On Thursday (15 January), the Wicked film franchise co-stars Ariana Grande and Jonathan Bailey visited the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) to spend some time with Georges Seurat’s Pointillist masterpiece A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, which has been a fixture of the museum’s collection since 1926.
Grande and Bailey’s stop at the AIC coincided with the announcement that the two will appear in a revival of Sunday In The Park with George, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Stephen Sondheim musical inspired by the painting. The production will debut at London’s Barbican Centre in the summer of 2027.
Marianne Elliot has been named the director of the project; she formerly directed Bailey in the West End gender-swapped revival of Sondheim’s Company. This time around, Bailey will play the titular character Georges, and Grande will play the part of Dot, originated by Broadway doyenne Bernadette Peters.
Georges Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, 1884 The Art Institute of Chicago
Sunday in the Park with George had its premiere Off Broadway in 1983 at Playwrights Horizons, going on to win the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for drama, two Tony Awards for design and the 1991 Olivier Award for best musical. This is not the show’s first major revival; in 2005, a UK production premiered at the Menier Chocolate Factory and transferred to Broadway three years later. A limited engagement run starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford was also staged on Broadway in 2017.
Sondheim’s musical braids the fictionalised creative trajectory of Seurat as he worked on A Sunday on La Grande Jatte with that of his great-grandson, George, a contemporary artist who is haunted by his own ambition. Seurat’s renowned pointillist technique, which required the systematic application of individual gestures of pure color to coalesce into a larger image, operates as a thematic motif in the show, grounding the two Georges in the all-immersive frustration and triumph of artistic production.
After Sondheim announced his early retirement from musical theatre in 1981 following the disastrous run of his show Merrily We Roll Along, writer and collaborator James Lapine convinced him to visit the AIC to view the famed Seurat. Lapine noted that the only figure missing from the painting was the artist himself, an observation that inspired Sondheim to begin work on his own professional renaissance.
While the upcoming revival will mark Grande’s London stage debut, the Dangerous Woman is a Broadway veteran. She starred in the musical 13 in 2008 alongside an all-teenage cast and was scouted for her first television role on Nickelodeon’s Victorious soon thereafter. Grande has been nominated for two Golden Globes for best supporting actress for her role as Glinda in John Chu’s big-screen adaptations of the Broadway blockbuster Wicked.
This is hardly the first time Seurat’s largest and best-known painting has been visited by stars of the screen and stage. A Sunday on La Grande Jatte figures very prominently in a famous scene from John Hughes’s 1986 comedy Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
