Top Five Songs: Sunday in the Park with George

This Stephen Sondheim score will own me forever – I just adore it.  There are Sondheim shows that I probably enjoy more, but that score… Throw in Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters on the original cast recording, and I’m a goner.  Here are five songs I can’t do without.

 

“Color and Light” – This sprawling duet beautifully, painfully encapsulates the divide between George and Dot, the reasons they’ll never fit together even though they love each other.  I especially love the repetitive, rapid-fire lines that punctuate George’s pointillism.

 

Best Line:  “And you look inside the eyes, / And you catch him here and there, / But he’s never really there. / So you want him even more, / And you drown inside the eyes - / I could look at him forever.”

 

 

“Finishing the Hat” – I think, more than any other, this song communicates Sondheim’s philosophy as a composer.  It’s transposed to suit George’s painting, but the sentiment is the same – the idea that any artist is consumed by their desire to create, and that the whole world can fall away but they won’t notice because they’re trying to get the last detail just right.

 

Best Line:  “Mapping out the sky. / What you feel like, planning a sky. / What you feel when voices that come / Through the window / Go / Until they distance and die, / Until there’s nothing but sky.”

 

 

“We Do Not Belong Together” – George and Dot part in this heartbreaking duet.  Dot is wrung out, exhausted from loving George without evidence that he cares for her, and for his part, George is hungry for her to stay but doesn’t know how to tell her.  Their world together ends, not with a bang but a whimper, as they quietly slide away from one another.

 

Best Line:  “We do not belong together, / And we should have belonged together. / What made it so right together / Is what made it all wrong.”

 

 

“Sunday” – After the years and happiness and sweat that George has given up for his painting, it’s only fitting that we see what it was all for, and Sondheim couldn’t have written a better song to accompany the painting coming together.  The soft choral melody, the haunting voices of the ensemble, and George’s gentle wistfulness… It gives me chills every time.

 

Best Line:  “Forever / On the blue purple yellow red water / On the green orange violet mass of the grass / In our perfect park / Made of flecks of light / And dark.”

 

 

“Moving On” – This song is the sole representative of Act II (because Act I is just too gorgeous,) an exquisite moment between George’s descendent and the shadow of Dot.  I love the message of moving forward on your own terms and not making decisions based on what others expect or demand.  Dot’s connection with young George is sublime.

 

Best Line:  “I chose, and my world was shaken - /So what? / The choice may have been mistaken, / The choosing was not. / You have to move on.”