Rhymes of requirement
On the weather; and whether to choose admiring flowers or finishing hats.
It's finally feeling like spring here in NYC and it's euphoric. The trees are green, the sky blue, the bistro chairs are out. This is stop and smell the flowers weather. Ride the ferry to work weather. Pull out that linen shirt from storage and unbutton it a little lower weather. Walk across the Brooklyn Bridge after happy hour weather. Blow off writing on a weekend afternoon and have another weather.
It’s falling in love weather.
But! The hats…
I'm in a season overflowing with big feelings. I'd like to think I'm coming out of a hard time, but it's still early days. (Or is it the birthday?) More accurate to say I'm moving through it. Reporting out my headspace over dinner, my friend Robb gave his musical forecast: It’s Sunday in the Park with George weather. The thought did cross my radar…
A refrain (“Merrily Flying Along”):
Every few years I seem to fall in sync with a different Sondheim show. Company’s meditations on marriage got me through a divorce. Into the Woods' interrogation of fairy tale morality and giants in the sky helped me survive existential pandemic angst. I'm in my Merrily era now: rolling back through time to figure out how I got here, how we all got here.
Now, Sunday. A show I've knowingly avoided. Too opaque, too staccato. Except you can't spend decades listening to Broadway satellite radio without hearing Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters sing-speak “Color and Light.” I just never leaned in close enough to see what they saw in each other, past each other. Now, might the quintessential musical about the artist’s struggle provide solace?
Sunday is best known for “Finishing the Hat.” The penultimate number in Act 1—the artist’s lament—became the defining metaphor of Stephen Sondheim’s creative process (and all the required sacrifices) ever after.
Sondheim summarized the Pulitzer Prize-winning Sunday, his first collaboration with writer/director James Lapine, thusly:
Boy Loves Girl
Boy Loves Art
Boy Loses Girl
Boy Gets Both Girl and Art a Hundred Years Later.1
In Sunday, the boy is Georges Seurat, Sondheim, you. (Me?) The girl is Dot, Seurat’s lover/model for Un dimanche après-midi à l'Île de la Grande Jatte, anyone who has ever tried to love an artist. (Me.) The art is everything, the hat.
Too soon to tell, perhaps, tomorrow will only mark 45, but this might be the defining narrative tension of my one mortal life. Not, contrary to public opinion, the specifics of my transgressive gender unfolding. Rather, all the little choices and compromises that result in finishing hats. Or a life of just thinking about them.
When spring arrives, I admire blossoms in the parks as much as floral prints packed on the subway. I’ve had an essay in the compost pile for years now; it only makes sense during this shift of season. Every year, I unearth the idea just long enough to toss it aside a few weeks later, rotting. Is it because I don’t have what it takes to let the voices outside the window distance and die? Until there’s nothing but type?
Now that I’ve told all of you, will I permit myself to stay inside just long enough to finish? Will you? Or will I spend the rest of spring studying Sunday in the park, with the flowers.
There are worse things than staring at a blank page on a Tuesday,
xx Kyle
A few more bits of Sunday while we’re here:
I’m a Sondheim evangelist, clearly, so I recommend joining me in watching the full 2.5-hour (free on YT!) Mandy and Bernadette recording this weekend. If you don’t believe me yet, or Robb’s endorsement, perhaps Ms. Audra or Reddit will convince:
Sunday in the Park with George has always been like an oracle, bible, talisman, and holy grail all rolled into one for the benefit of my artistic soul. Whenever I am feeling weary, jaded, or frustrated, I turn to this show to inspire me and help me fall in love again with my art. — million-time Tony Award-winning Audra McDonald
The other big stand-out number from Sunday is “Putting it Together,” which has been adapted many times to underscore the creative process. Here’s Bernadette’s 1993 Oscars-opening montage which put it (filmmaking, or rather white men making films) together to dazzling effect.
Robb took issue with Sondheim's synopsis: “I don’t know that he gets the girl! Just learns to appreciate her “
Happy Birthday week, fellow Taurus!