Friday, July 15, 2005
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NSC is 'putting it together'
With cutting-edge digital technology and an energetic cast, New Stage Collective tackles Stephen Sondheim's 'Sunday in the Park with George'
By
Allyson Jacob
New Stage Collective will be producing the second show of its summer season, Stephen Sondheim’s Pulitzer prize-winning musical “Sunday in the Park with George.” Shows are from Thursday, July 28 through Saturday, Aug. 6. The musical is being produced in the Black Box Theatre at the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC), under the direction of Alan Patrick Kenny, who also serves as NSC’s artistic director.
After the short, yet successful, run of “Kimberly Akimbo” in late June, Kenny, along with music director Michael P. Hamilton, have raised the stakes in choosing “Sunday” as the second and main production of NSC’s season. The musical, which premiered on Broadway in May 1984 and ran for more than 600 performances, featured Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters in the lead roles of George and Dot, respectively.
“Sunday” chronicles the life of 19th century French pointillist Georges Seurat and his great-grandson, George, in the present day. Both men are accomplished but struggling artists. Though the score excites Sondheim fans around the country, “Sunday” is not often performed because of its technical demands.
“‘Sunday’ has been rarely produced due its rigorous technical and artistic demands, which require extensive integration of the famous Seurat painting ‘Sunday on the Island of La Grande Jatte,’” Joshua Steele, producer of the show and NSC’s executive director, said. “NSC has solved the problem with a ground-breaking visual reconceptualization that makes use of state-of-the-art digital projectors and Flash animation to create the world in which Seurat lived and painted.”
As Steele explained, the original Broadway concept brought Seurat’s work to life on stage with painted set pieces; NSC has updated this concept by replacing painted set pieces with blank white surfaces, and paint brushes with pixels. NSC has acquired six professional video projectors and two of High End Systems' DL1s, cutting-edge, fully remote controlled projectors that allow the designer to remotely reposition, zoom and focus images in real time. Utilizing the projectors and an army of networked computers, NSC will be able to place ambient and active animations of Seurat's work anywhere on the stage.
"This project is the perfect launch into my career, where I hope to bring higher technology to fruition in the Theatrical and Production Industries,” Pete Thornbury, lighting and projection designer for the production, said. A recent College Conservatory of Music (CCM) grad, Thornbury stated that “‘Sunday’ has given me the chance to create a design that I only dreamed of in my traditional theatrical scenic / lighting design schooling at CCM. I can't really call it a 'Lighting Design' or a 'Scenic Design' because it is so much more than both."
The second act of “Sunday,” which is set in the present day, provides additional technical demands: the modern George presents the latest rendition of his visual art creation “Chromolume” to the A-list of the art community. Originally portrayed as a laser light show in the 1984 Broadway production, NSC’s Chromolume is a multimedia presentation constructed around digital images and video clips of the electronic world.
Andrew Lazarow, who created NSC’s Chromolume design, believes that the updated depiction of George’s work is much more than digital dots on the wall. “The difference between a brush stroke and Seurat’s dots is similar to the difference between analog and digital,” he said. “I wanted to show that Seurat’s work is still relevant and important. While I was working I realized that his paintings predicted the way that we experience the world through digital media. What’s more, his work actually shows the world as the most current discoveries in biology and physics tell us it essentially is. My job quickly became finding the best way to illustrate these connections while staying true to the world of the piece.”
The digital media while impressive and certainly innovative is only one supposed star in “Sunday.” Kenny has assembled a cast of 16, whose experience levels largely vary. Some of the supporting ensembles are still in high school while others have worked professionally in the dramatic arts for years. The majority of the cast, however, falls somewhere in between, in the “pre-professional” category—either in the middle of pursuing college degrees in performance or having recently embarked on a professional career following the completion of such a degree.
The cast is helmed by Charlie Clark, in the role of George, and Kera Halbersleben, in the role of George’s lover, Dot. Halbersleben will be a familiar face to patrons who have followed NSC’s evolution over the past three seasons; she sang the role of Meg in “Merrily We Roll Along” during NSC’s inaugural season and was nominated for a Cincinnati Entertainment Award for her portrayal of Violet in last season’s “Side Show.”
Clark is making his NSC debut in “Sunday,” having last performed locally in “The Eight: Reindeer Monologues” with The Know Theatre Tribe last December. He has a lot of Sondheim under his belt, having sung Robert in “Company,” Jack in “Into the Woods” and Franklin Shepard in “Merrily We Roll Along;” all performances were with Porchlight Music Theatre in Chicago.
In the end, NSC wants to stay true to its mission statement: to provide opportunities for promising young talent to develop their skills in exceptional productions of rarely performed works. “Sunday” certain fits squarely into that mission.
Allyson Jacob is a freelance writer and playwright living just outside of Cincinnati.
