, is rather cold and distant. This is really a musical more about concepts than plot or characters. It's intelligent, it's daring, and it's a bit dull (I'm still not convinced "Sunday" is a masterpiece).
The original Broadway production(as seen on DVD), though boring at times, had great performances by Mandy Patinkin as Seurat (and his great-grandson) and Bernadette Peters as his mistress, Dot (and her daughter). Their committed performances added excitement to a show that too often lags, and their excellent characterizations also make for a really good original cast recording.
Now there is this new 2-disc set of the 2006 London cast. This production got a lot of ecstatic reviews, but the recording veers towards lackluster. Daniel Evans and Jenna Russell are adequate as Seurat and Dot, but they don't quite manage to embody their characters as fully as Patinkin and Peters did. The orchestra here is also a measly five instruments, which does the music no favors. Sometimes this kind of reduction works (I thought the minimalist approach to the revivals of Sondheim's "Pacific Overtures" and "Sweeney Todd" made those scores feel fresh in new and interesting ways). Here, though, it just sounds chintzy.
Despite this, the first act comes across fairly well. This version contains more useful dialogue, and the finale, with its extra crisp sound quality, comes across as especially powerful (this is the most moving moment of the show-- when the cast assembles into Seurat's masterpiece, "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte"). The second act is more problematic. "Putting it Together," a highlight of the score and of the original album, is marred by some really bad acting. I mean really bad- it's one of the most cringe-inducing songs on any recent cast recording. Evans and Russell do manage, however, to pull together for a moving rendition of "Move On."
So, overall, a disappointment. Not terrible (except for "Putting it Together"-- I still shudder at the thought of it), but rarely more than average.