The return to the stage of Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George, the musical inspired by Georges Seurat’s most celebrated painting, La Grande Jatte (1884-1886), saw Wicked’s Ariana Grande and Jonathan Bailey visit the Art Institute of Chicago to spend time with the painting, a cornerstone of the museum’s collection since 1926.
Their appearance at the AIC coincided with the announcement that both actors will star in a new revival of Sunday in the Park with George, due to open at London’s Barbican Centre in summer 2027. Marianne Elliott will direct the production, reuniting with Bailey following their work together on the West End’s gender-swapped revival of Company. Bailey will take on the role of Georges, while Grande steps into the part of Dot, first made famous by Bernadette Peters.
The play was first staged Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons in 1983. Sunday in the Park with George went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1985. The play also won two Tony Awards for design and an Olivier Award in 1991. The musical has returned in various forms over the decades, including a 2005 revival at the Menier Chocolate Factory that later transferred to Broadway, and a limited Broadway run in 2017 starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford.
At its core, the show intertwines a fictionalised portrait of Seurat as he labours over La Grande Jatte with the story of his imagined great-grandson, a contemporary artist wrestling with ambition, doubt and inheritance. Seurat’s pointillist method of painting is the patient accumulation of tiny, deliberate marks. It becomes more than just technique, echoing the slow grind and occasional exhilaration of making art itself.
The musical owes its beginning to a turning point in Sondheim’s own career. After announcing his intention to step away from musical theatre in 1981, following the commercial failure of Merrily We Roll Along, his longtime collaborator James Lapine persuaded him to visit the Art Institute to see Seurat’s painting. Lapine later remarked that the artist himself was the only figure missing from the scene — a thought that prompted Sondheim to imagine a way back in.
The upcoming revival will mark Grande’s first appearance on the London stage, though she is no stranger to musical theatre. She made her Broadway debut in 13 in 2008, before being cast in Nickelodeon’s Victorious. More recently, she has received two Golden Globe nominations for her performance as Glinda in Jon M. Chu’s film adaptations of Wicked. The visit to the AIC shared on Instagram felt staged rather than casual.
Georges Seurat A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884-1886)
A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte
(French: Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte) was painted between 1884 and 1886 and remains Georges Seurat’s most iconic work. A landmark of the pointillist technique and one of the defining pieces of neo-impressionism, the painting depicts Parisians enjoying a leisurely afternoon along the banks of the River Seine. Today, it belongs to the Art Institute of Chicago.
Seurat began work on La Grande Jatte in May 1884, continuing until March 1885, and then resumed from October 1885 to May 1886. He devoted painstaking attention to the park’s landscape, exploring the interplay of colour, light, and form. The finished canvas stretches roughly 2 by 3 metres (6.6 ft × 9.8 ft). Before completing this masterpiece, Seurat produced a host of preliminary sketches and studies—one notable oil study, measuring 70.5 × 104.1 cm (27¾ × 41 in.), is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Seurat’s method drew on contemporary colour theory, influenced by thinkers such as Michel Eugène Chevreul and Ogden Rood. He experimented with tiny, discrete dots or short brushstrokes of pure colour, which the eye blends into a single, luminous hue when viewed from a distance. At the time, this approach was called Divisionism, a term Seurat himself preferred; today, it is better known as Pointillism. By the second year of painting, 1885–86, Seurat had refined his technique, using almost uniformly sized dots to create a shimmering, vibrant surface that made the colours appear more intense than traditional brushwork could achieve.
Top Photo: Ariana Grande and Jonathan Bailey in Seurat-Inspired Sondheim Revival Announced For Barbican Photo: Via Instagram