Putting It Together

Starred review from June 21, 2021
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.