Jonathan Bailey, Ariana Grande, and the Sunday That May Send Me Back to London – front mezz junkies, Theater News

Frontmezzjunkies reports: Jonathan Bailey and Ariana Grande to Star in Sunday in the Park With George in London

By Ross

There are theatre announcements that make you smile, and then there are ones that make you pause, stare at the screen, and quietly begin calculating flight prices. The news that Jonathan Bailey and Ariana Grande will reunite onstage in Sunday in the Park with George at London’s Barbican in the summer of 2027 is very much the latter. As a lifelong Sondheim obsessive and a critic who has chased this particular musical across cities, countries, and decades, this revival already feels less like a possibility and more like an inevitability I need to plan around.

Jonathan Bailey and Ariana Grande to Star in Sunday in the Park With George in London

Bailey, whose emotionally exposed Jamie in Marianne Elliott’s revelatory gender-swapped Company remains one of the great West End performances of the last decade, will take on Georges. Grande, returning to the stage as Dot after their shared cinematic stint in “Wicked“, feels like inspired casting: a performer whose vocal precision and emotional clarity could illuminate Dot’s aching need to be seen and chosen. With Elliott (NT/Broadway’s Angels in America) directing and Tom Scutt (Bridge’s Into the Woods) designing, this revival promises both intellectual rigor and emotional immediacy, a combination Sunday demands but rarely receives in equal measure.

For those of us who carry this show not just in our memory but in our nervous system, the idea of Sunday in the Park with George returning to London, and with artists of this caliber, feels momentous. This is not nostalgia casting. It’s a reminder that Sondheim and Lapine’s most personal work continues to speak urgently to artists and audiences navigating love, ambition, isolation, and the terrible beauty of devotion to one’s work. If this production delivers even a fraction of what its creative team suggests, then yes: summer 2027 just became a theatre pilgrimage.

A Brief (and Personal) History of Sunday in the Park with George

Inspired by Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, Sunday in the Park with George began life at Playwrights Horizons in 1983, famously unfinished, daring audiences to watch a masterpiece assemble itself in real time. When it transferred to Broadway in 1984, starring Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters, it announced itself not as a conventional musical but as a meditation on art, on love, and on the painful necessity of focus at the cost of emotional withdrawal.

The piece won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, making it one of only a handful of musicals ever to do so, and cemented its place as Sondheim’s most intimate self-portrait. Act One fictionalizes Seurat’s obsessive creation of the painting; Act Two leaps forward a century to interrogate legacy, commerce, and whether art can still connect in a louder, faster world. The refrain “Connect, George” remains one of the most quietly devastating imperatives ever set to music.

Over the years, Sunday has proven remarkably resilient, revealing new meanings with each revival. The Menier Chocolate Factory production that transferred to Wyndham’s Theatre in 2006 — starring Daniel Evans and Jenna Russell — remains, for many (myself included), a near-perfect realization of the piece. That production’s emotional clarity, modern design, and Russell’s shattering Dot demonstrated how profoundly the musical can land when its intimacy is honored rather than intellectualized.

The 2017 Broadway revival starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford reaffirmed the show’s relevance for a new generation, proving that Sunday is not a museum piece but a living work that speaks powerfully to contemporary anxieties about art, attention, and connection. At its core, it remains a story about the anxiety and necessity of making something meaningful, and the people we risk losing in the process.

That’s why this 2027 London revival matters. Sunday in the Park with George doesn’t just reward star casting; it demands artists willing to expose themselves inside its silences, its repetitions, and its aching unresolved questions. With Bailey, Grande, and Elliott at the helm, this production has the potential not just to revive the musical, but to reintroduce it, once again, as one of the great, necessary works of modern theatre.

And yes. I will absolutely be there.