PUTTING IT TOGETHER

Conversations with the creators of a landmark American musical.

Lapine was “an accident of the theater,” an Ohio native whose first Broadway experience was the time when, at age 11, his parents took him to Bye Bye Birdie and he clumsily thrust his souvenir program at star Dick Van Dyke and gave him a paper cut on the nose. He had intended to pursue a career in photography, but he became an off-Broadway playwright, work that attracted the interest of Stephen Sondheim. Their first collaboration, Lapine’s debut as a writer/director, was Sunday in the Park With George (1984), a musical inspired by Georges Seurat’s pointillist painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. This delightful book revisits the two years they spent telling a fictionalized version of Seurat’s life. Lapine conducted conversations with around 40 people involved with the show to create “a mixed salad: one part memoir, one part oral history, one part ‘how a musical gets written and produced.’ ” Among the participants are Sondheim, stars Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters, and musical director Paul Gemignani. The result sometimes feels like a mutual admiration society, with the casting director saying Sondheim was “incredibly generous to all of us,” Lapine saying how much he learned from Peters and Patinkin, and so on. But fans will find much to love, including the complete text of Lapine’s script and Sondheim’s lyrics and reproductions of handwritten notes, sheet music, drawings of costumes, and more. A highlight is the long section in which Sondheim describes his process of composing a song. The author is refreshingly candid about his role in his actors’ frustrations—a continuation of his childhood clumsiness—as when he told cast member Brent Spiner, “You’re not a character, you’re a color,” to which Spiner replied, “Would you mind telling me what color?” As Lapine admits, “I wasn’t the most popular guy in the room.”

Art isn’t easy, as this entertaining look at the making of a cultural touchstone amply demonstrates.