Earlier this month my wife and I saw the Broadway production of Stephen Sondheim's "Sunday in the Park with George" at the Hudson Theatre. Most theatergoers are familiar with the original cast's made-for-PBS recording from the 1980s. The original production was so masterfully captured on video that it is rare to see anyone dare to stage a revival of this unorthodox musical. The primary force behind 2017's revival was Jake Gyllenhaal, one of the few Hollywood film actors capable of following Mandy Patinkin in the role of George Seurat.
The story behind this musical is imaginative: George Seurat's magnum opus, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte, comes to life as Sondheim transforms the canvas into the landscape of Seurat's life. Some of the characters that he paints are an intimate part of Seurat's personal life. Many are strangers whom Seurat studies as they stand in the daylight or recline in the shadows. Interwoven throughout Act I is Seurat's obsession with "pointillism," which is a fancy word for painting using dots rather than brushstrokes. Seurat described this method as "chromo-luminarism," in order to emphasize his own focus on the human eye's natural ability to blend two colors together (depending on the viewer's distance from the canvas). Although Seurat's term never caught on, museum curators and art critics have come to prefer the term "divisionism" to describe his methodology, as this third term emphasizes his commitment to creating illusory color combinations which can trick the human eye and excite the human mind.
In Act II, Sondheim's musical transforms into a self-reflexive journey onto the 1980s American art scene. Although Seurat's purported American great-grandson becomes the protagonist, his lyrical musings in the song "Putting It Together" seem to be Sondheim's personal reflections on dealing with Broadway critics and wealthy patrons whose money comes with strings attached. It is at that moment in the play when it becomes obvious why Seurat is like patron saint for Sondheim: the obsessive, unyielding French painter, who was never accepted among his peers before his death at age 31, contrasts starkly with Steven Sondheim, who quickly catapulted to Broadway success with his first musical endeavor, the lyrics for West Side Story (which he co-authored with composer Leonard Bernstein and choreographer Jerome Robbins).
Sunday in the Park with George feels like Sondheim's attempt to make a musical that would fulfill his own artistic standards, without having to sacrifice his creative choices for the sake of ticket sales. It comes as no surprise that he initially failed to persuade Broadway producers to stage his imaginary tale of Seurat's life. To prove that musicals can be high art, and not just a few "hummable" tunes, Sondheim had to prove Off-Broadway that the experimental approach of Sunday in the Park with George could draw audiences in New York. Not only did his musical make it to Broadway, but it even won two Tony awards and the Pulitzer Prize.
The genius behind Sondheim's musical is manifold. As this is a blog post about copyright, I feel the need to "stay in my lane" and focus on the legal significance of Sunday in the Park with George. From a legal perspective, the greatness of Sondheim's musical begins with its derivation from Seurat's painting. U.S. copyright law classifies Sunday in the Park With George as a derivative work from A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Grand Jatte. Sondheim is limited to a copyright in his original contributions-- in other words, Seurat's painting cannot be exhumed from the public domain at this late day. Sondheim's musical is, however, enormously creative: his music and lyrics may have been inspired by Seurat's painting, but copyright law treats Sondheim's homage to the French master painter as an independent and original creation. Ideas are lifeblood of artistic inspiration, and Sondheim's ingenious use of a "pointillistic" score has turned the visual flare of Seurat's canvas into a musical experience for the eyes and the ears.
I must also make a point about the American public domain: Sunday in the Park With George might never have been made if Seurat's works were still under copyright. Sondheim's freedom to use La Grande Jatte contrasts starkly with the struggle of many hiphop and EDM artists to sample popular records. Licensing fees constantly hamper the efforts of modern musicians to transform their favorite pop songs into fresh new tracks.
The Copyright Clause of U.S. Constitution urges us to maintain a system of copyrights that promotes the progress of the arts. For sampling artists, the existing system of copyrights hardly feels that way. There is one important source of shared creativity that seeks to promote artistry further than Congress has: you have probably seen the benefits of Creative Commons on Wikipedia and other popular sources of free information. Hopefully this project will yield some excellent results in the coming decades. For now, however, Creative Commons is dwarfed in size by the copyright libraries held by the major publishing houses of the 20th century.
In my next entry, I plan to highlight how, practically speaking, sampling artists today probably need to prove talent near the top of their field (in the same way that Sondheim did) if they want the chance to sample the greatest songs of yesteryear. I'm of the opinion that musical talent should always find a way to make creative works worth experiencing. It's one thing to complain about copyright laws hindering artists from make derivative works, but it is quite another to suggest that copyright laws prevent great talent from being recognized. Musical talent should never have to depend on a single sample to build a memorable career; the greatest creative forces will always find a way to get great art into the hands of those who will appreciate it. It always starts with Seurat's favorite: a blank page or canvas... so many possibilities...
Comments