"So much love in his words...forever with his colors...how George looks...he
can look forever..."
(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.
The Musical
The love story in the musical arcs through two acts and 100 years. In the
opening seconds of the show, as artist George Seurat sketches "Dot," the woman in
the forefront of the painting, she pleads with him to notice
"there's someone
in this dress." She is determined to "get through" to
the artist. But during Act One, she comes to recognize that she cannot have his full attention. He sings why in a reflection about himself,
... however you live,
There's a part of you always standing by,
Mapping out a sky,
Finishing a hat...
-(Sondheim, "Finishing the Hat")
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:
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 Collaboration
James Lapine reflects in his book that the two years spent creating
Sunday in the Park with George "changed my life, and I would venture to
say it changed Sondheim's as well." No doubt about that: Sondheim's memoir,
part I, ends at a lowpoint in his career, but he adds, "Then I met James
Lapine."
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.
The Art of Making Art
The love stories in both musical and book are buttressed by dozens of
thumbnail portraits of characters whose lives go into the making of the
artworks.
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 afraid
George sees the park
George sees it dying.
George too may fade,
Leaving no mark,
.Just passing through.
("Lesson #8")
Lapine 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.
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."
Art, Love, and Death
Lapine and Sondheim both have discovered new things in what they themselves
wrote. They have heard their own words come back to them in times of
discouragement:
Anything you do
Let it come from you
Then it will be new.
Give us more to see.
("Move On")
Lapine says it's a letter to them from their younger selves (127).
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
Sundays
Disappearing
All the time,
When things were beautiful.
The 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
Changing,
As we sit here--
Quick, draw it all,
Georgie!
("Beautiful")
"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."
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
