Pop superstar Ariana Grande and Bridgerton actor Jonathan Bailey are headed to the London stage together. The pair will star in a new West End revival of Stephen Sondheim’s classic musical Sunday in the Park With George at the Barbican Centre, slated for summer 2027. This casting is a high-profile reunion: Grande and Bailey became friends playing Glinda and Fiyero in the upcoming Wicked film adaptations, and now they’ll tackle the beloved Sondheim roles of Dot and artist Georges Seurat. Renowned director Marianne Elliott – who guided Bailey to an Olivier Award in her 2018 revival of Company – will helm the production, with Tony-winning designer Tom Scutt on board to reimagine the show’s visual world.
The project had been rumored for months following buzz around the Wicked movies, and Grande’s fans are thrilled to see her return to live theater. She hasn’t performed in a musical since she was a teenage Broadway hopeful in 2008’s 13. The duo confirmed the news on Instagram by sharing a photo together and cheekily captioning it, “All it has to be is good,” a lyric from the musical’s opening number.
Sunday in the Park With George is a Pulitzer-winning piece that explores the life of painter Georges Seurat and the sacrifices of the creative process. A planned 2020 London run starring Jake Gyllenhaal was canceled by the pandemic, so this will mark the show’s first return to the UK stage in over a decade. With two pop-culture heavyweights in the lead and a Tony-winning creative team at the helm, expectations are sky-high that this revival will indeed be more than “good” when it opens in 2027.
