Studio to Stage

Degas’s Little Dancer/ Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon

How did such famous works as Edgar Degas’s Little Dancer Aged Fourteen (1878–81) and George Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte–1884 (1884–86) come into being? The subject of art historical studies, these questions also inspired two musicals: Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Sunday in the Park with George (1884) and Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens’s Little Dancer (2014). Ann Hould-Ward’s costume designs for Sunday in the Park with George underscore the strength of Sondheim’s musical, its exploration of Seurat’s color theories. For the character Dot, Hould-Ward created a bustled dress with a silhouette recognizable from the painting. Using layers of different colors and patterns of fabrics, she suggested the simultaneous contrasts of colors Seurat sought in his “pointillist” paintings.

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