Sunday in the Park with George (1999)

The colors are dull, the sound pinched. Is this any way to experience Sunday in the Park with George, Stephen Sondheim's Pulitzer-winning 1984 Broadway show? Absolutely. Taped in 1985 for PBS, this reissued home-screen production struggles to get camera angles right while Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters play out love-hate duets as pointillist painter Georges Seurat and fictional mistress Dot. But the show's portrait of an artist succeeding at work while failing in life survives the clumsy visuals, and it's great fun to see Brent Spiner (Star Trek's Data) and Charles Kimbrough (Murphy Brown) in pre-TV-star parts. On DVD and laser, there's audio commentary with Peters, Patinkin, Sondheim, and director- book writer James Lapine. The patter satisfies, even though hambone Patinkin hogs the microphone. A-