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February 16, 1986, Page 002030Buy Reprints The New York Times Archives

In many ways, the production of ''Sunday in the Park With George'' that comes to Showtime Tuesday night at 8 is concerned with matters of creation and re-creation. With a score and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by James Lapine, the two-and-a-half-hour musical speculates about the creation of Georges Seurat's pointillist masterwork ''A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Grand Jatte,'' in which a cross-section of late 19th-century Parisians are depicted at irridescent leisure in a tree-shaded park.

Re-creating that tableau with actors, animals and cardboard figures, the show follows Seurat's processes of selection, placement and deletion for the painting, and conjectures about why this motley population came together on the green that day. In Act II, the show jump-cuts to the present, where an American multi-media artist named George finds himself embroiled in the fund-raising, social posturing and self-doubt that surrounds his creation of an electrified sculpture commissioned to commemorate Seurat's painting.

For the special demands of the television screen, executive producers Michael Brandman and Emanuel Azenberg also decided on a policy of re-creation. The musical's leading players - Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters - were reassembled for the taping, which took place at the Booth Theater after the show had ended its run there last October. No changes were made to its book or music.

''Our purpose was to preserve in one medium a work of art from another medium,'' said Terry Hughes, the director of the television production. ''Of course I made minor adjustments to a few actors' positions, but I suspect that not even their mothers would notice it.''

According to the director, both Mr. Sondheim and Mr. Lapine worked closely on the television project, with the former largely concerned with musical details and the latter mostly making contributions toward keeping the show within Seurat's point of view. This left expressive leeway for Mr. Hughes in his use of cameras. ''I shot the show like a movie, with hand-held cameras and many angles and crane-supported cameras that swoop and glide,'' he said. ''On a song like 'Sunday,' we pick up one couple and follow them as they move through the group and then pick up someone else.''

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More problematic were the show's several moments where the cast directly evokes the Seurat painting, filling the proscenium with a static composition. ''Television doesn't work well in situations like that, especially because the painting is totally flat,'' said Mr. Hughes. Nevertheless, between close-ups of individual players, ''we had to come back to that full shot every so often, to give a reminder of the geometry of the picture. But we made sure not to do it too frequently.''

And Mr. Hughes also believes that judicious camera work can act in the service of Mr. Sondheim's complex and literate lyrics. ''Sometimes in the theater, his words go by so fast you can't catch them all,'' he said. ''But by seeing the faces singing in close-up, it becomes much easier - and the lyrics seem all the more impressive. This is what makes up for not being part of the live experience.'' Adventure Duo

Science answers many riddles, and on ''The Edison Twins,'' a monthly series on the Disney Channel, it is used by a brother-and-sister team to solve adventure mysteries.

Each half-hour episode draws the young sleuths, Tom and Annie Edison, into a knotty mystery or gentle adventure, which the twins solve by means of a scientific principle or application. As produced by Nelvana Limited of Toronto, each program concludes with a brief, animated recap of the scientific lesson embedded in the action. Andrew Sabian and Marnie McPhail play the teen-age detectives.

For example, this week, at 4:35 P.M. today and 2:35 P.M. on Thursday, the inventive Tom and the analytic Annie discover that steroids have been added to the bird feed at the local zoo; after researching the dangers of steroids, the two use their investigative instincts to find the culprit. Other programs feature stories that pivot on the twins' building a seismograph out of a bucket and an alarm clock, or using a hologram to out-spook a ghost (actually, a man living in an abandoned house who masquerades as a ghost to keep the local officials from evicting him).

''The program was not designed for people who want to learn a lot of science, but who enjoy the little bit of science we throw into it,'' said George Vanderkuur, the science consultant for the series who is head of research at the Ontario Science Center, a Toronto museum. According to Mr. Vanderkuur, most episodes in the series were not specifically written to illustrate a scientific principle, but originated as a story to which a scientific solution was added. ''Which is as it should be,'' he said. ''That's what happens in the mind of the scientist -nature generates some kind of riddle that the scientist then tries to solve.''

Mr. Vanderkuur noted that although the series - which is syndicated in some 40 countries - is designed for 9- to 13-year-olds, it is also watched by older viewers. ''Many people feel that they live in a world of un-understandable technology - that they are being processed by a system that they can't possibly comprehend,'' he said. ''This kind of program tells you that all of these things are understandable. It tries to create a comfort with science, an acceptance of it. It sees science as a solution to some of our problems, rather than as something to fear.'' Nigerian Music

Over the last several centuries, musical evolution in Nigeria has been distinctly circular. West African drums and percussion techniques crossed the Atlantic in slave ships, influenced the rhythms of American popular music, and eventually returned to their homeland in stylized and refracted forms. In ''Konkombe,'' the British director Jeremy Marre studies the modern variations of this circuit, from the streets and recording studios of Lagos to Nigeria's northern desert to its eastern forests, with a particular eye on the music's social and political significance and its re-assimilation by pop players around the world. The hourlong documentary will be shown tomorrow night at 8 on WNYC-TV, which feeds into Channel 3 in Manhattan and is carried by some 60 suburban systems.

In the Saharan north of Nigeria, for example, ritual boxing matches are fought to the thunderous accompaniment of Nigerian talking drums; elsewhere, West African ''griots'' -elaborately dressed minstrels -carry local news between villages while playing bamboo flutes and hollowed-out gourds. Nigeria's leading female performers, the Lijadu Sisters, sing and speak about the sexism that exists in Nigerian society, while Nigeria's best-known musical export, Sunny Ade, leads his colorful, choreographed ensemble through songs of praise to a local ruler. Channel Hopping

The Australian actress Zoe Caldwell stars as the shrewd, spirited and eccentric Sarah Bernhardt in ''Sarah,'' a two-hour production by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that comes to Arts and Entertainment Tuesday night at 9. This biographical drama traces the renowned actress of the belle epoque from her beginnings at the Comedie Francais through her triumphs in Europe and America, her struggles with other actors and her work in early films . . . . ''Ray Bradbury Theater,'' HBO's series of adaptations by the science-fiction and fantasy writer of his own short stories, begins its second season Saturday at 8 with three newly transcribed half-hour tales that will subsequently enter HBO's schedule individually. Jeff Goldblum stars as a frustrated urban writer with visions of small-town life, followed by Drew Barrymore as a 10-year-old who chances upon foul play. Concluding is Peter O'Toole as an idiosyncratic film director.

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