![]() Singing “Sunday” every night was like going to church.īETH MALONE ( Fun Home): Sunday in the Park with George is my favorite musical. I’d literally been in New York a couple of months when I got a part in the show. HOWARD MCGILLIN ( Phantom of the Opera): I made my Broadway debut in Sunday in the Park with George. Harper’s Bazaar assembled those stage icons along with Miranda and Garfield to retell the story of how a Sondheim song became a Larson song became a Miranda song-and then became one of the 2021’s most joyous movie moments. And by the time Garfield takes Peters’s hand in the same way Mandy Patinkin took her hand in the original “Sunday,” a feeling of joy begins to crescendo alongside the music. A Sunday brunch becomes a can’t-miss Broadway revue. ![]() The diners then begin to subtly flash signature moves, props, and outfits from their iconic roles. As the patrons enter the diner, theater lovers will instantly begin to clock them as one Broadway legend after another. Much like in Sondheim’s version, a transformation occurs over the course of the song. ![]() ![]() He began texting friends like Hamilton alumni Renée Elise Goldsberry and Phillipa Soo and Fun Home star Beth Malone (who appeared with Garfield in the 2018 production of Angels in America) original cast members of Larson’s Rent, such as Daphne Rubin-Vega, Adam Pascal, and Wilson Jermaine Heredia and Broadway legends including Bebe Neuwirth, Chita Rivera, and, of course, Bernadette Peters. So when Miranda began to formulate his version of Larson’s “Sunday,” he imagined a paean to the musical theater that inspired Larson and that Larson inspired. Larson’s version swaps the Island of La Grande Jatte for the legendary Moondance Diner (a Manhattan haunt, since closed down, where Larson had once worked as a waiter), subbing in himself for Seurat. In the original “Sunday,” Seurat guides his subjects in the park into a perfect composition as the chorus sings in harmony. The 1984 musical followed French painter Georges Seurat as he worked on his seminal pointillist painting A Sunday on the Island of La Grande Jatte, of park-goers on the banks of the River Seine. His song “Sunday” began as an admiring parody of another “Sunday,” the Act One closer from Sondheim’s Pulitzer-winning Sunday in the Park with George. Just as Miranda looked up to Larson, Larson idolized Sondheim. He played Larson’s character, alongside Leslie Odom Jr. In 2014, Miranda-who has long been inspired by Larson’s legacy-starred in a special two-week run of the show in between the workshop and Off-Broadway debut of Hamilton. It was posthumously adapted into a full-fledged musical (with assists from Larson’s college friend Victoria Leacock Hoffman, a producer, and Tony-winning playwright David Auburn) and several companies have performed it Off-Broadway since. He’d also written Tick, Tick…Boom! as an autobiographical story about trying to break into Broadway, and performed it as a one-man “rock monologue” in the same years he was developing Rent. Larson died suddenly in 1996, on the morning of Rent’s first Off-Broadway preview show, and was never able to witness its enduring success. Directed by Broadway game changer Miranda and adapted from a musical by Rent composer, lyricist, and writer Jonathan Larson, who was in turn inspired by musical legend Stephen Sondheim, the number features cameos by over a dozen Broadway icons in a fantastical sequence packed with enough Easter eggs to keep theater nerds pausing and rewinding for weeks. The song “Sunday,” a showstopper that comes early in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s feature directorial debut, Tick, Tick…Boom!, lasts only a few minutes, but it packs in four decades of Broadway history.
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