Sunday in the Trenches With George

As someone then working in a menial capacity on musicals, I was lucky enough to see the original production of James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park With George” several times: once during its ragged, unfinished Off Broadway workshop at Playwrights Horizons in 1983 and repeatedly during its gleamingly polished Broadway run at the Booth Theater starting the next year. Either way, I thought it was a work of beauty and genius, especially after getting to study the music up close as I proofread parts of the score for the show’s copyist. What I didn’t know was how close, and how often, “Sunday” had come to not working at all.

In “Putting It Together: How Stephen Sondheim and I Created ‘Sunday in the Park With George,’” Lapine, who directed and wrote the book for the show, relates the history of the work through memories, memorabilia and interviews with more than 50 people connected with it. They include Sondheim, of course, but also the original stars (Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters), ensemble members (including the as-yet-unknown Kelsey Grammer, Brent Spiner and Christine Baranski), producers, designers, stage managers and grunts.

Far from being a nostalgic ego trip, though, Lapine’s book is astonishingly frank about the show’s troubles and his own shortcomings. His background in experimental theater was central to the new work’s innovations but did not prepare him, especially as a novice director, for the mainstream pressures that inevitably came to bear once Sondheim was involved, even if Sondheim himself was trying to escape them.

That division is recapitulated in the plot, which in the first act concerns the pointillist painter Georges Seurat, his fictional lover, Dot, and the creation of his masterpiece, “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.” In the second act, it leaps ahead 100 years to focus on a contemporary artist who might be the couple’s great-grandson. Some audiences were unwilling to make that leap. Even Emanuel Azenberg, one of the show’s commercial producers, found it “intimidating and baffling.”

The same phrase applies to the many personality clashes, technical problems and existential threats that seemed to pop up constantly during the show’s development. So even as Lapine traces the painstaking process of creating and directing something fundamentally new, he also reveals the role of chance and adversity in the making of a musical that’s now considered a classic.

The unexpected flip side of that insight is the realization that even the greatest works, as they come together, are always just a few decisions shy of coming apart.

Below, a timeline, with quotations from the book (out on Aug. 3), of the portents, miscalculations and disasters that over the course of two years led — utterly unpredictably — from the postcard of the painting that Lapine first showed Sondheim to a musical that may be, as one lyric puts it, “durable forever.”

June 12, 1982

With Sondheim, 52, in “a pretty dark place” after the failure of “Merrily We Roll Along” in 1981 — he’s considering giving up theater to make video games — Lapine, 33, a downtown up-and-comer, anxiously heads to their first meeting “through a huge antinuclear march that seemed to have taken over the city.” As the two men share a joint and talk, Lapine realizes they come from different artistic worlds; he has seen only one of Sondheim’s shows — “Sweeney Todd” — and has the thinnest possible knowledge of musical theater in general.

September 1982

Sondheim, who typically begins by looking for places to put songs in the book writer’s text, finds one in Lapine’s first pages, as Dot poses for Seurat on a hot Sunday. Lapine expands the moment into a monologue beginning with the words “First a dribble of sweat,” but Sondheim thinks: “Dribble — I can’t do dribble.” He changes it to “trickle.” A good start, yet Lapine waits so long to hear the result, or any result, that he begins to fear Sondheim will leave him “at the altar.” The delay is in part the result of Sondheim’s fundamental concern: “I didn’t think the show needed songs.”

Nov. 1, 1982

At the first reading of the first act, Sondheim plays the entire score so far, which consists of four arpeggios — about 10 seconds of music.

Early 1983

The Off Broadway workshop at Playwrights Horizons has been financed mostly by grants and “wealthy widows,” says André Bishop, the theater’s artistic director. But at least one isn’t on board. Dorothy Rodgers, the widow of Richard Rodgers and an éminence grise in New York State arts funding, argues that Sondheim, as a “commercial” composer, doesn’t merit public funds. Bishop recalls writing to her: “If you think this musical that is barely half-written, about a pointillist painter, is commercial, you’ve got to be nuts!” Instead of cutting funding, he adds, “what I think you should do is get down on your knees and kiss my feet.” Rodgers replies: “Dear André. Point taken.”

April 1983

Lapine receives a letter from Edward Kleban, the lyricist of “A Chorus Line,” suggesting that “Sunday,” as yet unperformed, appropriates elements of Kleban’s unproduced musical “Gallery.” The implied threat of a lawsuit hovers all the way to Broadway, as does Kleban, seen scribbling notes during previews, but a suit never materializes.

May 31, 1983

On the first day of rehearsal, Peters gets an emergency call: “Your father is sick.” But it’s just her stalker. Other problems are not so easily dismissed. One cast member quits after a week, and several who remain resist what they call Lapine’s “sophomoric” theater games and directing style. Spiner, who plays a chauffeur, complains, “I don’t have a character. Where is my character?” When Lapine answers, “You’re not a character, you’re a color,” Spiner retorts: “Would you mind telling me what color?”

July 1983

Patinkin, later describing himself as “terrified” by the demands of the role, storms out of the theater during the first week of performances at Playwrights, with Lapine chasing him down 42nd Street. Though Patinkin’s wife and agent talk him out of quitting, Lapine isn’t sure he’ll ever trust his leading man again. But trust is a problem all around. After Lapine confuses upstage and downstage and gives inappropriately harsh notes, Grammer, who plays several small roles, reams the director out in front of the company.

Late July 1983

Near the end of previews, Sondheim finishes “Finishing the Hat,” a song for Seurat that makes the first act gel. Not gelling: the skeletal second act hastily added for the final three performances at Playwrights, introducing the contemporary George as a wacky performance artist. Audiences are mystified, as is Sondheim: “It was really terrible.”

Fall 1983

To everyone’s surprise, the Shubert Organization decides to produce the unfinished, highbrow show in one of its Broadway theaters by the end of the new season; Lapine selects the Booth, nearly the smallest and thus the least financially feasible option. (The pit is so small that the bass drum has to be sliced in half to fit.) Patinkin almost decamps to play one of the sons in the Dustin Hoffman “Death of a Salesman.” Peters does not immediately sign on for Broadway either, noting that Dot still lacks a major moment in the first act like George’s “Finishing the Hat.” (This isn’t narcissism; she has already declined top billing, pointing out that the show is called “Sunday in the Park With George” — not Dot.) Sondheim, agreeing, fills the emotional gap with “We Do Not Belong Together.”

April 2, 1984

At the first Broadway preview, Lapine writes, the theater is “sweltering” and the first act runs an hour and 40 minutes. “Many people walked out at intermission and more during the second act. By the end of the show, people were so desperate to get out of the theater that if I’d stood in their way, I’d have been trampled.” The crew, who call the show “Sunday in the Dark and Bored,” think it will close on opening night — or maybe before; they joke about kidnapping Patinkin and dumping him “in the middle of the Bronx.”

Later that April

A big technical problem during previews is Dot’s trick dress, which she must step out of during the title song as if it were an exoskeleton. The Off Broadway dress was problematic enough, but the fancier Broadway version, operated by a stage manager with a garage-door opener, is even buggier. The shell does not always open, forcing Peters to fight her way out of it manually, using the “emergency exit.” On one occasion, the opposite happens: The dress suddenly shuts before Peters can get back inside; she grabs it under her arm and walks off with it, getting a huge, unintended laugh.

Even later that April

With two crucial second act songs still unwritten, the opening night is postponed by two weeks and Michael Bennett, an in-demand play doctor ever since he staged “A Chorus Line,” is brought in for advice. But there are also improvements and good omens. The first act has been cut down to 75 or 80 minutes and more people (even Johnny Cash!) are staying through the second. In the week before opening, when Sondheim finally finishes the last two songs — “Children and Art,” which Lapine says “explained the show,” and “Lesson #8,” which “explained George” — the contemporary story suddenly hangs together, even though the songs aren’t yet orchestrated.

May 2, 1984

“Sunday in the Park With George” opens to mixed reviews, is nominated for 10 Tony Awards (nabbing only two) but runs for 604 performances and, in April 1985, wins the Pulitzer Prize.