It's Hot Up Here

Musings on Sunday in the Park with George's Act II opener

Precisely a hundred years elapse between the two acts of Sunday in the Park with George, but when the second curtain rises it seems as though not a moment has passed. Those on stage appear exactly as we last saw them: a tableau, frozen in time. Seurat’s painting is complete, its subjects fixed forever in their various poses—much to their chagrin. The opening number of Act II, “It’s Hot Up Here,” catalogs the general displeasure of those assembled, their every gripe and grumble distilled to its essence. “This is not my good profile,” moans Franz over and over again. Poor Louise, meanwhile, just wants her glasses. Celeste #2, lovestruck, laments that “the soldiers have forgotten us,” but one of the soldiers in question is more concerned that “these helmets weigh a lot on us.” After we have marvelled at the two rhymes Sondheim has managed to conjure for the word monotonous, it is valuable to take a look at this number in its wider context.

There is a somewhat symmetrical flavor to Sunday as a whole, with the completed painting—and therefore the show’s intermission—serving as a central pivot point. The first George’s creative journey, charted by Act I, brings with it an inherent sense of growth, outward expansion, and forward momentum. Act II, by contrast, might be more aptly characterized as a turn inward. Here, the focus is not on construction but deconstruction, a breaking down of the second George’s notions of art and self in pursuit of sincerity. In this sense, we might think about the “blank page or canvas” which so famously bookends the show as being rather like the idea of “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” in Christian burial rites. The entire journey of Sunday could be summarized as a departure from and return to the purity and potential of the proverbial blank page. “For you are limitless possibility,” this show seems to say, “and to limitless possibility you shall return.” 

We might therefore imagine Sunday’s intermission as the apex of a great arch, a structural peak that corresponds to the summit of the first George’s artistic achievement. If that is the case, it follows that we will sense a change of direction most acutely by comparing the musical numbers closest to this formal midpoint. In the show’s Act I finale, “Sunday,” those on stage speak with a single voice. That number is a collective statement of breathtaking objectivity, in which individual character melts away. Earlier, in “Color and Light,” George remarks that Dot is “seeing all the parts and none of the whole.” Sunday’s first-act finale reveals that to have been our experience as audience members too—that is, until “Sunday” itself. Only then is order brought to the whole: George’s work is complete, his vision of an ordinary Sunday fully, gloriously realized. 

This coherence is totally at odds with the patchwork of quips and jibes that dominate “It’s Hot Up Here.” As Act II begins, it is clear that any sense of unity or common purpose has faded away; what remains is a fractured group of fractious people. There is much bickering between characters, to be sure, but the contrast with Act I’s finale is no less stark when those on stage sing together. Much of what they say comes in short, sharp bursts of three or four syllables, their delivery stilted and their phrasing often unnatural. Compare a line like “A lot of fun it’s not up here” with the luxuriant lyricism of the previous number. This is the artificial, mannered speech of artificial, ill-mannered people. And this might go some way to explaining the sometimes less-than-warm reactions of audience members when the show was in previews. As Mary D’Arcy, who originated the twin roles of Celeste #2 and Elaine, once recalled, “One night when we started Act II with “It’s Hot Up Here” and Yvonne sang the second line, ‘It’s hot and it’s monotonous,’ someone yelled from the audience, ‘It sure is!’”

Only Dot, characteristically setting herself apart from the others, remains her fully fleshed-out self. Her heartfelt appeal to an absent George is a familiar blend of self-absorption and genuine tenderness, as exemplified by these touching lines: 

They’ll argue till they fade
and whisper things and grunt.
But thank you for the shade, 
and putting me in front.
Yes, thank you, George, for that—
And for the hat…

“Thank you for the shade” is a particularly nice nod to Dot’s very first lines in “Sunday in the Park with George” (the show’s opening number), wherein she asks George why “you always get to sit in the shade while I have to stand in the sun?” Her plea appears to fall on deaf ears. “George? Hello, George?” Perhaps he was listening after all.

Both of Sunday’s act openers belong to a rather charming tradition of Broadway numbers which similarly use excessive heat as a motif of sorts. Act II of Kiss Me, Kate begins with “Too Darn Hot”; 110 in the Shade’s opening number (perhaps unsurprisingly, given the show’s title) is “Gonna Be Another Hot Day”; and then there is Kurt Weill’s “Ain’t It Awful, the Heat,” from Street Scene. We might think too of “How Can I Call This Home?” from Jason Robert Brown’s Parade, in which Leo Frank yearns to be “free of magnolia trees and endless sunshine,” or of the sun-soaked New York City of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In The Heights. “Oh, qué calor, qué calor, qué calor, qué calor, qué calo-o-or!” sings the Piragua guy as he sells his wares. What heat indeed. There is, at the very least, a great cabaret medley along these lines just waiting to be put together…

“It’s Hot Up Here” is a portal through which Sunday travels from 1884 to the present day (at the time of the show’s writing). It is part entr’acte, bridging two centuries as one quite literally fades into another, and part coda to Act I, a last hurrah for these three-dimensional souls now forever confined to just two. And in the final lines of this number, which include an internal rhyme so elegant that it slips by almost unnoticed, the subjects of Seurat’s painting spell out the harsh reality of their own eternal present:

The outward show
Of bliss up here
Is disappear-
Ing dot by dot

And it’s hot!

Listening links:

There are three widely accessible recordings of Sunday in the Park with George: the iconic 1984 original; the 2006 London cast recording; and the 2017 Broadway cast recording. The Dots on these recordings are, respectively, Bernadette Peters, Jenna Russell, and Annaleigh Ashford. Here are the three versions of “It’s Hot Up Here,” in chronological order of release: