Putting It Together
How Stephen Sondheim and I Created "Sunday in the Park with George"
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A behind-the-scenes look at the making of the iconic musical Sunday in the Park with George
Putting It Together chronicles the two-year odyssey of creating the iconic Broadway musical Sunday in the Park with George. In 1982, James Lapine, at the beginning of his career as a playwright and director, met Stephen Sondheim, nineteen years his senior and already a legendary Broadway composer and lyricist. Shortly thereafter, the two decided to write a musical inspired by Georges Seurat’s nineteenth-century painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.
Through conversations between Lapine and Sondheim, as well as most of the production team, and with a treasure trove of personal photographs, sketches, script notes, and sheet music, the two Broadway icons lift the curtain on their beloved musical. Putting It Together is a deeply personal remembrance of their collaboration and friend - ship and the highs and lows of that journey, one that resulted in the beloved Pulitzer Prize–winning classic.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The making of a Broadway hit requires pratfalls, clashing egos, and grueling artistic struggles, according to this luminous debut by the Tony Award–winning playwright and director. In a captivating oral history, Lapine revisits his experiences writing and directing Sunday in the Park with George—a musical riff on Georges Seurat's 1886 pointillist painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte—through interviews with those involved in the show's 1984 debut, including composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, leads Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters, producers, financiers, and even stage managers. These conversations explore the project from Lapine's and Sondheim's early, inchoate brainstorming sessions to desperate last-minute rewrites when preview audiences hated the second act. Along the way were innumerable design headaches—Peters required a mechanical gown that opened on its own—actorly meltdowns, and persistent bafflement at Lapine's directing techniques ("I remember saying to you, ‘I don't have a character. Where is my character?' And you said, ‘You're not a character, you're a color,' " one cast member recalls). There's plenty of entertaining backstage melodrama, but Lapine never plays it just for laughs, instead drawing out the serious devotion to craft and artistic risk-taking that fueled it. This is a fascinating 360-degree panorama of showbiz at its most intense and creative.
