It’s fitting that the elegant revival of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s musical Sunday in the Park with George – currently at Studio 54 following an acclaimed London run – brings the latest advances in animation and digital projection to the stage. After all, the show takes as inspiration Georges Seurat and his 19th century masterpiece A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, which was itself informed by cutting-edge theories on color and optics, particularly the discovery that two juxtaposed colors could suggest a new color when seen from a distance. Hence Seurat’s famous depiction of a lazy French Sunday using innumerable colored dots, the style that came to be called pointillism. more ›

Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 black and white spy thriller The 39 Steps has been given a vividly colorful stage adaptation by a troupe of four British actors who’ve brought their madcap show to Broadway after an award-winning run on the West End. Adapted from a 1915 novel by John Buchan, the movie concerns the dashing but vague Richard Hannay, who gets ensnared in a deadly game of cat and mouse after shots ring out at a London music hall. In the ensuing stampede, a woman bluntly asks to go home with him and, once there, reveals that she’s a spy trying to stop a plot to smuggle British military secrets out of the country. more ›