Sam Buntrock’s staging of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Sunday in the Park with George is nominated for several Tonys and has received a lot of praise, especially for its ingenious use of animated projections. The actors interact with these moving images (a small dog is particularly popular) and the device is not only creative, but it doesn’t feel like an artificial graft—it fits the theme of the show.

The first observation is that the two most inventive musical revivals of the past few years on Broadway (George and John Doyle’s Sweeney Todd) have come from England, which says something about the state of American directing. The second is how startled some critics seemed to be by Buntrock’s use of technology to make the painting so integral to the show come to life; it’s as if they had never seen that type of stuff before. For some reason effects are fine in movies but to many theater fans, technology still feels like a new gimmick. read more