Putting It Together: How Stephen Sondheim and I Created “Sunday in the Park with George” by James Lapine

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 416 pp.

By Janice C. Simpson

They were an odd couple.  At 52, Stephen Sondheim was a celebrated master of the Broadway musical, having written the lyrics for West Side Story and Gypsy and the complete scores for such trailblazing shows as Company, Follies and Sweeney Todd, winning a half dozen Tony Awards along the way. James Lapine, 33, was a relative newcomer to the theater world whose reputation rested on just three small off-Broadway shows, only one of them a musical.

But in 1982, Sondheim and Lapine joined forces to create Sunday in the Park with George, a musical centered around the post-Impressionist painter Georges Seurat. The show, a paean to the agonies and ecstasies of making a work of art, would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.  Putting It Together: How Stephen Sondheim and I Created Sunday in the Park with George is Lapine’s intimate account of how it all happened. 

Sunday’s origin story has been told many times before in the dozens of books written about Sondheim and even in the composer’s own annotated collection of lyric’s Look, I Made a Hat, which borrows its title from a lyric in Sunday. But as he’s done with so many shows over the past four decades, Lapine, who borrows another Sunday lyric for his title, takes an innovative approach that is in his words, “a mixed salad: one part memoir, one part oral history, one part ‘how a musical gets written and produced.’” All of it is delicious.

Lapine was still finding his way in the theater world when he met Sondheim and his reminiscences paint a vivid portrait of the artist as a young man, equal parts cocky and insecure. Readers of theatrical histories and biographies are sure to see a similarity between this book and Act One, the writer and director Moss Hart’s much beloved memoir about the early days of his partnership with George S. Kaufman. Clearly a fan of that book himself, Lapine adapted it into a play with music that had a short run in 2014.

Unlike Hart, however, who had always dreamed of a life in the theater, Lapine stumbled into his career. He originally intended to be a photographer and entered the theater world through a side door when he got hired to design posters for the Yale School of Drama. When some of the students there urged him to try his hand at a production, he adapted a minimalist poem by Gertrude Stein called Photograph because he thought it might play to his visual strengths. The resulting production, which showcased various interpretations of the themes in Stein’s poem, played so well that it moved to New York where Lapine won an Obie citation for his direction.

Two shows later, a producing friend set up a meeting between Lapine and Sondheim, who was licking his wounds over the failure of his musical Merrily We Roll Along.  It had closed after just 16 performances and left him soured on Broadway, questioning his future in the theater and looking for a way to rekindle his passion for it.

After sharing a joint at their first meeting in Sondheim’s East Side townhouse, Sondheim confided that he’d always wanted to do a theme-and-variation show. The next time they met, Lapine, still visually oriented, brought along some images to inspire their conversation.

They quickly zeroed in on Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, a group portrait of an assortment of 19th century Parisians in a local park on their day off that now hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago. When Lapine commented that the main character missing from the picture was the artist, they knew they had their show. The first act was devoted to Seurat’s creation of the painting (it ends with a glorious tableau vivant of it); the still-controversial second act, which moved to the present and introduced a fictional grandson artist, served as a variation on the themes the first had set.

But Lapine doesn’t depend solely on his memory to tell this version of how the show came together. He interviewed some 40 people who were involved in the production and most of the book consists of extended excerpts from those conversations he had with everyone from the rehearsal pianist to Sondheim himself. Their combined recollections give the book the feel of a reunion of soldiers still amazed at having gone through a battle together and grateful for having survived.

Lapine also raided both his archives and Sondheim’s to fill the book with mementos from the two years in which Sunday was workshopped at the off-Broadway company Playwrights Horizons and then moved to Broadway. There are photos; reproductions of handwritten lists of the thoughts and rhymes Sondheim used as he composed his songs, and some daily performance notes that Lapine sent to the show’s temperamental star Mandy Patinkin when the two realized that was the more productive way for them to communicate. The final third of the book reprints the full script but, alas, the lyrics bleed into the dialogue so it’s hard to tell where the show’s 16 songs begin and end.

Still, readers who are in show business, those hoping to get into the business or those who just love knowing how the musical sausage gets made may most appreciate the bit-by-bit details of the development of the show, which its producers scheduled to open on Broadway before the second act was written because they were so eager to cash in on the Sondheim name. 

Lapine’s relative lack of experience upped the degree of difficulty in making that move. The actor Kelsey Grammer, who left before the move to Broadway but would later gain fame in the TV shows Cheers and Frasier, challenged Lapine openly at one rehearsal. “We were having a note session with the company,” Grammar recalls. “And you said to me something like: ‘You fucked up that entrance again,’ and I thought, How dare you! And I barked at you something like, ‘Don’t ever talk to an actor like that again.’”

Others, who had far more Broadway experience than Lapine, resented the basic theater games he insisted the cast play during rehearsals. “It wasn’t that we didn’t like the show,” another cast member told Lapine. “Some of us just didn’t like you.” Looking back now, Lapine laments his youthful callowness. “I knew how I wanted the show to look and feel; I just didn’t have the craft to articulate that to others,” he writes.

There were outside obstacles too. The composer Richard Rodger’s widow Dorothy, then head of the New York State Council on the Arts, didn’t like the idea of a nonprofit theater working on a commercial musical and tried to block the funding Playwrights Horizons needed for Sunday’s workshop. Edward Kleban, best known as the lyricist for A Chorus Line, claimed that Lapine had plagiarized the idea for a show that he was working on and threatened to sue. Meanwhile lawyers and agents bickered over contracts.

It also didn’t help that Sondheim had trouble composing the final songs for the show. So many audience members walked out during the unfinished second act at one preview performance that one of the producers got out of his seat and held the door open so that it wouldn’t continually bang as they left. Stagehands, calling the show “Sunday in the Dark and Bored,” took bets on how soon it would close after opening night.    

But finally, on the day before critics arrived, Sondheim delivered the missing songs (Children and Art and Lesson #8) that underscored the show’s message about the sacrifices artists make and tied the two acts together. Reviews were mixed but a semi-rave from The New York Times (“Even when it fails - as it does on occasion - Sunday in the Park is setting the stage for even more sustained theatrical innovations yet to

come”) kept the show running for over a year. And the creators had the last word when Sunday won the Pulitzer, becoming only the sixth musical to achieve that honor, a testament, as is this delightful book, to the power of making art.

Janice C. Simpson is a theater journalist who writes the blog Broadway & Me and hosts the BroadwayRadio podcast All the Drama, about the plays and musicals that have won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.