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date: 08 March 2021

Abstract and Keywords

Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Sunday in the Park with George is divided into two acts that take place in different centuries and feature two sets of seemingly different characters. A close reading of the musical demonstrates, however, that most of the characters in act 2 either present another facet of the parallel character in act 1 or reveal another side to these characters’ functions in the overall scheme of the show. Through the use of a system of doubling, whereby actors played parallel characters in acts 1 and 2, the original New York production enhanced the work’s exploration of the role art and the artist play in society and of how this role has changed in the century between 1884 and 1984.

Keywords: Sunday in the Park with George, Stephen Sondheim, James Lapine, Georges Seurat, artist and society, double casting

Olaf Jubin

Olaf Jubin is a Senior Lecturer in Media Studies and Musical Theatre at Regent’s University London and a Visiting Lecturer on the MA in Musical Theatre at Goldsmiths, University of London. He obtained his PhD from the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany and has written and co-edited several books, among them a study of the German dubbing and sub-titling of Hollywood musicals and a comparative analysis of reviews of the musicals of Sondheim and Lloyd Webber. He has published essays on the reception of Sondheim in Germany and on the London version of Follies, and is co-editing the Oxford Handbook of the British Musical.

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