By Mark Cristofaro, Drummer-Percussionist-Noisemaker, orchestra member for Sunday in the Park with George

Preparing for a new show is always challenging.  I get the score, look over the music, see what instruments I will need to bring, etc.   Any Sondheim show though always makes this process harder.  For the percussionist, it usually involves a lot of instruments, which you just don’t have sitting around in your living room.  When I received the score for Sunday In The Park with George, I expected the worst.  The usual Sondheim stuff which includes a multitude of tuned percussion, like timpani, vibraphone, orchestra bells and even tuned concert toms, tuned wood blocks called Temple blocks, and tuned cymbals called Crotales.  Then just for fun, he usually throws the percussionist a curve ball by writing in an unconventional sound.  When I played Sweeney Todd here, it was the “metal bucket”.  Pacific Overtures had the “bell plate”.  Even Caroline, or Change had me trying to make music by playing on a cardboard box…

So I had heard from some other players in the business that Sunday would require more of the same insanity: pots and pans.  OK, no problem.  I can handle this.  Just another day at the office.  From what the score reads, looks like 4 different pots…or pans…or both.  However, when I started to listen to the original soundtrack, the pots…or pans…sounded like they were specific pitches. (long pause………)

What do I have to do now?  Go into my kitchen, take out our cookware, and listen for pitches?  This was never going to happen(mostly because if I EVER took cookware out of my kitchen to use as a drum or something, the front door locks would be changed by my wife Suzanne when I returned home that night). So with a little help from another percussionist colleague, we brainstormed and came up with a great idea to find the specific pitches needed for this show:  Thrift shops.  So, we start going into second hand stores…with a pitch pipe and a mallet… You can only imagine the looks we would get.

I learned a lot about cookware construction during this quest.  The thinner the pot/pan, the lower the pitch.  If I found as cast iron pan, it usually had a very high pitch.  These were the easier ones to find: the higher pitches.  I determined the pitches I need were(form low to high), C#, F#, A natural, and C natural.  These were the distinct pitches I hear on the recording that doubled the bass line for the song “The Day Off”.  So we found the highest pitch, C natural rather quickly.  A small skillet (iron) pan.  Also the A natural initially, but I decided to replace that one because it was a thinner metal, and sounded too “clangy”(is that a word?).  So then I found a real nice replacement A natural…another skillet(iron pan).  Real defined “A”.  AAAHHHH….. Sounded like a bell of some sort.  I was getting hopeful, but then hit a dry spell.  Couldn’t find the 2 lowest pitches.  After a few attempts at various places, I did come across this sauce pan, thin metal though, that produced a fairly convincing low F#.  Chances of finding that last pitch, the lowest C# was looking almost impossible.  I came up short so many times.  Then I just got lucky and found this beautiful larger iron skillet pan(looks like something form the 70’s w/ a red paint bottom) that produced a very convincing low C#.  OK…had them all.

Now that I had the “instruments” (aka..the skillet pans), now I had to figure out how to set these things up so I could some how make music with them.  There are no stands, mounts, or gizmos you can find to hold pots and pans in place so that a drummer can play them with sticks or mallets.  My idea was to find some kind of suspended contraption to hang the pans from…but where was I gonna find something like that?  Lucky for me, technical director Glenn at the Arden had some ideas, and he designed and fabricated an aluminum structure that we fastened the pans to.  It is a great piece of hardware, and I don’t believe I could have played the show smoothly without Glenn’s help and input.  It even looks cool…makes me look like I know what I’m doing too.

I’ve done 14 musicals at the Arden, and the production people and artists know I go to all extremes to make the music and percussion 100% accurate.  Sometimes it’s not easy to do.  But when you “get it right” and never compromise the integrity of the music, it feels so good…

By Maureen Torsney-Weir, cast member of Sunday in the Park with George

Well here we are in the middle of our run of Sunday in the Park with George.  We’ve been through an exhausting (though completely worth it) tech and previews, seen an exhilarating opening night and now are doing eight shows a week of this fabulous show.

I play the Old Lady and the critic Blair Daniels in Sunday.  It’s fun to hear the audience murmuring when I come out to the “Blair Bling” in Act 2: “Is that the same woman who was the old lady?”. Thanks to Terry Nolen and our wonderful costume designer, Rosemarie McKelvey – I do look different! Its a funny thing, but as a painfully shy person in my private life, I am completely comfortable on stage.

Through the lives of the characters I get to play, I am most fully myself onstage.  Terry Nolen, who I’ve been lucky to have done 5 plays directed by him, says he wants to see our souls onstage.  Come see to see the souls of a most extraordinary company of people!

By Sarah Ollove, Dramaturg for Sunday in the Park with George

The more you look at George Seurat’s masterpiece, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte, the less sense it makes. In a way, it’s a product of its technique: when you get close to the painting, it breaks into tiny dots of color. And when you take a second look at the subjects themselves, they get…well…spotty.

Who are these people and why are they there? And what’s with the monkey?

Seurat talked a lot about the technique of his famous painting but made little mention of the subjects themselvesand died without revealing his motive for drawing these people.

Art critics and historians have gallantly tried to pick up the slack. Everyone seems to agree that he created a commentary on bourgeois social life during the French Third Republic. We can all agree on this because of a famous quote of Seurat’s about his intention to ‘make the moderns pass by…in their essential aspect like figures on a Panathenaic frieze.’ But who these moderns were remains a mystery.

Even during his lifetime, the Symbolists tried to claim Seurat. They felt that the painting was filled with symbols of restrictive bourgeois values, citing the static nature of the figures and the mix of classes. They point to the factory in the background and the likelihood that this painting was meant to be paired with The Bathers at Asnières, who relax casually across the river in stark contrast to the stiff bourgeois figures of La Grande Jatte.

Other critics have felt that Seurat commented on fashion. They take their cue from the well dressed figures at the front and the fashionable lap dog. Everyone is puffed up in their Sunday best, but their desire to be fashionable restricts their movements. The monkey in this instance becomes a stand-in for trendsetting. If the fashionable woman in front has a monkey, you can be sure every young lady will have one within the year.

Still another more controversial contingent argues that the painting cannot be understood without acknowledging the racier side of the Grande Jatte. The Island was well known as a place where Parisian prostitutes plied their wares. Some feel that the well-dressed woman at the forefront of the painting is probably a coquette, or kept woman, because such women were always at the forefront of fashion.  The monkey also buoys this theory because the French word for female monkey (singesse) was 19^th century slang for prostitute.  They also point to the young lady fishing on the left of the painting who might be angling for more than just fish. The word in French for fishing and sinning are very similar: pécher vs pêcher. Several French critics, by the way, feel this reading is a ridiculous modern invention of non-French speakers that says more about us than the woman in the painting.

Sondheim and Lapine had their own interpretation of the painting, but they drew on the established critics views to populate their work. The girl fishing might not be a prostitute, but she seems to have sinning on her mind. Dot might not be a coquette but she is very concerned with fashion. And they made sure to include people of all social classes from the domestic servants Franz and Frieda to the rugged Boatman to the wealthy Jules and Yvonne and the extremely wealthy American couple. But in turning their attention to the artist, Sondheim and Lapine give Seurat an additional motivation: to order the world the way he wants it, not the way it is. Unlike the art critics who try to put the man together from the painting, Sondheim and Lapine start with the man and find their way back to the painting.