The 2011-12 season at the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis opened in an artist's studio with "Red," John Logan's drama about abstract expressionist Mark Rothko. Its latest production, "Sunday in the Park with George," returns to the art world with a musical portrait of one of Rothko's antecedents, the pointillist master Georges Seurat.

In the course of the evening, we'll spend some time in Seurat's studio, too. But the play's ravishing opening moments find us on an island in the Seine 128 years ago, the place where a brilliant young painter is making sketches for what will be his triumph: "A Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte."

By the time he completes that painting at the end of Act One, you may find yourself crying. But they're the good kind of tears, tears that come when the artifice of theater resolves itself into solitary world — in this case, a world of transcendent beauty.

Savor that moment. Later on, you'll have plenty of time to distinguish among its components. When Seurat invented a new kind of painting that depended on the viewer to make connections — to perceive colors he didn't actually paint, colors that emerge from the juxtaposition of tiny dots of pigment — he was doing something similar to the work that theater artists do all the time. Their art doesn't exist without an audience, either.

Maybe that's why Stephen Sondheim, who wrote the words and lyrics, and James Lapine, who wrote the book, were drawn to Seurat in the first place. With this production of their musical (which won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for drama), director Rob Ruggiero brings together many single "dots" of theater art to play off each other and create a breathtaking whole.

With a set of floating pieces by Adrian W. Jones, elegant costumes by Alejo Vietti and tender lighting by John Lasiter, the play evokes the airy, sun-and-shade ambience of "Sunday Afternoon."

If you've ever had a chance to see the real painting at the Art Institute of Chicago, you know how you long to step into it. The actors in Ruggiero's production get that chance — and we, in the audience, come awfully close.

Conductor F. Wade Russo and the musicians, tucked unseen off stage right, have a similarly direct style. Sometimes you almost seem to hear each note by itself, a kind of aural pointillism. Sondheim's score can stun you with its elegance and fire; Ruggiero serves it well with performers who lavish regard on each note and syllable.

"Sunday in the Park with George" has a large cast, led by the spirited Ron Bohmer and Erin Davie. In the first act, Bohmer plays Seurat; in the second, he plays his (fictional) great-grandson George, a modern New York artist struggling to articulate his own vision. Davie plays Seurat's girlfriend, a model called Dot, and an old woman named Marie, daughter of Dot and Seurat.

Together, they deliver emotionally dense renditions of "We Do Not Belong Together" and "Move On," songs that express the characters' deepest longings. Davie also shines in "Children and Art," an eloquent song that's as close to an anthem as Sondheim comes (not that close).

Like Davie and Bohmer, the other actors also take double roles, 19th-century and modern. First, they play the people who will be portrayed in the painting, then New York art scene denizens. There are particularly nice touches from Zoe Vonder Haar as a dowager and an art critic, Deanne Lorette as an affluent matron and an avant-garde composer, and Steve French as a boatman and an engineer.

The actors must have a great time performing a piece that asks so much of them — and this show is just as generous with its audience. Because it is so big and so demanding, "Sunday in the Park with George" isn't staged often. Don't miss this opportunity to relish it.

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'Sunday in the Park with George'

Who Repertory Theatre of St. Louis • When Through Jan. 29 • Where Browning Mainstage, Loretto-Hilton Center, 130 Edgar Road • How much $19-$77 • More info 314-968-4925; repstl.org