Sunday in the Trenches With George

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. 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.