(lines written by James Lapine, spoken during the reprise of Stephen Sondheim's song "Sunday" at the end of their musical play Sunday in the Park with George)
The distinguished Broadway musical Sunday in the Park with George wraps a love story in a lively conversation about art -- how we make it, why it matters.
So does James Lapine's memoir of that musical's creation, Putting it Together: How Stephen Sondheim and I Created Sunday in the Park with George (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021). The starting place for both love stories is George Seurat's pointillist painting A Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte - 1884.
Clockwise from top: Act One finale, 1984; Sondheim and Lapine on set, 1984; Sondheim studies La Grande Jatte, photo by Lapine.
... however you live,Dot, carrying George's child, finds another man "simple and kind" who "makes a connection." With him, she immigrates to America, leaving Seurat with these words:
There's a part of you always standing by,
Mapping out a sky,
Finishing a hat...
-(Sondheim, "Finishing the Hat")
You have a mission,
A mission to see.
Now I have one, too, George.
And we should have belonged together.I have to move on.
("We Do Not Belong Together")
In Act Two, another artist named George, descendant of Seurat and Dot, revisits the island of La Grand Jatte. He had planned to bring along his grandmother Marie, the baby in the painting, to celebrate the painting's centennial with a new art installation. But Marie has died, the island is encrusted with buildings and pavement, and he's having doubts about his own work.
As he reads the notes that Dot wrote in her English primer, she appears to him in person. As if he were his ancestor Seurat, she thanks him for what he taught her about being "in the moment," not to worry over past or future -- a lesson that the modern George needs to hear. For his part, George sees in her "Things I hadn't looked at / Till now," her smile, "the way you catch the light," the "care / and the feeling." Now George and Dot sing in unison, "We have always belonged together." Dot inspires him to "stop worrying if your vision is new" and "move on."
The two men were unsuited to each other like characters who "meet cute" in a rom-com.
Lapine, barely in his 30s, straight, with "commitment issues," was an out-of-work teacher of fashion design with a couple of writing-directing credits at an off-Broadway workshop for experimental drama. Sondheim, 52 and gay, was a multi-Tony-winner and "Broadway's Music Man" (Newsweek) but suffering the end of his fruitful collaboration with director Hal Prince after their show Merrily We Roll Along flopped in 1981.
When a common friend arranged for a meeting, Lapine didn't know any of Sondheim's work except for the 1979 masterpiece Sweeney Todd. Blocked by a nuclear protest, Lapine barged through the crowds to arrive at Sondheim's town home just on time. Sondheim put him at ease by offering a joint.
"I loved that you did that," Lapine says to Sondheim in the book. The transcripts of Lapine's reminiscences with Sondheim glow with many moments when the two collaborators express feelings they'd kept private at the time.
For example, Sondheim reveals that it was Lapine's play Twelve Dreams that kept him from quitting theatre altogether. Sickened by the glee that greeted the failure of Merrily in "so-called Broadway circles" (17), he wanted nothing more than to create video games. But Lapine's play inspired him. "Really? I didn't know that," says Lapine in his interview.
Then Sondheim describes the moment that began their long working relationship. Over several meetings, they'd not found a subject of sufficient interest to both of them. Then Lapine laid down a postcard printed with Seurat's Sunday on La Grande Jatte, and the two found possibilities. It looked to them like a stage set; all the characters seem to avoid looking at each other. Then Lapine observed that "the main character is missing" -- the artist. Sondheim says, "Boing! All the lights went on" (23).
As in any good romantic comedy, there were doubts, more than either man knew at the time. Reading Lapine's first drafts, Sondheim felt superfluous. "This will make you blush," Sondheim tells Lapine, "but you are -- a poet" and Sondheim feared that any song by him would be "intrusive" (35). At the same time, Lapine felt that Sondheim always had "one foot out the door." Sondheim says,
I never detected any of that. ...Not only did I enjoy your company, but also I thought everything you were showing me was fun and good and stimulating. (35)Sondheim's procrastination made it a pretty one-sided collaboration until the day when Sondheim seated Lapine beside him on the piano bench to turn pages while he sang the opening number. Lapine admits, "This is going to sound odd... Suddenly, we were shoulder to shoulder... It was a kind of an emotional moment for me." Sondheim was so nervous that he "attacked" the keys and oversang. He had to do it twice before Lapine "got it," and even then, Lapine apologizes now, "I'm not effusive" (44).
Their trust grew through re-writes, rehearsals, and preview performances when the audience sometimes responded badly. "Out of the blue," Lapine recalls, Sondheim said to him, "I want to write my next show with you." Lapine writes, "I had never felt that kind of trust coming at me." He reflects that his "commitment issues" vanished forever (121).
In an interview about this book, Terri Gross asked Lapine why he never wrote another show with Sondheim after Sunday, Into the Woods and Passion. "Are you still friends?" she asked. "Yes!" Lapine said, though they never found another topic that interested both of them. Lapine worked with Sondheim on a successful revision of Merrily, a stage revue Sondheim on Sondheim, and a movie mixing archival footage and new performances, Six by Sondheim. Now, he told Gross, writing this book has been another way to keep Sondheim in his life.
In the musical, Seurat sketches the other figures of the painting between his encounters with Dot. Lapine's pithy bits of dialogue bring out their salient characteristics. In musical numbers called "Gossip" and "The Day Off," Sondheim distills Lapine's characters in brief songs. Though a couple of critics say there's "no life" in Seurat's art, Sondheim has Seurat sing along with portions of each portrait, showing how the artist enters into the characters' lives. Seurat even channels two dogs in a virtuoso duet for solo voice. In act two, Lapine and Sondheim interlace dialogue and lyrics to portray a slate of new characters from the contemporary art world who surround the 1984 George.
Likewise in Lapine's book, we get to know actors, producers, and designers. We learn how much the actors helped -- and prodded -- Lapine and Sondheim to flesh out their characters. In the roles of servants, Nancy Opel and Brent Spiner (subsequently "Data" on Star Trek) introduced German accents that gave Lapine and Sondheim ideas for character development (97). Lapine borrowed personality traits for his 1984 George from the technical designer Bran Ferren who created the laser-based sculpture called "Chromolume #7" (169).
Lapine also got a lot of pushback and resentment, especially during weeks of previews for audiences that grew restless and hostile. He learned about leadership from their pushback. Actor Melanie Vaughan remembers how she, Spiner, and Opel stonewalled Lapine, staring at him blankly while he gave them notes. They were thinking, just tell us what you want (98). Lapine reflects that, as both writer and director, he was still figuring out what he wanted (98). Actor Charles Kimbrough asks Lapine in the book if the memory of all that is painful. "I'm actually somewhat in awe of my younger self. At the time, I was just trying to keep my head above water. But when I look back now, I think: Boy, I had some chutzpah!" (242)
Sondheim felt mounting pressure to fill in gaps in the dialogue where he and Lapine intended the characters to sing. Bernadette Peters complained that "Dot" "kind of disappears" in the first act, pushing Sondheim to write "Everybody Loves Louis," about leaving Seurat for the baker, a peppy song with an undercurrent of sorrow: "We lose things / and then we choose things /...George has George, / and I need someone." Mandy Patinkin, already high-strung (the backstage crew wanted to kill him (218)) was on the verge of quitting. He pleaded for a song that would explain his character. Sondheim finally delivered "Finishing the Hat." Rehearsing it, Patinkin "lit up like a flare," remembers orchestrator Michael Starobin. The song explained "why [Seurat]'s so hard on his partner and also why he's so hard on himself. The piece didn't make sense until that song came in" (120).
Everyone felt even more urgency for Sondheim to produce songs for the second act. For the book, Lapine presses Sondheim for an answer to what took so long. After all, he and Sondheim had discussed the characters, the moments, the themes; Sondheim had written page after page of notes; yet the audience and actors, too, were left to wonder why they should care about the second-act George or why "Dot" suddenly appears in 1984. What was the delay?
Sondheim finally admits that he has no answer, but it's clear that he benefitted from seeing the actors in their roles. Performing the role of "Marie," Peters spoke to Marie's grandson "George" with a South Carolina lilt that put Sondheim in mind of his favorite composer, southerner Harold Arlen, whose blues-inflected songs were "seductive...warm...yearning" (233). Sondheim wrote those qualities into a new song "Children and Art" in which Marie gently encourages her grandson to produce "the only two worthwhile things to leave behind when you depart this world: children and art" (368).
That still left a big hole in Act Two where the modern George expresses himself. Sondheim tells Lapine that he knew the contents of the missing number, but not the form, until he saw the little red book in George's hand, the primer that Dot used to learn English in the first act, a gift to modern George from his grandmother. Alone in the park, George reads from the book: "Charles has a book... Charles shows them his crayons... Marie has the ball of Charles...." George keeps the primer's simple grammar going as he muses about the lost park and his uncertain future:
George is afraidLapine tells Sondheim, "So when we finally got those last two songs in the show, Mandy said it best, it was like a magic trick" (240). Sondheim responds, "That's the miracle. ...When music is used correctly, then everything coalesces." Actor Charles Kimbrough gives the cast's perspective. They'd watched from the wings each night as the last scene fell flat.
George sees the park
George sees it dying.
George too may fade,
Leaving no mark,
.Just passing through.
("Lesson #8")
But the addition of these songs laid that carpet of feeling under the moment. When Dot entered to the music of "Lesson #8," it was clear that this George had summoned her. It was pure gold. And then they sang "Move On" and that just killed. And then when the "Sunday" reprise came around, bam! (241)Lapine and Sondheim stuck to their vision while producers and actors advised them to just extend act one with some audience-pleasing number and jettison the difficult second act. Lapine writes, "[We] had to stay true to our initial impulses and write the show we had intended, not the show these people [who walked out on the second act] had wanted to see" (127). Actors Mandy Patinkin and William Parry both remember Lapine, a very "controlled" and "internal" man, opening up and choking back tears after the last rehearsal, pleading with the cast to "trust" the show. "Believe in what we have made." And they produced something "remarkable."
Anything you doLapine says it's a letter to them from their younger selves (127).
Let it come from you
Then it will be new.
Give us more to see.
("Move On")
Those words from "Move On" speak to me as an artist, too, but the moment that has always spoken to me as a man emerges from another arc in the story. There's a through-line of statements about art that tell us all why we should care about artists doing their work.
This other arc has to do with the death of what you love.
At the start of the show, Dot says, "If you want instead / When you're dead / Some more public / And more permanent / Expression / Of affection," then you want a painter or sculptor whose work will endure "forever." Near the end of the show, 1984 George fears that his life will have been "just passing through." In between, we've heard the admonition to "leave behind" either children or art, and we've heard the anthem "Sunday" that celebrates how Seurat's painting preserves a moment "forever."
But the song "Beautiful" reaches an emotional peak that affected me deeply, from the first time I heard it to the present moment nearly 40 years later.
This quiet song follows Dot's tumultuous aria "We Do Not Belong Together." While Seurat sketches his mother, the "Old Lady" played originally by Barbara Bryne, speaks of memories that are fading. Sondheim's music for her seems to be built on sighing, while an ostinato suggests the river nearby. She sings of regret that the Eiffel Tower is being constructed "where there were trees," and she mourns
SundaysThe accompaniment changes to cascades of notes when George tells her "All things are beautiful." In the earlier song "Finishing the Hat," he had expressed the joy of seeing this world through art "like a window...the only way to see." Now he demonstrates for his mother how the tower is "a perfect tree." He promises, "You watch / While I revise the world." Suddenly, she gets it, and her song becomes urgent, as everything is
Disappearing
All the time,
When things were beautiful.
Changing,"You make it beautiful," she says, eyes closed. As this quiet song subsides, the other characters enter, their confrontations with each other at the boiling point. Seurat freezes the chaotic action to compose all the players into the tableau we all know, Seurat's "perfect park" that continues "forever."
As we sit here--
Quick, draw it all,
Georgie!
("Beautiful")
The song isn't mentioned in Lapine's book, but the 1986 edition of Craig Zadan's Sondheim and Company includes Mandy Patinkin's story of a two-hour conversation with Sondheim about "people that you love, things you'd like to say to them, ideal states of when you can communicate and when that communication can never take place again....And four days later, he came in with this conversation turned into a poem called 'Beautiful,' set to this simple, gorgeous music" (Zadan 305).
When the Old Lady says, "Quick, draw it all!" she speaks for all of us when we're suddenly reminded that people and places that we love will not last. Sunday gives us the reason to care about the making of art: it's an expression of love that distills, elevates, and preserves the object of appreciation.
As Lapine has done for that life-changing collaboration in this book.
Of Related Interest
- In Sunday, Art, and "Forever" I speculate why many people cry for the song "Sunday."
- The show is key to what I see as Sondheim's Religious Vision, with George and Dot as saints.
- 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.
- See a curated list of many, many more articles on my Sondheim page
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