Jake Gyllenhaal to star in Broadway musical revival of “Sunday in the Park”

PanARMENIAN.Net - Jake Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford will reprise their performances in a Broadway run of Sunday in the Park With George, The Hollywood Reporter said.

The limited engagement of the revival will reopen the Hudson Theater, the landmark 44th Street venue that will operate as part of Ambassador Theatre Group, bringing the total number of officially designated Broadway theaters to 41. Performances will begin Feb. 11 ahead of a Feb. 23 opening night and continue through April 23.

In October, the two actors starred in a New York City Center concert staging of the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical, which features a score by Stephen Sondheim and book by James Lapine. Sarna Lapine, the niece of the writer and original director, will again stage the show in its second major Broadway revival.

The musical contemplates the solitude and sacrifices of making art, weaving a fictional story around the creation by French post-Impressionist painter Georges Seurat of his pointillist masterpiece, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, which costs him his relationship with longtime mistress Dot. The action then leaps forward by 100 years to pick up on George and Dot's great-grandson, a multimedia artist debuting a lighting installation that pays homage to the Seurat painting.

The Hudson Theater, which last listed a Broadway production in 1968, promises to be equipped with state-of-the-art technical upgrades as well as new seating, lounge service and restroom improvements, plus expanded dressing rooms and new fly systems. It was originally announced to reopen with a revival of Lanford Wilson’s acclaimed play Burn This, also set to star Gyllenhaal. That production was postponed due to scheduling conflicts.

Gyllenhaal made his Broadway debut in the 2015 two-hander Constellations, opposite Ruth Wilson, and also starred in City Center's concert staging of Little Shop of Horrors last year. Sunday in the Park With George will be his first Broadway musical.

Ashford, a Tony winner for 2014's You Can't Take It With You opposite James Earl Jones, will make her return to musicals, as she first rose to fame as part of the original cast of Kinky Boots. She also starred in the 2015 play Sylvia opposite Matthew Broderick.

Sunday in the Park With George premiered on Broadway in 1984 starring Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters, running 604 performances. The musical was revived in 2008, in a limited-engagement transfer of a London production that starred Daniel Evans and Jenna Russell.