scenic effects, and as the figures of the Seurat painting return to
the stage, standing in different places this time, a sort of visual
quotation of the act 1 ending is taking place, and this is also a
visual quotation of Sondheim’s earlier West Side Story.
The orchestra’s omniscience is at work, but the quotations
come with residues of difference. There is grief and beauty in
this ending. Completing a design puts loss into the accom-
plishment. The figures in the painting stand differently now,
and the composition does not exactly take shape. The figures
in the painting are singing the gorgeous “Sunday” music with
which act 1 concluded—music can be restored, but not the rest.
Dot is, after all, dead. The figures in the painting depart.
George is left alone with the blank canvas his great-grandfather
had at the very beginning of the musical: “White. A blank page
or canvas. His favorite. So many possibilities.”
These are almost the words his great-grandfather spoke in
front of the blank canvas at the beginning. The young George
is reading Dot’s version of his great-grandfather’s words. She
wrote them into her lesson book, and she did not get them ex-
actly right. Seurat earlier said, “The challenge: Bring order to
the whole.” Dot’s book reads, “So many possibilities.” The first
points to the completion of the painting. That is act 1. The sec-
ond points to the need to step free from that completion, the
need to find a valid form of repetition, the musical form. “Move
on.” That is act 2.^18
The Phantom and the Demon Barber: A Contrast
The source acquiesces to the book-and-number format of the
musical. The book-and-number format puts the performers
into an area of fallibility, where their characters take on musi-
cal dimensions. They seem like additional selves, these singing
and dancing characters, bringing the source to life in lyric ways
before going back to the give-and-take dialectic of the book
164 CHAPTER SEVEN
(^18) For additional explanations of what needs to be accomplished in act 2, see
Scott Miller, Deconstructing Harold Hill, pp. 153–89.