by Kevin McLaughlin
Great Lakes Theater opened its fall season at the Hanna Theatre with Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Sunday in the Park with George. I saw the performance on September 27. In a house of just over five hundred seats, the show feels almost purpose-built for intimacy: audiences sit close enough to hear breaths behind every phrase and to see the small adjustments of light and posture that bring French Neo-Impressionist artist Georges Seurat’s world into focus.
Winner of the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Sunday resists conventional structure. Its first act imagines the years Seurat spent creating his pointillist landmark, La Grande Jatte. Sondheim and Lapine do not present the artist as genial or approachable. He is exacting, self-absorbed, forever chasing the perfect dot of color at the expense of his personal relationships. The cost is clear: his model and lover, another Dot, leaves him, unable to compete with the canvas.
Alex Syiek was an intense, brooding title character, with a probing ache in his voice and a lovability that came through in spite of himself.He resembled Stephen Sondheim, at least in his first-act makeup, and from his first appearance — he walks onstage to sketch the audience before the first curtain. It was hard not to wonder if director Victoria Bussert hoped we might glimpse parallels, either personally or creatively, to the composer.
Jillian Kates was a radiant Dot, with her luminous mezzo voice and sharp comic timing reminiscent of Bernadette Peters, who originated the role — but with her own distinctive imprint. She made everyone around her shine even more brightly.
The second act flips to modern times when another George, also sung by Syiek, unveils the dazzling but alienating light generating machine Chromolume #7. He finds himself wrestling with the same unanswered questions: how to make art that matters, how to connect with backers and audiences, and how to balance creation with human need. The result is a piece that is at once cerebral and sad, unsentimental yet deeply moving.
Bussert’s direction succeeds in walking the knife-edge between head and heart. She treats the musical as Seurat did his painting: not as a story to be told, but rather a mosaic of fragments — songs, asides, and frozen tableaux — that gradually coalesce. Her achievement was fusing the fragments into a powerful whole.
She has a strong team at her side. Like Sondheim’s score, Jeff Herrmann’s scenic design builds pictures out of tiny strokes. Trad A. Burns lit the show with painterly effect — the haze of a Paris park, the harsh glow of a gallery, the stabbing bursts of Chromolume #7, that Act II contraption named for Seurat’s color theory.
Tesia Dugan Benson’s costumes capture the bustle and weight of 1880s fashion, contrasting with the sleek 1980s cuts of Act II. Patrick John Kiernan’s sound design and Nick Lynch-Voris’s wigs and makeup captured those eras, while Jaclyn Miller’s choreography, assisted by Lauren Marousek, provided the ensemble with easy flow and rhythm.
Music director Matthew Webb had perhaps the most daunting task of all of guiding the small orchestra (lamentably hidden under the stage) and steering singers through Sondheim’s famously jagged lines and shifting meters.
The cast, drawn largely from GLT’s resident company, shoulders the score with commitment. Numbers like Finishing the Hat and Move On stung with longing and resignation. In a room as intimate as the Hanna, those moments landed without mercy.
The Great Lakes Theater production runs two hours and twenty minutes with one intermission. This is the company’s eighth Sondheim staging, more than any other Broadway composer in its history. In her opening remarks, Sara Bruner, Producing Artistic Director — now in her twentieth year with the company — pointed to many echoes from the past. September 27 marked seventeen years to the day that the Hanna Theatre reopened — with Sunday in the Park with George on the bill. Bruner was the first actor to set foot on the Hanna stage that night and Matthew Webb was in the pit playing percussion.
There are risks built into the show. The leap between centuries can feel abrupt; the marriage of painterly illusion with living actors can falter if design and performance are not tightly synchronized. But on this night, the rewards were just as strong. When the picture comes together — dots aligning into figures, voices coalescing into harmony — the audience sees what Seurat and Sondheim both saw: the stubborn beauty of order wrested from chaos, and that art is one of the few things we can count on to stay.
Performances run through October 12. Tickets are available online.
Photo credit: Roger Mastroianni
Published on ClevelandClassical.com September 30, 2025
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