Gyllenhaal & Ashford in SUNDAY: Delirious Joyfulness

New York City Center’s Sunday in the Park with George
on Broadway (Feb. 11-April 23, 2017)

The cast of Sunday in the Park with George at Broadway’s Hudson Theatre. PHOTO BY MATTHEW MURPHY

Every once in a rare while, the theater rewards us with a kind of transcendent experience, a feeling that this, surely, will never happen again — at least not remotely in the same way. My once-in-a-lifetime theory is being crushed — exquisitely, rapturously — right now as Jake Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford step up alongside Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters in the treasured place where I keep memories of the original Sunday in the Park With George. They are that good. This is not to say that anything in director Sarna Lapine’s production feels like a copy of the premiere that her uncle, author-director James Lapine, and Stephen Sondheim revealed with such indelible audacity in 1984. But the revival, dressed-up a bit from a dazzling semi-staged, three-night run at City Center Encores! in October [2016], shares the delirious joyfulness, integrity and blissful musicality that no previous incarnation I’ve seen of the Pulitzer Prize-winning masterwork has approached. – Linda Winer, Newsday

He is a thorny soul, a man neither happy nor particularly kind, and not someone you’d be likely to befriend. But when the 19th-century French painter Georges Seurat, reincarnated in the solitary flesh by a laser-focused Jake Gyllenhaal, demands that you look at the world as he does, it’s impossible not to fall in love. Or something deeper than love — closer to religious gratitude — is the sentiment you may experience in the finale that concludes the first act of the marvelous revival of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Sunday in the Park With George …  We have watched a restless day of rest in the park of the title, where an assortment of flâneurs and poseurs have become steadily more fractious and discordant. But after the shouting and the frenzy, a breathtaking and infinitely consoling harmony descends, as a living painting is assembled out of a most inharmonious crowd. Though you’re feeling anything but sad, you realize there are tears on your cheeks, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning musical from the 1980s suddenly feels more incisive and urgent, even necessary, than ever. – Ben Brantley, The New York Times

Jake Gyllenhaal (George) and Annaleigh Ashford (Dot) PHOTO MATTHEW MURPHY

Seen last fall in a brief run at New York City Center, the staging by Sarna Lapine (the co-creator’s niece) remains efficient and spare. With just a scrim for projections, a raked platform and onstage musicians — playing Sondheim’s gorgeous melodies for iconic songs like “Finishing the Hat” and “Move On” — the production comes alive. Like the crisper, more colorful costumes and a dazzling new light effect, the stars are even better than before. Gyllenhaal’s focused work is packed with yearning and flecked with playfulness as needed, like a crowd-pleasing moment when Georges pretends to be a dog. Ashford, a Tony winner who’s known for Masters of Sex, is as endearing and sympathetic as they come. The love story feels more primary. A fine supporting cast that includes Robert Sean Leonard, Penny Fuller and Ruthie Ann Miles helps connect all the musical dots. – Joe Dziemianowicz, New York Daily News

Gyllenhaal is at once distinctive, self-effacing and the boldest choice made in this uneven if intriguing production, albeit by virtue of its relative neutrality (it’s Gyllenhaal, so we’re talking smoldering neutrality). The actor can certainly carry the musical demands of the show, but not with bravura flourish, for he does not have that kind of voice. Ashford’s wholly empathetic Dot also is a more contained piece of work than most incarnations of George’s tempting antithesis. Whether Ashford is playing Dot, or the role of the elderly Marie in Act 2, you always feel that she does not want that much from George. Hers is a modest ask — connect for just a moment, you feel her saying as the lyrics to her numbers are cagily and tentatively delivered — but she still, of course, cannot be satisfied. Ashford imbues much of Gyllenhaal’s sadness as Dot’s flirtiness falls into acceptance, and those are her best moments. Her typically accomplished use of charm and comedy feels more of an escape in this show, insufficiently integrated by the director into the whole. – Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune

The creation of harmony out of disharmony and coherence out of chaos are among the themes of Sunday in the Park With George. However, in fortifying for Broadway what was already a probing interpretation of this complex 1984 musical diptych … the production has elevated an affecting work into something quite rare and exquisite. Jake Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford bring richer shadings and startling emotional candor to their dual roles, supported by a gifted ensemble that embodies the notion of great art being born out of multiple influences nourishing a unique vision. – David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter

Jake Gyllenhaal as George in the 2017 Broadway revival of Sunday in the Park with George. PHOTO MATTHEW MURPHY

Setting aside its biographical liberties, Sunday in the Park is a show about making art. Not the glamorous part, or the sexy-muse part, or the mystical-inspiration part. It daringly sets to music the laborious and non-negotiable time that must be put in, inevitably to the detriment of other aspects of life, in order to create something wonderful. … The message, which gives Sunday in the Park its heartache, is timeless. – Allison Adato, Entertainment Weekly