James Lapine on Friendship with Stephen Sondheim

Today on NPR's Fresh Air, Terry Gross asked playwright James Lapine why he didn't write another show with Stephen Sondheim after Passion in 1994. "Are you still friends?" she asked. Lapine was emphatic: Yes. But the two never again found a story that interested both of them the same way. So Lapine directed a stage revue Sondheim on Sondheim and a film documentary Six by Sondheim, and now he has written a book about their first collaboration "to keep him in my life."

The book Putting it Together is on order. Amazon told me that I got one of their last three copies: sorry, everyone. [Photo: Sondheim and Lapine when their show was on Broadway. I saw that production, though not the original cast.]

Meanwhile, the interview today brought some special pleasures to light, or to light again:

• On the time Sondheim took to write his last two songs for Sunday in the Park with George while audiences were hostile: "Do you want it Tuesday, or do you want it to be good?" ("Both" Lapine remembers saying.) Researching this book, Lapine looked through Sondheim's paper work. He found pages and pages of notes that went into a very short song, "Lesson #8."
• On those two songs: "Lesson #8" crystallized the character of second-act "George"; the other, "Children and Art," was "linch-pin" for the whole show. Evidently neither man realized that until they were reviewing the show recently.
• Hearing "Lesson #8" even out of context, we could hear how the short English-textbook phrases "Charles has a ball... Marie has the ball of Charles... Charles misses his ball" morph into the character's realizations about himself: "George misses a lot... George is alone... George has outgrown what he can do"
• On watching Sondheim at work: Lapine hadn't had much contact with musical theatre and remembers being delighted by the process. Sondheim told him, "Let me take care of theme" because things that might sound preachy or corny in dialogue can sound uplifting in song.
• On Sondheim's preparations: Sondheim would present Lapine with options. "It was like being cross-examined by a lawyer," Lapine remembers, because Sondheim was trying to get at the characters who lived in Lapine's head. Eventually, the characters lived in Sondheim's head, too.
• It was a pleasure to hear again what Sondheim wrote when Lapine handed him a draft of Into the Woods with the comment, "There's no way you're going to make an opening number that pulls all of this together." Lapine laughs that the best way to get Steve to do something is to tell him that he won't be able to do it. We also hear the song "Loving You" that saved Passion by opening up the rebarbative character "Fosca" to the audience.

Advance reviews of Lapine's book include Lin-Manuel Miranda's writing that he didn't read the book; he inhaled it. I anticipate something like that.

Read my reflection on Lapine's book. I call it So Much Love in Their Words (09/2021).

See my Stephen Sondheim page, a curated list of links to many, many articles about Sondheim, his themes and craft, his collaborators and comrades, and his shows, including these posts about Sunday:

Sunday, Art, and "Forever" (11/2015) theorizes why so many people find themselves crying midway through Sunday in the Park with George.

The show is key to what I see as Sondheim's Religious Vision (11/2017).

With my fellow arts teachers' thoughtful Sunday-themed retirement gift, the show spoke to me in a new way: Children and Art: Sunday in Retirement with George (05/2021).