Noel: Please don't blame Sharon for Starmites. I myself did not have the misfortune of seeing the show, which has become somewhat legendary in the Moose Murders vein. I did, however, see Sharon do her number on the Tony Awards show, and it was obvious to me that this woman was quite superior to the material.
As for Sunday in the Park with George, the people I saw it with didn't get it. "So it's about this artist and he has to choose between his art and this girl." For me there are so many other aspects to it than this TV-Guide plot summary. Like the pairing of songs in the first and second acts. Like what it says about art in the nineteenth vis-à-vis the twentieth century. (She's a railroad train!)
Maybe I'm so moved by SitPwG for the same reason that I get goose pimples from "Someone in a Tree", and it's the same reason many people "don't like Sondheim". "Cold, intellectual, distant" Well, that is also what SitPwG is about isn't it? About the passion (oh, a Stephen Sondheim reference) in the obsession with one's work--not just painting, but brokering stocks, building motorcycles, whatever--and how others interpret that as lack of feeling.
But, to get back to my point, whatever it was: It's the intellectual dialogue in "Someone in a Tree", the zen imagery, that leads to the big emotional payoff in the word History. Ah, a Jessica Fletcher moment!
The same with Sunday in the Park. You see George as totally distant, distracted, unfeeling perhaps in Act I right up until "Sunday", one of the most emotional moments I've had in the theatre. You're so swept up in the realization of his vision (in the music, mind you), that you forgive him.
The second act begins again with a lot of intellectualizing. Though this George wears his anguish on his sleeve, you don't really like him all that much more than the other one until he gets to Grande Jatte, and then, with one tree (with on one in it) and "Lesson Number 5" we are led to the glory of "Move On". Again, the emotional payoff had its foundation laid by the more brainy stuff before. Not every musical needs to deliver a big payoff with every number, punch-punch-punch.
God I love the Modify feature on this board! Saves a lot of embarrassment.