Best Stage Production: ‘Sunday in the Park with George’.

April 30, 2003.By City Pages.

Local Stephen Sondheim fans have had a pretty good run over the past five years or so. John Miller-Stephany directed winning productions of Sweeney Todd and the rarely performed Merrily We Roll Along for the Guthrie, and earlier this year Theater Latté Da took over the Loring Playhouse for a soaring rendition of Sunday in the Park with George. Sondheims’s triumphant meditation on French painter Georges Seurat, art and commerce, art and inspiration, and, well, Stephne Sondheim. The production wasn’t flawless: Sweet-voiced lead actor Randy Coe was less effective in Act Two than in the awesome first act and the orchestrations were occasionally thin. But under Peter Rothstein’s direction, the play was so visually striking (the gradually developing reproduction of Seruat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” was a joy to watch), and so wonderfully sung (especially by Ann Michaels), that all complaints were forced to cry uncle to the engulfing, impossibly beautiful melodies.