Putting It Together: How Stephen Sondheim and I Created “Sunday in the Park With George“
by James Lapine
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021

On July 6, 1983, the musical Sunday in the Park With George opened at Playwrights Horizons, a tiny not-for-profit theater on a seedy stretch of New York City’s West 42nd Street. Still thriving today in a much more commodious setting (but still on the same stretch of the same street, but now less seedy), Playwrights began in the early ‘70s as a safe zone for young theater writers, many of whom went on to impressive careers: Wendy Wasserstein, Alfred Uhry, Kenneth Lonergan, Christopher Durang, Annie Baker, A.R. Gurney. Seven Pulitzer Prizes for Drama have been awarded to plays that debuted there, including 2020’s A Strange Loop.

But on that July night, anticipation was high, if guarded, for Sunday. Reason for optimism: music and lyrics were from Stephen Sondheim, then and now the reigning master of the American Musical Theater, who with his producer/director collaborator Harold Prince transformed the art form from its Golden Age (see Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Lowe, et. al.) to one of increased complexity, depth, and maturity. Company, Follies, Pacific Overtures, Sweeney Todd, A Little Night Music were each unique, audacious representations of the genre, each an historic achievement—even if none of them rose to the Chorus Line/Annie/ Cats commercial stratosphere.

However. This time Sondheim was competing with his recent past. His previous collaboration with Prince, 1981’s Merrily We Roll Along, was an embarrassing flop, lasting only two weeks on Broadway and fracturing the duo’s professional relationship for years to come. And though Sondheim’s score to Merrily would over the years be considered one of his best, the show’s failure left him bitter and demoralized and convinced he might never be motivated to write another musical.

When he did choose another collaborator, eyebrows were raised. James Lapine, then 33, had virtually stumbled into the theater from the worlds of photography and graphic design. While teaching at Yale, he began to write and direct plays; two made their way to off-Broadway productions that piqued Sondheim’s admiration. Lapine had made his musical theater debut by directing the well-regarded March of the Falsettos, but he had never written a libretto and had seen only one of Sondheim’s works, Sweeney Todd.

Nonetheless, a mutual friend intuited a kinship and introduced them. As they met to share ideas, Lapine, ever the visual artist, brought photos and other random images to the table to spur their collective imagination. This, for Sondheim, then 52, was a new—and not altogether comfortable—way of working.  As he says in Putting It Together, Lapine’s absorbing new memoir/oral history of Sunday in the Park’s creation, “This guy is so avant garde. . . the idea of coming in with a lot of disparate photographs and throwing them on the floor and saying, ‘Does any of this strike your fancy?’ I thought, I’m the wrong generation for this guy.”

But what finally captured their mutual interest was a postcard from the Art Institute of Chicago depicting one of its greatest treasures: “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” the pointillist 19th-century masterpiece by Georges Seurat. Sondheim immediately saw the painting’s resemblance to a stage set and wondered why none of the people were looking at one another. For Lapine, the person conspicuously absent was the artist. Sondheim: “Boing! The lights went on. That was the beginning of the race—a great moment.”

That race—starting from that day in 1982 to May 2, 1984, when their creation opened on Broadway for 604 performances, winning its own Pultizer along the way—is thoroughly and entertainingly chronicled in Lapine’s book. Through interviews with dozens of its creative team—from producers and designers to actors and stagehands—he presents an invaluable historical document, remarkable in its detail considering the lapse in time of nearly four decades. Some crucial moments, such as the day when Sondheim was ordered out of the theater by Lapine during a rehearsal, are lost to time. Some transgression was committed by the composer, but neither men can recall exactly what. And yet Sondheim does recall that he was served cheese the first time they met at Lapine’s apartment. Ah, memory.

Backstage sagas are always irresistible to theater fans, and this one had more than its share of twists and turns: a rocky workshop period at Playwrights, with conflicts between Sondheim’s Broadway savvy and Lapine’s looser, experimental style; the bewilderment of cast members often confused by the material and the resentment from those whose roles were shrinking; the will they/won’t they commit question of the mighty Shubert Organization, who held all of the power (read: money) to bring the final version to Broadway. There were frequent audience walkouts along the way and some overt hostility toward the show from those who found it dull, confusing, or both.

(No one does schadenfreude like Broadway. When the community smells blood from a show that seems doomed, wicked tags take root; fetishizing failure becomes a hobby. The flop Dance a Little Closer became “Close a Little Faster”; Ethel Merman’s revisit to one of her greatest hits, playing a teenage Annie Oakley at the age of 58 was, of course, Granny Get Your Gun; a stage version of the great film The Red Shoes went through so many cast members and creative folk that it was dubbed “The Pink Slips.” So “Sunday in the Dark and Bored” became the unofficial title among the chatterati, and this predated social media by decades.)

And then there was Act Two. For quite a long time in the process, there simply wasn’t one. Lapine and Sondheim’s answer to “Where is the artist?” was to place George squarely as the focus of the musical. Because very little is known about the historical Seurat, who died at the age of 32 without selling a single painting, they had free rein to create their own George, making him an obsessive, selfish, driven genius, loved by his mistress Dot (!) but coldly indifferent to her needs. Surrounding them on the island are various Parisians—a boatman, a baker, shop girls, an American couple, soldiers, a nurse, even his mother—all of whom have reasons to be there on “an ordinary Sunday,” but most, as drawn by Lapine, hid secrets and resentments and bitterness.

Act One ends with Seurat using his vision to make sense of the confusion by placing the characters onstage as he memorialized them in the painting. As accompanied by the hymn-like “Sunday,” the characters become the painting in a breathtaking coup de théâtre.

I was lucky enough to see one of the first performances. (Was it the first? Perhaps, but I can’t be sure. As I said, memory.) Early on, Sondheim appeared before the show to explain that Act 2 had yet to be written and begged our indulgence. We were happy to offer it, grateful for the unforgettable performances by not-yet-but-on-the-brink-of-Broadway-royalty-status Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters. We witnessed sheer alchemy from the show’s creative team—sets, costumes, lighting, orchestrations. And we were transfixed by Sondheim’s score, inchoate though it was, that already included a handful of his best songs. And, oh, the bragging rights to be among the anointed few!

It would be nearly a year before Sunday reached its first Broadway performance, and in Lapine’s narrative hands, the journey is suspenseful. Producers were uneasy, the cast often befuddled by what they were performing, some saw their roles shrinking, and Act Two—focusing on Seurat’s great-grandson, a multimedia artist beset by creative stasis and commercial pressures, who travels to La Grande Jatte to seek inspiration—was unfunny and clumsy. (Some will say it still is.) Sondheim—often a slowpoke when writing new material—failed to finish two crucial songs until the third week of previews. Even then, many audiences weren’t buying the show; hecklers and walkouts were common. Lapine writes that during certain performances he might have been trampled had he been standing in the aisle. (And they were almost absent a leading man. Patinkin’s assholery—temper tantrums, infantile behavior, followed by tearful apologies—pissed off cast and backstage crew, some of whom had to be restrained from dropping something heavy on his head. But the powerful intensity of his performance, which for me has never been matched, saved him from concussion.)

Reviews were mixed-to-positive, with the all-important Frank Rich of The New York Times writing a near-rave. Yet, as Rich notes in his collected theater writing, he was drawn again and again to the show, each time admiring it more. His follow-up pieces, plus an extensive profile by Michiko Kakutani, helped to buoy the box office (and earned accusations from other producers that The Times editors were unfairly shilling for the show).

Lapine is an easygoing, self-effacing, candid narrator, aware that as he went through the responsibilities of both librettist and director he was treated with skepticism by the cast for his off-Broadway roots and lack of experience. But he went on to write and direct many musicals, including two with Sondheim: Into the Woods (the composer’s most frequently produced work) and Passion, whose value can still cause (polite) barroom brawls in certain elite watering holes.

As for Sondheim, he proves, as he does in his two-volume Collected Lyrics, that he is wonderfully articulate and direct about his craft relating not only his indebtedness to Debussy, Ravel, and Harold Arlen, but how pointillism, Seurat’s glory on the canvas, informed his music and lyrics.

Sunday will always be caviar to the general. As a pensive meditation on creativity (Sondheim has dubbed it his and Lapine’s “attitude toward art and artists and the difficulty of living”), it will never supplant more boisterous or sentimental works in the hearts of most theatergoers. Witness that year’s Tony Awards ceremony, when Sunday, which had garnered the most nominations, was trounced in all the major categories by La Cage Aux Folles, a slick, splashy tale of two gay lovers running a drag night club. Colorful, loud, and infectiously tuneful in the ”I-left-the-theater humming the songs” tradition, it also smartly caught the wave of flourishing gay pride  (“I Am What I Am” is its then-bold anthem) at a time when HIV/AIDS had already taken a horrific toll on the Broadway community, with an end nowhere in sight. Old-fashioned it was, but also in its own way groundbreaking.

History, however, so far favors Sunday’s primacy; its two major Broadway revivals have cemented its aesthetic power, while La Cage, in its recent incarnations, has proven a sturdy entertainment, but quaint. Gay pride in American society has become solid political muscle, and the giggling titillation supplied by men dressing as women has given way to serious discussions of gender identity.

Would that there were similar books chronicling “the making of” other theatrical milestones. (Highly recommended is The World Only Spins Forward, an oral history of the creation of Angels in America). So Putting It Together deserves our gratitude.  As a bonus, the oversized tome is handsomely designed, chock full of color and black-and-white photos, designers’ sketches, Sondheim’s and Lapine’s notes, and even samples of Seurat’s other work.

And at the very end, happy surprise, the entire text of the musical, dialogue and lyrics. Sing along with Seurat, anyone?

Michael Adams is a writer and editor living in New York City. He holds a PhD from Northwestern University in Performance Studies.