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General		Extras
Category	Musical	Main Menu Animation Audio Commentary - Stephen Sondheim (Composer) et al Notes - Cast and Crew Credits Notes - Awards DVD Credits Notes - Thanks
Rating
Year Released	1985
Running Time	145:08 minutes
RSDL/Flipper	RSDL (71:34)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region	2,4	Director	James Lapine
Studio Distributor	Warner Vision Australia	Starring	Mandy Patinkin Bernadette Peters Charles Kimbrough Barbara Byrne Dana Ivey Mary D'Arcy Brent Spiner Robert Westenberg
Case	Transparent Amaray
RPI	$39.95	Music	Stephen Sondheim

    It did not last long.

    Just about everything that made Into The Woods such a welcome experience is missing here in abundance. Okay, I knew about as much about this musical as I did about Into The Woods going into the review session, but coming out I really wish that I had never stuck my hand up to do the review. No great characters, no great catchy tunes, no genuine humour and a story that defies even more interpretation than that of Into The Woods. Suffice it to say, Sunday In The Park With George is definitely only for real fans of the genre or the lead performers. Everyone else would be well-advised to head off in search of greener forests than this.

    After all, where does one start about a musical based upon a painting? For those not so artistically inclined, the musical is based upon a sort of "what-if" story behind the most famous painting of George Seurat, a French artist who lived a tragically short life between 1859 and 1891. The painting is Un Dimanche d'ete a la Grande-Jatte - Sunday Afternoon On The Island of La Grande Jatte if your French is about as good as mine. This rather revolutionary painting is best known for its bold use of a new style of painting that did not use mixed colours but rather a palette of a minimal number of fixed colours. These were applied to the canvas in a dot like fashion and it was left to the eye to "mix" the colours when viewed from a normal distance. The painting took two years for George Seurat to complete between 1884 and 1886 and Act One of the musical is basically the story of the painting of the painting. La Grande Jatte is an island in the River Seine which was a favoured haunt of all classes on Sunday afternoons, to be seen and to see. The first act covers the possible inspirations for the characters depicted in the painting. The central characters are of course George (Mandy Patinkin) and his model/lover Dot (Bernadette Peters), and their interactions with each other and other people as their relationship suffers the strain of George's commitment to the painting.

    Act Two returns us to the centenary of the painting and sees George's grandson, namely George (Mandy Patinkin), and daughter Marie (Bernadette Peters) presenting an homage of sorts to the great painting. This presentation is taking place in Chicago, the current location of the painting. The common thread throughout the musical is of the sacrifices that people make to their art - and questions whether that sacrifice is to some extent warranted.

    Featuring the same talent as Into The Woods, the result is something entirely different indeed. Whether it was the subject matter or some other reason, the music and lyrics of Stephen Sondheim just do not seem to have the same zip as in the later musical. The directorial work of James Lapine is also not in the same league as the later musical, but the way the musical is presented is perhaps more the reason here than anything expressly wrong with his work. This apparently copped the Pulitzer Prize for Drama which perhaps can be interpreted as an indication of the lack of competition rather than this being any great masterpiece. It certainly did not win any Tonys, usually the mark of truly great theatre. The cast assembled here is certainly decent enough, with the standouts being the two leads obviously. However, it just lacks serious distinction across the entire cast in my view.

    This is certainly a musical that challenges to a large extent conventional thinking on music theatre. Whether it is a success or not I would not like to make any definitive call on. However, I would suggest that the reason why people go to the theatre is to be entertained and really with the best will in the world, I would have difficulty calling this entertainment. True aficionados of the theatre will revel in this but those of us with less understanding of the theatre would certainly be best advised to give this a miss.

Video

    This really is anything but a sharp transfer and almost looks like a good VHS tape. This is not the fault of the DVD mastering I hasten to add, but rather the nature of the source material. There are the almost obligatory slight lapses in focus dotted throughout the transfer and this is compounded just a little by the distinct lack of definition in the transfer. You really would be hard-pressed to find any sort of sharp definition here at all. Part of the reason again is the stage setting for the musical, which seems to have a rather soft, muted style to it. Shadow detail is not spectacular, but then again it did not really need to be. This is also not an especially clear transfer, a reflection of the age of the source material, and it is fortunate that there are no really serious indications of grain here at all. There did not seem to be any problem at all with low level noise in the transfer.

    Whilst I have not seen the original painting in real life, I have seen it many times in books and so on, and have seen Seurat's earlier painting Une Baignade in London. From my recollections of these, the style of Seurat's painting is to relatively muted colours, more pastelly than usual. This is certainly the style of the transfer and I can only presume that it was a deliberate attempt to evoke the muted nature of the painting. Accordingly, you really do not expect any problems with oversaturation and colour bleed and there certainly do not appear to be any. However, the style of the colours added to the lack of definition in the transfer certainly result in a transfer that I found just a little tiring to watch. There really could have been a bit more tone of the colours here. The blacks and whites really are not blacks and whites.

    I am presuming that this was filmed on videotape, as there are a number of video artefacts that draw attention to themselves here. Remember those rather annoying white interference lines on VHS tapes? A few get to display themselves here (around 59:53 and 66:46). There seem to be video glitches at various points between 82:30 and 85:00, with a rather extreme example also appearing noticeably at the lower right of the picture at about 78:12. Add in some wobble at about 6:48 and some rather noticeably jumps in the video stream around 34:11, 53:33 and 84:38, and the overall effect is quite similar to a VHS tape. In other words, there are some source material problems here that no amount of superb mastering is going to overcome. Apart from these problems, there did not appear to be any MPEG artefacts in the transfer, there did not appear to be any film-to-video artefacts in the transfer and there did not appear to be any film artefacts in the transfer.

    This is an RSDL formatted DVD and the layer change comes at 71:34. Whilst it comes mid-scene, it is quite decently handled and is not especially disruptive to the flow of the musical. There is unlikely to be a better place to put it anyway, since I doubt that there would have been enough mastering room to allow this to get to the intermission - the most logical place for a layer change.
 
 

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain
Film-to-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    The dialogue and vocals come up extremely well in the soundtrack and are always easy to understand. There did not seem to be any problems with audio sync in the transfer.

    As indicated earlier, this is not to my mind an especially wonderful piece of work from Stephen Sondheim, although my view seems to be out of sorts with the rest of the world.

    Once again we have a Stephen Sondheim musical where we can forget about any surround or bass channel use. Whilst I suppose a Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack would almost be a waste of time in this sort of show, you really do at times wish for a bit more dynamic in the soundtrack. I know that both Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters have fine voices, but this soundtrack really does not capture them that well. It could perhaps have benefited from a little more air in the sound, but there is nothing really wrong with the soundtrack per se.
 
 

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Menu

Audio Commentary - Stephen Sondheim (Composer), James Lapine (Director), Mandy Patinkin (Talent) and Bernadette Peters (Talent)

Notes - Cast and Crew Credits

Notes - Awards

DVD Credits

Notes - Thanks

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall

© Ian Morris (have a laugh, check out the bio)
29th January 2001