Of course Stephen Sondheim wrote about the painter Georges Seurat in his 1984 musical Sunday in the Park with George. But did you know he first wrote about Seurat 16 years earlier?
In Intermediaries, his cryptic crossword for the Monday, October 21, 1968 issue of New York magazine, the clue for 20 Down is as follows:
French painter's works could make us stare (7)
The (7) indicates the number of letters in the answer. A cryptic crossword clue typically contains two different clues to the answer. One is "French painter's". In this case, the other clue is contained in the words "us stare", which is an anagram for the answer: SEURATS. (Apostrophe omitted.)
We don't know that Seurat was an especial favorite of Sondheim's, or if he had ever seen "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte" at the Art Institute of Chicago before beginning work on the musical. The idea of a musical based on the painting began when librettist James Lapine brought a postcard of it to a brainstorming session. But Seurat was already at least a distant blip on Sondheim's radar.
I think the one part of the clue is "French painter's works." In American English it is common to refer to more than one of a famous artist's works as [artist]s. I still need to download all these Sondheim puzzles. Thanks for sharing them!
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