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    Stephen Sondheim’s Final Musical is Opening. How Complete Was It?

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    Sondheim said days before his death in 2021 that he did not know when it would be finished, but the musical, now called “Here We Are,” begins performances Thursday.Stephen Sondheim, asked days before his death if he had any sense of when his final musical would be finished, offered a simple answer: “No.”The great composer and lyricist, who was 91 at the time, in late 2021, had been working on and off for years on the show, which was adapted from two Luis Buñuel films. He had written songs for the first act but was struggling with the second. “I’m a procrastinator,” he told me then. “I need a collaborator who pushes me, who gets impatient.”Now, two years after his death, the show, which Sondheim had been calling “Square One” but which was later renamed “Here We Are,” is being presented for the first time, in a 526-seat theater at the Shed, a nonprofit cultural center in Hudson Yards on the Far West Side of Manhattan. Performances of the show, which is based on Buñuel’s “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” and “The Exterminating Angel” and billed as “the final musical by composer Stephen Sondheim,” are set to begin Thursday and to run until January,So what changed? How did a show that Team Sondheim suggested was incomplete at the time of his death get to a point where it was ready for public consumption?The show’s creative and producing team say that two months before Sondheim’s death, he had agreed to let the show go forward, following a successful reading of the material that existed at that point. They had come up with a rationale for a second act that is light on songs. And they note that, following that reading, Sondheim had appeared on Stephen Colbert’s late-night show and had said, “We had a reading of it last week and we were encouraged. So we’re going to go ahead with it, and with any luck we’re going to get it on next season.”So is the show being staged a finished musical? “Who would consider a musical ‘finished’ until it has gone through a full preview process?” the show’s producing and creative team said in written responses to questions for this article. “What we are putting on stage now is as finished as any production about to play its first preview. It’s ready for audiences, and very much the musical Steve envisioned.”The creative team said that all of the show’s songs, and all of its lyrics, were written by Sondheim, and that “as is the case with every musical, the orchestrator and arranger take the composer’s melodies and motifs and use them to arrange and orchestrate the instrumental interstitial music.”The musical will be based in part on Luis Buñuel’s 1972 film “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.” Rialto Pictures“There isn’t a note in this score that wasn’t born out of Steve’s compositions, as will be abundantly clear to audiences,” they said.The book, on the other hand, has been revised since Sondheim’s death by its writer, David Ives, and director, Joe Mantello. But the team said that “the three collaborators agreed after the informal reading that took place on Sept. 8, 2021, that Steve’s songwriting for both acts was complete.”There is a long history of work in various stages of completion being released after the death of an artist. Mozart’s Requiem, Puccini’s “Turandot” and Berg’s “Lulu” were all left unfinished when their composers died and are now considered classics.“The work that David and Stephen did should absolutely be seen,” said Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater, which was working with Sondheim to develop the show until a few years ago. “It’s a jewel, it’s small, it’s incomplete, but it’s absolutely delightful and smart and gorgeous, and it would be a crime for it not to be seen. So I’m entirely in favor of the work being shown in public.”James Lapine, who as a librettist collaborated with Sondheim on shows including “Into the Woods” and “Sunday in the Park With George,” agreed. “I really trust David and Joe, and don’t think they would be putting up something they didn’t feel was finished — not on this scale,” he said. “They’re smart cookies, and if they wanted to do a workshop because it wasn’t finished, they could. But they see it as finished, and Steve gave his blessing, so it’s going to be an addition to the canon.”The show, in Sondheim’s pithy description in that last interview, has a “so-called plot” in which “the first act is a group of people trying to find a place to have dinner, and they run into all kinds of strange and surreal things, and in the second act, they find a place to have dinner, but they can’t get out.”When Sondheim seemed stymied by the second act, Ives and Mantello suggested that perhaps, once the characters are trapped, they can no longer sing.“Hopefully it won’t feel unfinished,” said the actor Nathan Lane, who took part in the 2021 reading. “It makes sense that these characters, once they’re trapped, they can’t sing any more.”“Here We Are,” like many new musicals, has had a complicated developmental journey.Long before he appeared on Colbert’s show, Sondheim had made suggestions that a production could be imminent. In 2014, during an appearance at the New York Film Festival, Sondheim said that he and Ives had just finished a first draft. In 2016, the producer Scott Rudin, who had been consulting with Sondheim about the show, told the “Fresh Air” interviewer Terry Gross that he hoped it would be staged in 2017. Two months later Sondheim, speaking at the Glimmerglass Festival in Cooperstown, N.Y., said he also hoped the show would be staged in 2017, “if I can finish the score in time.”Sondheim had been working on the project off and on for years. Daniel Dorsa for The New York TimesThere was a reading and three workshops before the pandemic — all led by the Public Theater — but no productions.“My impression was that Steve hadn’t finished it in his mind to where he wanted it to be exactly, but an unfinished Sondheim song still sounds like a pretty amazing song,” said Michael Cerveris, an actor who took part in two readings at the Public.At one point Sondheim set aside work on the musical; he and Ives returned to another project, called “All Together Now,” and the Public’s rights to the Buñuel films lapsed.Then Mantello and Ives pulled together the 2021 reading, with a starry cast led by Lane and Bernadette Peters. The reading was a one-afternoon event, with no singing — the assembled actors read the words of the script and the song.“It was two acts, and the lyrics were witty and clever, unsurprisingly,” Lane said. Sondheim, he said, “had written an act and the beginning of the second act, and there was some material in the script that was suggesting perhaps he might turn some long monologue into a song — I wasn’t privy to those conversations.”There is uncertainty among some Sondheim biographers about how to view this show.“I’m both eager and apprehensive,” said Daniel Okrent, who is writing a book about Sondheim. “I’m eager because I so admire his work, and I’m apprehensive because of his public statements that suggested he wasn’t very happy with what he had done, or that he didn’t think it was complete.”Several people who spoke with Sondheim in his final years said they were surprised by the turn of events. “He thought it was never going to happen,” said the director Ivo van Hove, who spent time with Sondheim while directing a 2020 Broadway revival of “West Side Story,” “but it’s happening now.”Others would like more transparency from the creative team about how they have pulled this show together, a process partly described by Frank Rich in New York magazine.“I think we’d all like to know more about how the sausage was made, especially the second act sausage,” said D.T. Max, a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of “Finale: Late Conversations With Stephen Sondheim.”Sondheim was known for revising many of his shows throughout the preview process, which makes this one unusual. (He wrote “Comedy Tonight,” the opener of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” and “Being Alive,” the 11 o’clock number in “Company,” after out-of-town pre-Broadway productions had begun.)“Steve going on Colbert and saying ‘we’re going to do a show’ and then being around for rehearsals and previews and developing and rewriting as always is one thing,” said David Benedict, a writer who is also at work on a Sondheim biography. “It’s a very different proposition when the composer-lyricist isn’t with you.”The show has a sizable budget for an Off Broadway production — the commercial producers who are financing the show (Tom Kirdahy, Sue Wagner, John Johnson and The Stephen Sondheim Trust) expect to raise between $7 million and $8 million, according to a spokesman for the production. The ticket prices are also steep for Off Broadway: Prime seats are being priced at $349.Alex Poots, the Shed’s artistic director, said he had been thrilled when the Sondheim estate approached him last year about staging the musical.“We’re here to support artists who advance their fields,” he said. “I was literally doing back somersaults — for the most important and groundbreaking theater composer and lyricist to have his final work at the Shed is wonderful for us.” More

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      Review: Is William Finn’s ‘A New Brain’ a Stroke of Genius?

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      Barrington Stage Company’s revival of the 1998 musical brings vocal luster and newfound relevance to the story of a songwriter’s near-death experience.First comes the piano, then the bed. In between, in Barrington Stage Company’s revival of “A New Brain,” a dejected man named Gordon Schwinn plunks out the first halting notes of a song he’s writing. It’s about a frog, and he hates it.In this musical, with songs by William Finn and a book by him and James Lapine, the prominence of the piano and the bed is no accident; they are the poles of Schwinn’s, or any artist’s, existence. To write? To sleep? It’s almost Hamletian.But add an endless stream of groany rhymes and a life-threatening crisis, and it becomes something distinctly Finnian: a musical both twittery and existential, with an annoying tickle and a profound smack.For “A New Brain,” first seen at Lincoln Center Theater in 1998, Finn shaped the givens of his idiosyncratic songwriting style and of the stroke that nearly killed him in 1992 into a show that somehow transcends both. If you could never mistake its silliness and sadness for anyone else’s work, you could never miss, in its intimations of mortality, how it inevitably speaks to everyone. After all, we must all decide how to balance the bed and the piano, or our versions of them: the thing that is our destination and the thing we do on the way there.The ragged yet nevertheless powerful revival that opened on Sunday in Pittsfield, Mass., succeeds best with the darker side of that chiaroscuro. As played by Adam Chanler-Berat, Schwinn, like his rhyme-sake Finn, is a songwriter who probably doesn’t need a near-death experience to confirm his morbidly anxious disposition. Being forced to write hideous ditties for a television character named Mr. Bungee (Andy Grotelueschen) is enough to stoke his neuroses.So when a previously undiagnosed arteriovenous malformation makes his brain “explode,” landing him in the hospital to await a risky procedure, he is already primed for a despairing review of his life, love, family and art. Joining him in these semi-hallucinatory retrospections are his best friend and work colleague Rhoda (Dorcas Leung), who tries to eke songs out of him; his indulgent lover, Roger (Darrell Purcell Jr.), who’s stuck on a sailboat; a homeless woman only tangentially related to the plot (Salome B. Smith); and various medical personnel including an absurdly alpha surgeon (Tally Sessions) who sometimes goes shirtless.And then there’s his mother, Mimi, a passive-aggressive tornado of Oedipal attachment and regret. (She cleans her son’s studio while he’s in the hospital by throwing away all his books.) Mary Testa, who in the original production played the homeless woman, deploys a lifetime of stage know-how (and intimacy with Finn’s style) to create a shattering portrait of manic optimism just barely outpacing fury at a world that has already cost her too much.In outline this might all seem grim, but in practice Finn’s songs, even ones called “Craniotomy” and “Poor, Unsuccessful and Fat,” are almost always too bubbly or buoyant to sink. The homeless woman’s big number, “A Really Lousy Day in the Universe,” is a barnburner for Smith despite its bleak message: that disaster is the normal state of affairs for most humans. “Anytime,” a ballad for Roger that was cut during rehearsals in 1998 has been restored; Purcell makes it a lush tear-jerker.Chanler-Berat’s Gordon Schwinn, in green, with his lover (Purcell), at left, his mother (Mary Testa) and his best friend (Dorcas Leung), at right. Daniel RaderHow Finn turns emotional and lyrical indulgence into a kind of discipline, following no known rules of song construction yet scoring points anyway, is something I’ve never understood. Bombarded by rhymes that favor sound over sense rather than the other way around — “Thackeray” and “whackery,” really? — I alternate between cringing at their illogic and tearing up over them.Part of the trick, as in Finn’s “Falsettos” diptych and “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” is surely how many of them there are. (“A New Brain,” originally formatted as a revue, is almost entirely sung.) So if at times Joe Calarco’s staging is as becalmed as Roger’s sailboat, its physical life stunted and those revue roots showing, not to worry. A fair wind will turn up soon.The fair wind will often be vocal. That’s evident not just in the unusually well-sung big solos but in the tricky ensemble numbers. (The music direction is by Vadim Feichtner; the superb original vocal arrangements by Jason Robert Brown and Ted Sperling.) “Gordo’s Law of Genetics,” a song led by the surgeon and a hospital chaplain, crystallizes Jewish fatalism (“the bad trait will always predominate”) in wacky doo-wop style. And the finale, revising the opening frog song as a hymn to the human capacity for reawakening — “I feel so much spring within me” — is almost impossibly moving.That capacity for reawakening is particularly wanted now. News of the disastrous effects of the Covid pandemic on the theater keeps coming, with aftershocks that are often worse than the earthquake itself. Through some combination of careful husbandry and audience loyalty, Barrington Stage has kept steady, continuing to succeed with worthwhile productions of thoughtful plays and complex musicals.Not all its neighbors have been so fortunate. Indeed, this production, which runs through Sept. 10, is being presented in association with the Williamstown Theater Festival, 20 miles up Route 7; Williamstown, facing an existential crisis as serious as Schwinn’s, needs all the help it can get. It’s not beyond the brief of “A New Brain” to suggest that everyone’s survival, especially in the arts, is ultimately linked to everyone else’s.Luckily, as this ultimately uplifting revival demonstrates, Gordo’s law of genetics isn’t always right. Sometimes the good trait predominates.A New BrainThrough Sept. 10 at Barrington Stage Company, Pittsfield, Mass; barringtonstageco.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

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      Review: ‘In the Company of Rose’ Is a Pleasant Portrait

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      When the theater and film director James Lapine first met Rose Styron, he knew her as William Styron’s widow. He learned there was a lot more to her.In 2014, the film and theater director James Lapine was invited to a Martha’s Vineyard lunch with the writer Rose Styron, the widow of the novelist William Styron (“The Confessions of Nat Turner,” “Sophie’s Choice”). At the lunch, Lapine proceeded to record an impromptu interview with Rose. Unlike lesser mortals, Lapine (a protean force in American arts who wrote the book for and directed Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park With George,” among other things) has the means to spin a feature film out of such an encounter.Composed of archival footage and interviews done with more polished equipment over the years, “In the Company of Rose” is a pleasant portrait of an admittedly rarefied world, but one that doesn’t transcend its vanity-project origins. Perhaps it doesn’t intend to. As Lapine, who narrates the film, admits, “I’ve often jumped into projects without really knowing what I was doing.” In her account of her life, Rose, too, seems to have moved forward without too much calculation. She recalls being unimpressed by Styron at a reading for his first novel, “Lie Down In Darkness,” they only clicked later, in Rome, where Rose was studying and William was living on a fellowship.Rose is kind, cheerful, frank, and she has a knack for telling stories laden with famous figures without sounding as if she’s name-dropping. She typed Styron’s work for nearly a decade. On becoming interested in human rights, she traveled for Amnesty International. She says that she and her husband resembled a stereotypically 1950s American couple, and that they managed their marriage “mainly by not talking about things, instead of talking about them.” But when Styron had depression in the 1980s she was a stalwart helpmate in his recovery, and encouraged him to write “Darkness Visible,” the memoir that has become one of his best known works. As existences in rarefied worlds go, this one plays as well-lived.In the Company of RoseNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      A Starry ‘Into the Woods’ Will Play Broadway This Summer

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      The fairy-tale musical, with songs by Stephen Sondheim, will feature Sara Bareilles and a cast of much admired theater performers.A production of “Into the Woods” that garnered ecstatic reviews during a sold-out two-week run at New York City Center this month will transfer to Broadway this summer.The Broadway production, scheduled to run for just eight weeks, will again feature the singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles as the Baker’s Wife and Gavin Creel as a prince, but the other lead roles will be played by newcomers to the production — including Patina Miller, a Tony winner for “Pippin,” as the Witch; Brian d’Arcy James (“Something Rotten!”) as the Baker; Phillipa Soo (“Hamilton”) as Cinderella; and Joshua Henry (“Carousel”) as the other prince.“When things don’t make sense anymore, this is the show that holds our hand,” Jordan Roth, the president of Jujamcyn Theaters and the production’s lead producer, said. “That’s why it resonated so profoundly deeply, and why we need to allow more people to have that experience.”“Into the Woods,” which first opened on Broadway in 1987, is one of the great collaborations between the songwriter Stephen Sondheim, who died last fall, and the book writer James Lapine. The show, a cautionary mash-up of various fairy tales, is widely staged, both professionally and at schools, and in 2014 Disney released a film adaptation.This new production, which began as part of the Encores! program at City Center, will start performances June 28 and open July 10 at the St. James Theater. It is again directed by Lear deBessonet, the Encores! artistic director. Writing in The New York Times, the critic Alexis Soloski declared the City Center production “glorious,” and many other critics agreed.The Encores! cast featured several performers who are not joining the Broadway production because of filming commitments, including Heather Headley, who played the Witch; Denée Benton, who played Cinderella; and Neil Patrick Harris, who played the Baker.The Broadway run will be produced by Jujamcyn, Roth, and City Center, as well as Hunter Arnold, Nicole Eisenberg, Michael Cassel Group, Jessica R. Jenen, Daryl Roth, ShowTown Productions, and Armstrong, Gold & Ross.Jordan Roth said that the physical production would be the same as at City Center, with an onstage orchestra and minimal sets and costumes. “The simplicity and poetry of this production delivered this story right to our hearts,” he said.A New York City Center production of “Sunday in the Park With George,” also written by Sondheim and Lapine, followed a similar path to Broadway. That production, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford, had a four-performance run at City Center in 2016, followed by a 10-week run on Broadway in 2017. More

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      ‘Into the Woods’ Review: Some Enchanted Evening

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      Sara Bareilles and Neil Patrick Harris lead a starry Encores! revival of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s sweet-sour musical.For nearly three decades, the Encores! concert series at New York City Center has upheld a specific mission — excavating the hidden gems of American musical theater, burnishing them to a fully orchestrated shine. Which makes the fractured fairy tales of “Into the Woods,” Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s sweet-sour 1986 musical, a peculiar choice. (Let’s just say that when Rob Marshall has directed a star-crammed film version of a show within the last decade, it is no longer a hidden gem.)But that mission has expanded, unearthing something as glorious as Lear deBessonet’s revival. Her “Into the Woods” runs through May 15; only a few tickets remain. So if you know a spell to charm the secondary market, cast it now.The show, as ever, collides characters drawn from a half-dozen tales in the European folk tradition — Cinderella, Rapunzel, Little Red Riding Hood, Jack the Giant Killer, a prince or two. At its whirling center are a humble baker (Neil Patrick Harris, with down-to-the-millisecond comic timing) and his wife (the Grammy-winning singer and songwriter and recent Broadway baby Sara Bareilles, no slouch). Desperate for a child, they heed the witch next door (Heather Headley, a diva in a frowzy wig and claws) and head into the forest — here, a bare stage ornamented with the set designer David Rockwell’s elegant birch trunks. Within three nights they must obtain a cow as white as milk, a cape as red as blood, hair as yellow as corn and a slipper as pure as gold.This color-blocked quest overlaps with those of Little Red (Julia Lester, pert and twinkling), waylaid by a seductive wolf (Gavin Creel, sleazy and flawless), and the moony Jack (Cole Thompson, sweet and dreamy), forced by his mother (the comic genius Ann Harada) to sell the cow that he loves too much. Separated in the woods, the baker and his wife have other encounters. The baker meets a mysterious man (the downtown stalwart David Patrick Kelly, who doubles as the narrator). His wife befriends Cinderella (Denée Benton, luminous, with a crystalline soprano), on the run from a pursuing prince (Creel again).From left, Gavin Creel, David Turner, Ann Harada, Bareilles and Harris in Lear deBessonet’s revival of the Sondheim-Lapine musical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhen tales have circulated since the premodern era, it’s no spoiler to say that they all end happily. Cinderella gets her prince. Rapunzel (Shereen Pimentel, mellow in an underwritten role) gets hers (Jason Forbach, in for Jordan Donica). Little Red and her grandmother (Annie Golden) are released from the wolf’s stomach. Jack, now rich, reunites with his cow (expertly puppeteered by Kennedy Kanagawa). But that only brings us to intermission. And unease already glimmers, firefly-like, among the trees.In “Maybe They’re Magic,” the baker’s wife interrogates the ethics of ambition. Characters weigh personal desire against the needs of the greater community. And as in Sondheim shows like “Merrily We Roll Along,” “Gypsy” and “Sweeney Todd,” they wrestle with the question of whether getting what you want is actually good for you. What if you get what you wish and you still want more? What if the wish come true isn’t really worth what it cost you?The second act darkens and destabilizes these tales. It’s a truism that a happy ending depends on stopping a story at just the right moment. “Into the Woods” insists on continuing straight past happily ever after, exploring the repercussions of those Act I choices and offering new and somewhat more abstract conflicts. The priority shifts from the individual to the collective as characters band together to save the kingdom and themselves. That should feel at least as propulsive as gathering potion ingredients. Instead it feels theoretical, a filigreed representation of the classic trolley problem. Should the characters deliberately sacrifice one person — Jack — or do nothing and allow many others to die?This more philosophical turn has bothered many critics. If I’m honest, it bothers me. But I can still remember myself 30 years ago, wearing out the VHS tape of the original Broadway version, which PBS aired as part of its “American Playhouse” series. The conflicts didn’t feel abstract to me then. Keying into the emotional force underlying them — the wanting, the regret — I understood the musical’s questions of right and wrong, and the very murky moral territory in between, the way children do: intuitively and very personally.From left, Heather Headley, Julia Lester, Cole Thompson, Denée Benton and Harris in the show’s second act, which darkens and destabilizes the fairy tales.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNow I understand them differently: as conjectures and hypotheticals. But that doesn’t make them any less urgent. The last two years, maybe the last six years, maybe more, have emphasized the stark divisions in American life, isolating us in our individual experiences of suffering and perceived injustice. But these same years have offered galvanizing examples of mutual care and aid, a mode echoed in the ballad “No One Is Alone,” which argues for support and understanding despite differences.If I were a betting woman, I would hazard that’s the aspect of “Into the Woods” that appealed to deBessonet, the artistic director of Encores! and an artist with a long history of community engagement and activism. Unlike the other Encores! shows of the season — “The Tap Dance Kid” and “The Life,” both of which received contested updates — “Into the Woods” arrives largely unchanged. And no longueur or flubbed cue breaks the spell of her compassionate, witty production. She has cast wonderful comedians, many of whom are also wonderful singers, and has encouraged them to deliver rich and very human performances, accented by Lorin Lattaro’s friendly, organic choreography and Rob Berman’s splendid music direction.The show ends with a musical combo punch — “No One Is Alone,” “Children Will Listen” — an absolute T.K.O. to anyone who argues that Sondheim’s pleasures are intellectual alone. (It’s a deeper cut, but the preceding song, “No More,” an existential body blow, prepares the way, too.) For “Children Will Listen,” led by Headley, with superb, sinuous phrasing, deBessonet suddenly swells the cast with 70 or so supernumeraries, children and seniors singing along.The night I saw it, not all of that singing was precisely on key, and the child nearest me overacted wretchedly. But I found myself crying without really knowing why. For the child I was, I suppose. And the child I am. And the mother now, also. I listened. I am still listening. You should, too.Into the WoodsThrough May 15 at New York City Center, Manhattan; nycitycenter.org. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes. More

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      Review: In ‘Flying Over Sunset,’ Getting High With the Stars

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      A new musical imagines the all-singing, all-dancing LSD trips of Aldous Huxley, Clare Boothe Luce and Cary Grant.To a perpetual square, nothing is as mystifying as another person’s high. Or so I learned in college, during the heyday of chemically induced inner journeys — and again at the Vivian Beaumont Theater the other night. Though sometimes mesmerizing, “Flying Over Sunset,” the new musical about LSD that opened there on Monday, is mostly bewildering, and further proof that transcendence can’t be shared.It admits as much in its structure, which throws into one scenario (by James Lapine) three famous seekers who never actually got high together. We meet them separately, starting with the philosopher and novelist Aldous Huxley (Harry Hadden-Paton), tripping at a Hollywood drugstore in the late 1950s. Next comes the greatest of all male movie stars, Cary Grant (Tony Yazbeck), demanding the drug — then legal — from his second wife’s psychiatrist. Finally we drop in on the playwright and diplomat Clare Boothe Luce (Carmen Cusack), hallucinating “a sapphire dragonfly” soon after being nominated as ambassador to Brazil.Much of this is true — if not the details of the visions then the settings and situations. But to advance the story beyond that, Lapine has to indulge in speculative nonfiction, a musical theater hallucinogen he has used to great effect before, in his play “Twelve Dreams,” inspired by Jungian imagery, and in his book for the musical “Sunday in the Park With George,” about the painter Georges Seurat. Perhaps recalling Seurat’s pointillistic technique, he writes in a preface to “Flying Over Sunset” that his script “connects the dots” of known history.It certainly connects the major players, bringing them together counterfactually, at the end of Act I, to discuss their common interest over champagne at the Brown Derby restaurant in Hollywood. In Act II, with the philosopher Gerald Heard (Robert Sella) as their “guide,” they indulge that interest together at Luce’s Malibu estate.Their trips take up perhaps two-thirds of the show — and 100 percent of the songs, by Tom Kitt and Michael Korie. As a concept, that makes sense, not just because music is arguably the most transcendent of art forms (and is often lovely here) but also because the characters, as Lapine presents them, apparently need to be high to be fully alive.Bottoms up: From left, Sella, Hadden-Paton, Cusack and Yazbeck prepare to embark on simultaneous LSD trips.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIt’s hard to argue with him from personal experience; as he recently told The Times, he used LSD frequently while in graduate school. But the actual lives of Huxley, Grant and Luce do not support the idea that they were lacking in the rich complexity of humanity when sober.To correct for that problem, Lapine, who also directed the show, steers “Flying Over Sunset” in some very strange and ultimately tiresome directions. First, he assigns each character a buried emotional problem that needs resolving. Huxley is grieving the death of his wife. Grant, having never fully reconciled his imperturbable public persona with the terrorized child he once was, has problems with women. And Luce somehow feels guilt over the deaths of her mother and daughter, in car accidents she had nothing to do with.There’s an overly programmatic quality to that setup, especially as delivered in the exceedingly flat dialogue Lapine seems to favor. (“I think what’s interesting,” Heard says, “is that you each seem to be at a turning point in your lives.”) Perhaps the flatness is meant to set up the floridness of the trips, which compensate for the lack of real-world dramatic development by growing more and more outré as the show, at two hours and 40 minutes, wears on.The first of those trips is at least efficient in characterizing Huxley, whom Hadden-Paton winningly portrays as a goofy know-it-all nerd. Spotting a Botticelli monograph at the drugstore, he imagines characters from the painting “The Return of Judith to Bethulia” coming to life somewhat randomly around him, to the strains of some beautiful bel canto pastiche by Kitt and Korie. Here and elsewhere, you may be reminded of “Sunday in the Park” for its tableaux vivants and shimmering orchestral effects, if not for its thematic discipline.And Grant’s maiden trip, involving an otherwise flat-footed encounter with his younger self (Atticus Ware) and violent father (Nehal Joshi), allows for a showstopping dance routine to a music hall ditty called “Funny Money.” The choreography for Yazbeck and Ware, by the tap phenom Michelle Dorrance, almost obliterates any qualms about the song’s psychobabbly premise.But for an audience not invested in Lapine’s personal imagery, the second act, with its nonstop LSD sequences, goes quickly downhill. A number called “I Like to Lead,” in which Sophia Loren, Grant’s co-star in the 1958 movie “Houseboat,” slaps him around in an allegory of female domination, is incoherent. Another, in which Grant imagines himself as a “giant penis rocket ship” on a “secret mission” to spare the earth from disaster, is merely mortifying. Luce’s visit to heaven to see her mother and daughter, in a song called “An Interesting Place,” is as banal as that title.Emily Pynenburg as Sophia Loren and Yazbeck as Cary Grant in a number recalling a scene from the 1958 movie “Houseboat.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt least there are compensations in the typically gorgeous technical wizardry of the Lincoln Center Theater production. The lighting (by Bradley King) and the projections (by 59 Productions) on Beowulf Boritt’s swirling-circles set — along with the immersively psychedelic sound by Dan Moses Schreier — bring us closer to the sensation of melting consciousness than the script ever manages. At times even the costumes (by Toni-Leslie James) seem to be tripping. And Dorrance’s choreography for the show’s opening, arranging the cast’s varying footfalls in rhythmic counterpoint, is sublime.These are not enough to outweigh Lapine’s failure to dramatize what he evidently sees as the life-enhancing possibilities of mind-altering drugs. If those possibilities exist, surely they are not to be found in a direct linkup of symptoms and cures, as proposed by “Flying Over Sunset.” During his Botticelli immersion, Huxley claims that his right eye, severely damaged from a childhood illness, has started “working” again. Grant and Luce, having faced unfinished emotional business, emerge from their trips refreshed and ready to move on.But LSD, on its own, is not psychoanalysis by other means. And if the drug offers access to a shared consciousness that can help humans connect, neither the show nor the subsequent lives of its real-life characters demonstrate it. Luce, a brittle charmer in Cusack’s smart rendering, drifted ever rightward politically; Grant married three more times.As for Huxley, despite his supposedly improved eyesight, his overall health deteriorated quickly. On his deathbed in 1963, he asked to be injected with 100 micrograms of LSD. He was still a believer — but in what? Some mysteries, this musical among them, are too interior to be understood.Flying Over SunsetThrough Feb. 6 at the Lincoln Center Theater, Manhattan; flyingoversunset.com. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More

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      Sunday in the Trenches With George

      by

      James Lapine’s book shows how he and Stephen Sondheim invested two years of work to burnish their musical from an avant-garde near-disaster to a mainstream classic.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.The composer Stephen Sondheim, right, was collaborating for the first time with James Lapine, left, who wrote the book and directed “Sunday in the Park With George.”Gerry GoodsteinFar 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, 1982With 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.Sondheim’s indication in Lapine’s script of where the opening number should go in “Sunday in the Park.”via Stephen SondheimSeptember 1982Sondheim, 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, 1982At 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 1983The 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 1983Lapine 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, 1983On 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?”Mandy Patinkin as Georges Seurat and Bernadette Peters as his fictional love, Dot, in the Broadway production.Martha Swope, via The New York Public Library for the Performing ArtsJuly 1983Patinkin, 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 1983Near 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 1983To 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.”The poster for the Broadway production, which played the small Booth Theater.1984 Fraver April 2, 1984At 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 AprilA 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.A costume rendering of the trick dress worn by the character Dot and controlled with a garage-door remote.Patricia Zipprodt, via Billy Rose Theatre Division/The New York Public Library for the Performing ArtsEven later that AprilWith 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.On April 24, 1985, from left, Sondheim, Peters and Lapine celebrate the news that the show has won the Pulitzer Prize for drama.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times More