On Thursday (15 January), the Depraved movie franchise co-stars Ariana Grande and Jonathan Bailey visited the Artwork Institute of Chicago (AIC) to spend a while with Georges Seurat’s Pointillist masterpiece A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, which has been a fixture of the museum’s assortment since 1926.
Grande and Bailey’s cease on the AIC coincided with the announcement that the 2 will seem in a revival of Sunday In The Park with George, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Stephen Sondheim musical impressed by the portray. The manufacturing will debut at London’s Barbican Centre in the summertime of 2027.
Marianne Elliot has been named the director of the undertaking; she previously directed Bailey within the West Finish gender-swapped revival of Sondheim’s Firm. This time round, Bailey will play the titular character Georges, and Grande will play the a part of Dot, originated by Broadway doyenne Bernadette Peters.
Georges Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, 1884 The Artwork Institute of Chicago
Sunday within the Park with George had its premiere Off Broadway in 1983 at Playwrights Horizons, happening to win the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for drama, two Tony Awards for design and the 1991 Olivier Award for finest musical. This isn’t the present’s first main revival; in 2005, a UK manufacturing premiered on the Menier Chocolate Manufacturing facility and transferred to Broadway three years later. A restricted engagement run starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford was additionally staged on Broadway in 2017.
Sondheim’s musical braids the fictionalised artistic trajectory of Seurat as he labored on A Sunday on La Grande Jatte with that of his great-grandson, George, a recent artist who’s haunted by his personal ambition. Seurat’s famend pointillist approach, which required the systematic utility of particular person gestures of pure shade to coalesce into a bigger picture, operates as a thematic motif within the present, grounding the 2 Georges within the all-immersive frustration and triumph of inventive manufacturing.
After Sondheim introduced his early retirement from musical theatre in 1981 following the disastrous run of his present Merrily We Roll Alongside, author and collaborator James Lapine satisfied him to go to the AIC to view the famed Seurat. Lapine famous that the one determine lacking from the portray was the artist himself, an commentary that impressed Sondheim to start work on his personal skilled renaissance.
Whereas the upcoming revival will mark Grande’s London stage debut, the Harmful Lady is a Broadway veteran. She starred within the musical 13 in 2008 alongside an all-teenage solid and was scouted for her first tv position on Nickelodeon’s Victorious quickly thereafter. Grande has been nominated for 2 Golden Globes for finest supporting actress for her position as Glinda in John Chu’s big-screen variations of the Broadway blockbuster Depraved.
That is hardly the primary time Seurat’s largest and best-known portray has been visited by stars of the display screen and stage. A Sunday on La Grande Jatte figures very prominently in a well-known scene from John Hughes’s 1986 comedy Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
