Seurat is long dead at the beginning of act 2. His great-
grandson is there instead. The new George cannot get his mod-
ernistic light sculpture to work, relates badly to the New York
art scene, has been through a divorce, and is uncertain about
the direction of his career. Omniscience is hardly the issue.
Then he visits the site of his great-grandfather’s famous paint-
ing, encounters the Ghost of Dot, and together they sing a cli-
mactic duet, “Move On.”
“Move On” is climactic because it takes elements left hang-
ing from songs in act 1 and composes them into a finished song,
an outsized AABA number. It is an example of the drama of the
uncompleted song that we discussed in chapter 5, but in this
case the number is not diegetic. “Move On” arises from out of
the blue, but it recombines segments from earlier out-of-the
blue songs—“Sunday in the Park,” “Color and Light,” and
“We Do Not Belong Together.”^17 The book does not concern
characters who are trying to remember old tunes or perfect
dance routines. The book is about completing artistic designs.
Seurat completes his Grande Jattepainting at the end of act 1.
Sondheim completes the song “Move On” in act 2. What the
lyric of “Move On” says is trite: an artist has to move on. The
power of the number lies in its completion and in its doubling
of the theme of artistic completion.
At the end of act 2, after the duet, George repeats his great-
grandfather’s words: Order, Design, Tension....On each word
the orchestra plays the chord from act 1. It is an uncanny mo-
ment. The modern buildings that surround La Grande Jatte lift
away, revealing the island rather as it was in act 1. If George had
this power to dismiss the buildings, he would be omniscient and
no one would pay much heed. With the power coming from
the orchestra’s chords, one knows that something appropriate is
happening. It is actually a scenic effect from West Side Storybe-
ing repeated (the tenements lift away at the beginning of the
“Somewhere” dream-ballet). The theatre is quoting its own
NARRATION AND TECHNOLOGY 163
(^17) Banfield covers this point thoroughly in Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals,
pp. 375–79. Sondheim himself discussed “Move On” as the completion of ear-
lier elements. See Zadan, Sondheim & Co., pp. 301–2, and Horowitz, Sondheim
on Music, pp. 93–98.