Jake Gyllenhaal to Headline ‘Sunday in the Park With George’ Broadway Revival
Image by Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images
By Talya Zax December 13, 2016
It’s been a good year for Stephen Sondheim: a new musical in the works, a documentary reviving his brilliant flop “Merrily We Roll Along,” and now a star-studded revival of one of his best-loved shows, “Sunday in the Park with George,” which will have a 10 week run on Broadway this spring.
The production, which will star Jake Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford, will begin previews February 11, open February 23, and close April 23 at the Hudson Theater. As The New York Times’ Michael Paulson wrote, the show will be the first staged at the soon-to-be reopened Hudson in almost 50 years.
Gyllenhaal and Ashford won’t be new to “Sunday in the Park,” which has a book by James Lapine in addition to music and lyrics by Sondheim. Both starred in a concert performance of the show that ran for four performances at Manhattan’s City Center in October. The production won widespread critical admiration; the Times’ Ben Brantley commended Gyllenhaal for displaying “both the radiant, centered stillness that can anchor a crowded stage — a clarity within opacity — and, who knew, a voice of richly flexible timbre that confidently elicits the most delicate shades of passion and despair,” and The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney deemed the show “a rapturous day out.”
“Sunday in the Park With George” tells two stories: in the first act, that of the painter Georges Seurat and his mistress Dot, and in the second act, that of the duo’s great-grandson George and their now-aged daughter Marie. Gyllenhaal will fill the roles of Georges and George, and Ashford those of Dot and Marie. Their parts were originated, respectively, but Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
