In the halcyon days of Gershwin, Porter, and Rodgers and Hart, Broadway musicals used to be about music. Beginning with Oklahoma, and culminating with My Fair Lady, Broadway musicals usually featured the book. Sunday in the Park with George, a new work by James Lapine (book and direction) and Stephen Sondheim (music and lyrics), is the first Broadway musical that is mainly about the set.

This show has a very good set—indeed, a brilliant one—by Tony Straiges—and since the design is primarily intended as a stage canvas for the reproduction (substituting costumed actors for the original figures) of the large pointillist painting "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte" by Georges Seurat, one could sit and look at it for hours. This, in fact, is precisely what the audience finds itself doing at the Booth Theater. A popular joke about heavyweight musicals...