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Director Sam Buntrock draws on years of commercial animation and graphic arts experience to radically re-envision Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George.
An interview by Randy Gener
In the virtual world of the Animation: Master software community, the British stage director Sam Buntrock is best known as “Parlo.” Anyone who Googles his real name is likely to stumble upon chat-room transcripts of Parlo holding forth on such matters as “rigging and modeling,” “tweaking the channels,” and the virtues of “the nlp concept of accessing cues.” (For wonk-wannabes, nlp stands for Neuro Linguistic Programming.) In an instructional two-disc set, titled A:M in Live Action CD Rom, Buntrock offers coaching on how to integrate animation techniques into post-production environments.
In the brick-and-mortar universe of Broadway and
London’s West End, however, the 32-year-old director is a smart, ambitious upstart whose emotionally intense, live-movie version of Sunday in the Park with George has dared to reinvent and digitize Stephen Sondheim’s 1985 Pulitzer Prize-winning musical. Buntrock’s revival uses animation, computer-generated imagery, and animated film techniques to conjure Georges Seurat’s famous canvas, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884–86), onstage. The award-winning production began its life in the u.k. at the Menier Chocolate Factory in 2005 and subsequently transferred to a commercial West End engagement at the Wyndham Theatre in 2006. Roundabout’s production at Studio 54, featuring Daniel Evans as French Neo-impressionist painter Georges Seurat and Jenna Russell as Seurat’s model/lover Dot, along with Michael Cumpsty, Alexander Gemignani, Jessica Molaskey, and Mary Beth Peil, begins performances in January.
Buntrock was 21 years old and still in college when he staged a successful 1997 fringe revival of Sondheim’s
Assassins in Hampstead, north London. That gig led him to being hired at the Donmar Warehouse as a resident assistant director, where he worked on Juno and the Paycock, Three Days of Rain, and The Real Thing, which transferred to New York with the original cast. “I couldn’t get any productions of mine off the ground,” Buntrock recalls. “I remember reading a New York Times review where the director Simon McBurney was a described as ‘a hot young director ’at 39. I was in my early 20s. I thought, ‘Well, okay, I can come back to this. There’s a reason why I can’t get this off the ground: I’m an embryo.’”
Interviewed by phone from his home outside of London, Buntrock rues, “Ninety percent of the work goes into elements that the audience doesn’t even realize have been worked on in great, painstaking detail. The collaborative work of musicals and the work of an animator are very much intertwined in my mind. It’s all about object, space, and time at play.”
FRONT AND CENTER: What can you tell me about Ninjasticks Studio, the animation company you created?
SAM BUNTROCK: I started Ninjasticks about 2001 or 2002. Along with Knifedge, a multimedia company, the group of people in Ninjasticks proved to be some of the primary animators on Sunday in the Park with George. I realized that I wasn’t going to make a living initially as a director, so I went back to commercial graphics and animation. I specialize in character animation. The best way to describe it to a layperson is that it’s the process of creating and animating characters and actors, including physical action. Animation is a massive industry; there are also special-effects animation and mechanical animation. The sheer magnitude of the digital content on Sunday in the Park… is huge. At the moment we’ve had a ten-strong full time production team that has been on it for ten-and-a-half months. Prior to that, there was a smaller number who worked on it full-time.
Sunday in the Park…started with an idea I had. I did animation tests with Shaun Freeman, an animator who I had never met but whom I’ve worked with internationally through the power of the Internet. Sean worked on the film Happy Feet and is now a very well respected and very successful feature-film character animator. We did a test of one of the figures in the Seurat painting that is not really a character in Stephen’s script. We did tests to see what it would look like if we moved it around in an environment, what we call in the industry “proof-of-contact work.” He did the animation that’s still in the show. It’s one of the final moments of Act One, in which a character takes its place on the canvas.
The visual palette of the show consists of computer-generated imagery. How many thousands of files are we actually talking about?
I’d say it’s in the terra-byte territory. The first act is an hour and 15 minutes, and the second act is 58. The show is over two hours. I’d say there’s about three hours of projections. There’s more projection than there is stage time because of the ways things overlap each other. So it’s like a movie that just happens to be caught in a play. From the very beginning, I was determined that everything had to be intrinsic. It actually had to feel as though both the actors and the video content inhabited the same world. David Farley’s work as a set designer had to allow for that integration. Timothy Bird’s content and projection designs feel as though they had been hand-drawn or hand-painted—there’s an extraordinary sense of the analog.
The first act of the musical is about the making of Seurat’s painting. The amount of man-hours spent in the pre-production process must have been quite excessive.
We ultimately had to recreate the painting in the computer with the dots. There was some automation involved to duplicate the dots. Someone had to work on a machine and re-create it dot by dot, but the amount of work that has gone into making it feels as though it’s real. I’ve been working on this show since the summer of 2004—not full-time but pretty constant. It wasn’t originally produced until the end of 2005. Shaun Freeman and I had a concept: The technology literally allows you to do the story of the painting from the first charcoal sketch line through the last dab of paint. In addition to that, we had a take on the piece itself as a play that is very emotional. We have a lead, Daniel Evans, who takes on the role in a way that I don’t think people expect it to be taken on. Most people end up being moved by this show in a way they hadn’t expected.
The signature image of your production intrigues me: a charcoal pencil runs across a white wall. That’s different from the cut-out technique that was executed in the original production.
I loved the original production; I loved watching how James Lapine staged it. But technologically they weren’t able to show how a painting progresses from the first sketch to the final creation. When I hear those opening chords of Sunday in the Park…, it feels like someone both tentatively finding their way and embarking on a huge journey. So it became clear very early on that that was the first sketch. The painter Georges Seurat knows the environment he wants to draw. He knows the line of the river bank—it’s the first line that goes across the page. That was the initial spark of inspiration, and the rest of the act is putting everything else on the plane.
After that initial moment of creation, the palette expanded almost immediately; he sketches in the tree and rubs it out. In the original stage direction, the tree flies out. In our production, the tree is literally rubbed off the page. That moment in our production is so complete because George is sketching and altering the world. As he sings at the end of Act One, “You watch while I revise the world.” In our Sunday in the Park…, that’s the key moment; if you sell that moment, then you’ve got the show. The audiences know from the get-go that everything they’ll see is through George’s eyes.
Your Sunday in the Park… has been praised for theatrically forging links between its Act One, which takes place in 19th-century France, and its Act Two, which takes place in the American present. How does the second act’s photorealistic rendering of a contemporary art gallery help bridge the two acts?
It’s a nondescript gallery; it’s not necessarily in Chicago or Manhattan. Yes, it’s a photorealistic rendering; we describe it as “digital set exception” so the perspective of the real stage goes up to the back wall, and this thing is then projected up the back wall much like a trompe-l’œil. It looks like it’s all one. And with the lighting, the projection, and the lighting on the stage (the spotlights on the 3D model), the back wall and the digital image both exactly match. Even though you know where the lines are and you know where the wall is, it feels as though you’re inside the space. It’s real stage magic.
This was one of my briefs early on with the design theme: We have to move from Act One to keep the presentational style into Act Two, and we stay with the painting. That’s the thing that connects us. There’s a time lapse which begins at Act One and takes us 100 years from the moment the painting is hung on the wall in Paris to our contemporary environment. It’s as though were standing in front of the painting for 100 years, and if we stop at any time in front of the painting, there’d be a story. But we wait 100 years until the characters connect at one place.
A terrific thing happens in this show. The audience has this information about the painting; we’ve been supplied the knowledge. They’ve learned about every character in the painting: who they are and where they come from, how they interact with each other. You place the painting on the wall and put two characters in front of it. There’s a lovely dramatic irony. I love it, too, for that very reason, and so when you finally have that wonderful moment, it’s magical.
Clearly you exhibit a real concern that the technology should not detract from the performances. But I also know you use the tools of technology as part of the theatricality. How do you balance those two concerns?
It’s that’s age-old thing where initially you want the audience to be totally amazed by what’s in front of them. Then you want them to take for granted that the technology is intrinsic to the performance. It’s not spectacle for spectacle’s sake. You want it to look like magic, but the magic serves the matter at hand. It’s what it’s meant to be, as opposed to anything overly flashy, overly cooked, or overly self-conscious. It’s a tough one. Sunday in the Park… is about the story of a painting, so obviously the images that are projected in front of the audience are very important. But what’s more engaging for an audience are the characters, the actors, the music, the text. That stuff is what ultimately wins out.
I first heard Sunday in the Park… when I was in my teenage years. I admired it but I didn’t have any real emotional reaction. When I really heard it again, before I got to work on it, what stood out is that it’s so overwhelmingly emotional. The thing that’s constantly aimed at Stephen’s work is that it’s cold and intellectual. I want to yell, “Bullshit.”
Sunday in the Park… is an extraordinarily emotional story, but there’s a man in the center who has problems expressing his emotion. This doesn’t make the show unemotional. It actually makes it more emotional. The French George creates this painting, but he cannot tell Dot that he loves her. He can’t give her words, but he gives her this painting. By then it’s too late. You see his inability to express emotion, and when you see the resolution, the show does knock you in the heart. It hits you in the chest.
I made it very clear in my mind that I wanted to explore Sunday in the Park… as a love story as much as a piece about the history of a painting. It’s about everyone who’s ever endeavored to make something in their lives. It’s about anyone who’s ever strived to do something and stumbled, or strived to do so something that no one else can see is possible.
What's the Pointillist?
Long before The Matrix movie trilogy arrived on the pop-culture scene, the world had known another “Neo.” That rebel's real name was Georges Seurat, the 19th-century Neo-Impressionist French painter. His 1886 unveiling of his most famous work, Sunday on Le Grande Jatte—1884 (when he was only 26 years old) signaled a radical break from the Impressionism of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, and Claude Monet.
Everything about Le Grande Jatte was a gesture of drama and rebellion. For one thing, there was its scale. Its large white frame (about 6 feet 8 inches by 10 feet 10 inches) contained a heavily populated tableau of Sunday loungers on a Paris isle—a cast of 48 people (soldiers, boaters, old people, fashionably dressed bourgeois women) and some animals (monkeys and dogs)—rendered with a rigid monumentality and accorded the same sense of timeless gravity normally associated with large-scale classical history paintings. As Seurat stated himself, his aim was to “make modern people in their essential traits move about as they do on [ancient Greek] friezes and place them on canvases organized by harmonies.”
Then there is the technique. It was deemed anti-Impressionist to the core. Instead of celebrating such Impressionist ideals such as spontaneity, improvisation, and movement, La Grande Jatte was seen as a proponent of rationality and science. Motivated by his understanding of optics and color theory, Seurat found that by painting miniature dabs of two complementary colors (blue and orange, for example, located on the opposite sides of the color wheel), the color of each was even more vivid to the eye. Seurat was also aware of how our eyes optically mix dabs of primary colors in ways that would create a more luminous effect than if those same colors were blended on a painter's palette. “Given the phenomenon of the duration of a light impression on the retina, synthesis is the unavoidable result,” Seurat wrote in an 1890 letter that describes this technique.
This strategy of color experimentation and optical unification in painting is now known as Pointillism. Seurat did not coin that term. According to the Art Institute of Chicago's exhibition “Seurat and the Making of La Grande Jatte,” the label comes from the French word for “stitch” and refers to the accumulation of paint daubs, not just a spray of dots.
The extensive and obsessive preparation that was required to create the composition of La Grande Jatte hinted at a culturally reactionary attitude that aligned Seurat more clearly (according to some art critics and historians) with the ambiguous questions raised by modernism and irony. Was Seurat poking fun at the stiff, fashionable, upwardly mobile Parisians of his day? Is this canvas intended as a social satire about the mixing of the classes? Is it about the pretensions of bourgeois Parisians who dressed up in their best Sunday clothes so that they can see and be seen on a narrow, pastoral island in the Seine northwest of Paris?
For admirers of La Grande Jatte, which has been in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago since 1926, the painting's detached grandeur, rich visual textures, and surface control are all dramatic aspects of Seurat's “Neo” mask. “The painting is precisely about change,” the critic Holland Carter says, “about mutability, about objects, light, and time coming and going. Seurat's figures are actors in a dream play.”
In 1891, at the age of 31, Seurat died. That he left behind such a distinct but small body of work naturally deepens his mystique and has inspired and affected the lives of everybody from Stephen Sondheim and Ferris Bueller to Big Bird and Elmer Fudd.—R.G.
Randy Gener, the senior editor of American Theatre magazine, is the author of such plays as Love Seats for Virginia Woolf; his lectures on the theatre, include “Storytelling by Digital Design: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create Theatre.”
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