John Jellison

A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte by Georges Seurat is one of the great paintings of the world, and in "Sunday in the Park with George," book writer James Lapine and composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim bring a story based on the work brilliantly to life. While the painting depicts people gathered on an island in the Seine, the musical goes beyond simply describing their lives. It is an exploration of art, of love, of commitment. Seurat connected dots to create images; Lapine and Sondheim use connection as the heart of all our relationships. Winner of the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Tom Christo is a New York TV writer-director in a dead-end marriage to Leslie. He meets the intriguing Marty Fenton, a research scientist, when she attends a party Tom and his wife give at their home. Even though there is an initial attraction between Tom and Marty, their eventual pairing takes a long time to evolve as each have their own partners (Marty has a boyfriend) and first must go through separation and a series of disastrously failed blind dates.

This play takes place during Yom Kippur in a post-Stalinist Russian synagogue, where a Rabbi waits for a Western acting troupe and gets extremely angry about the repression of Jews in the Soviet Union.