Ariana Grande and Jonathan Bailey to Star in West End Sunday in the Park with George Revival

With the hype of the movie adaptation of Wicked still fresh, the film's Glinda and Fiyero, Ariana Grande and Jonathan Bailey, are in talks to reunite on stage soon. According to Baz Bamigboye of Deadline, Grande and Bailey are in "early planning stages" to team up for a new production of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s musical Sunday in the Park With George, directed by Marianne Elliott, in London in 2027.

via: Deadline

There are many moving parts, some bigger than others, involved at this delicate juncture more than 18 months ahead of a potential summer opening at London’s Barbican Theatre.

Understandably, there will be no official announcement until all of those parts are firmly locked into place.

I am reliably informed that all involved are understood to be “cautiously optimistic” that the show will go on with Grande and Bailey in 2027.

The show is suggested by the painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatt, created by Georges Seurat over two years between 1884-86 employing the pointillist technique. The artwork depicts people of varying social classes strolling and relaxing in a Parisian park on the Seine.

Lapine and Sondheim demonstrate how the artist might have put his huge painting together, by imagining who the people in Seurat’s painting might be. They include the character of Dot, George’s (yes, Georges is now George) witty lover and muse; in the second act, the same actress plays Dot’s daughter Marie. Those roles were originated at the Booth Theatre on Broadway by Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters, respectively. Philip Quast and Maria Friedman created the parts over here in London in a production at the National Theatre directed by Steven Pimlott. It won the Olivier for Best New Musical.

At early read-throughs, I’ve heard that both Grande and Bailey have excelled in the parts. They’re joined at the hip as friends having now worked together for the past few years on Wicked and this year’s terrific Wicked: For Good with director Jon M. Chu and Cynthia Erivo.

There has been blather on social media about this version of Sunday in the Park With George and Grande has hinted that she’s hoping to return to the boards, but I hope my reporting gives you a sense of what’s going on behind the scenes. As for Bailey, the show would reunite him with Elliott. It was her production of Company, produced with Chris Harper, her former partner in Elliott & Harper Productions, that helped super-charge Bailey’s career. He was a standout as Jamie, originally the Amy role, in the gender-switching production that played at the Gielgud Theatre for a season in 2018 with an ensemble that included Rosalie Craig (Riot Women, which is a brilliant Sally Wainwright BBC drama, by the way) and Patti LuPone (The Artist, Agatha All Along).

It was a pretty magnificent contemporary reexamination of the 1970 musical created by Sondheim with George Furth, originally directed by Hal Prince.

Well ahead of Company, Elliott visited with Sondheim in NYC and later the famed composer and lyricist traveled to London for Company rehearsals. During that time the pair had a series of ongoing conversations about what else in the Sondheim canon she was interested in directing.

Sunday in the Park With George was one of those that was discussed. I understand that West Side Story was the other, perhaps destined for the National Theatre in 2027-28? But that’s a story for another day.

And, Elliott’s always keen to work with Bailey, having done so again in 2022 at the Ambassadors Theatre on Mike Bartlett’s play Cock.

Elliott’s version of Sunday in the Park With George, if all those aforementioned moving parts can be glued tight, would play the Barbican’s summer musical slot, a season established by Howard Panter’s Trafalgar Theatre Productions with shows such as Cole Porter’s Anything Goes. This year it was Fiddler on the Roof, which transferred from the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park. The 2026 offering will be High Society starring Helen George (Call the Midwife) and Felicity Kendal (Rivals, The Good Life). Kendal led in many of Tom Stoppard’s plays in the West End; the great man’s private funeral was conducted yesterday.

Sondheim’s Into the Woods is now playing at London’s Bridge Theatre and there’s a promise of more Grade-A appreciations of the musical theater titan’s work to come as the centenary of his birth approaches in 2030.

The passion for Sondheim will never wane.