The Barbican has confirmed that its planned 2027 production of Sunday in the Park with George will not go ahead as scheduled, twelve days after the producers said they were reshaping it around a new company. Empire Street Productions keeps the rights and is now looking at 2028.
The Barbican has confirmed that the planned 2027 production of Sunday in the Park with George will no longer proceed as scheduled. In a statement issued on Monday, the centre said that Empire Street Productions "will retain the rights with a view to presenting the production in 2028", and that further details would be announced in due course.
No reason was given for the change. The Barbican added that it wished to thank the Empire Street Productions team for working closely with it.
The wording matters more than it might look. This is a deferral rather than an abandonment: the rights stay with the same producer, and the stated intention is to stage the piece a year later than planned. What it does not carry is a theatre, a date or a cast.
How the production got here
The staging was announced with Ariana Grande as Dot and Marie and Jonathan Bailey as George, the painter Georges Seurat, under the direction of Marianne Elliott and with design by Tom Scutt. Grande stepped back at the beginning of August, her representative citing a break from public-facing work after the Eternal Sunshine Tour. Bailey followed on 2 September, saying he had decided to step back after much consideration.
At that point the production was still going ahead. Empire Street said it was "reshaping the production around a new company while preserving the ambition and artistic integrity" of the piece, and that it would still open in summer 2027. Twelve days later, that is no longer the plan.
What it means in practice
Few theatregoers will be out of pocket. Tickets had not gone on sale: they were due in autumn 2026, and the Barbican had said they would be available only through its own website and box office.
The Barbican Theatre now has a summer 2027 gap in its main house, and the centre has not said what will occupy it. Recasting two leads, re-securing a large-scale slot and holding a creative team together across an extra year is a considerable amount of work, which is presumably why 2028 is framed as an intention.
The piece itself
Sunday in the Park with George has music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by James Lapine. It takes Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte as its starting point, watching the painting assemble itself across the first act before jumping a century to a descendant working in a very different art world. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1985.
New casting and a revised timetable are expected to be announced in due course.
