by Eric Blume
Playbill recently announced that one of our very favorite Oscar nominees/hunks/great actors, Jake Gyllenhaal, will reprise his four-day stint from October as French painter George Seurat in Steven Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George for an official ten-week Broadway run. Previews begin February 11th.
I was able to catch Jake in the initial staged-concert run of the show, and he’s a sight to behold...
Sunday is a fairly divisive entry in the Sondheim canon, with some feeling it’s his most moving and profound (I’m in that camp), and others who find it cold and lacking connective tissue (the two acts take place nearly a hundred years apart). What isn’t in question is the difficulty of the score, which requires Jake to soar at the top of his tenor voice for a majority of the show. It was one thing for Jake to tackle the music from Little Shop of Horrors last summer, but the Sunday score is incomparably more intricate and difficult.
The evening performance I saw, which was the very first, he went up on a few lyrics two or three times, but his performance was sublime. He carries such natural weight and authority, and he plunges deeply into the role. There’s a joy to his signing, and like all smart musical theater performers, he lets the music do the majority of the work for him: at his best, he’s simply carried along on the euphoria of the moment, letting the notes come the acting, and the acting come from the notes. I can only imagine what a few more weeks of rehearsal will bring to his skillful work on this piece, and I can’t imagine him not winning a Tony for this show next June.
Tickets are going fast and are brutally expensive for the run, but if you can talk somebody into treating you for Christmas, you won’t regret it. Gyllenhaal’s co-star, Annaleigh Ashford (Tony nominated for Kinky Boots and a winner for You Can't Take It With You), does similarly beautiful work in the role originated by Bernadette Peters, and Jake’s star performance, both subtle and big, is a genuine wow.