![]() ![]() But it was missing that moment-and when it came in, it pulled the show together.” The finale was already there, which was wonderful. The piece didn’t make sense until that song came in. This moment of explaining himself: why he’s so hard on his partner and also why he’s so hard on himself. It was just this exciting moment that this character suddenly had. I remember watching Mandy rehearsing it and lighting up like a flare. “There was a lot of skepticism until the day ‘Finishing the Hat’ came in. “Late in rehearsals one day, I heard some of the actors muttering something to the effect of, Why are we doing a show about this obnoxious artist?,” says Michael Starobin, Sunday’s orchestrator. All of this was clear from the moment it was first performed. Explicating Seurat’s passionate (and corrosive) devotion to his art, the song managed to be both narratively significant and utterly beautiful. One of Sondheim’s best-loved melodies, “Finishing the Hat” was folded into Sunday some three weeks into its run at Playwrights Horizons. ![]() Replies Lapine: “Yeah, I think I went running out of the building and chased you down Forty-second Street.” It was instantly clear to the company and crew how good “Finishing the Hat” was. You know, who else was there for me to blame?” So, I thought this was insane, and you were to blame. I like the theater because you rehearse it. “One thing I’ve tried to learn through the years is to sit with the discomfort. “When I was younger, I had a bad habit of trying to fix my problems by running away,” he tells Lapine. Patinkin, already a ball of nerves, was beginning to lose it. Sunday’s earliest previews were chaos-the second act, which leaps forward 100 years to center on Seurat’s great-grandson, a conceptual artist also called George, had only barely been sketched out, and several key songs were still missing. Patinkin also very seriously considered leaving the show when it was in previews at Playwrights Horizons. “I remember she walked in the room and my heart just went crazy from the moment I set eyes on her,” Patinkin says. Never mind the fact that he had just won a Tony for Evita Patinkin was “just a fan” of Peters’s when they met in rehearsal-she had, at that point, become a major star of both stage ( On the Town Mack and Mabel) and screen ( The Jerk Annie)-and he behaved accordingly. ![]() Mandy Patinkin reacted as any normal person would to first meeting Bernadette Peters-he freaked out. Here, we look at seven of the book’s most intriguing revelations. It also lays out the beginnings of Sondheim and Lapine’s creative partnership, which would later bring us Into the Woods and Passion. Lapine captures all of this in his new book, Putting It Together: How Stephen Sondheim and I Created Sunday in the Park With George, talking through the show with virtually every living person who had a part in it: actors, producers, costume designers, musicians, et al. From an early workshop at Playwrights Horizon to a rocky Off-Broadway run and difficult transfer to the Booth Theatre on Broadway, the show was constantly in flux-and its cast and crew, frequently at odds. Their unlikely collaboration yielded one of the great Broadway shows of the latter 20th century, featuring important lead performances from Mandy Patinkin (as Seurat) and Bernadette Peters (as his frustrated, illiterate mistress, Dot) yet mounting Sunday was not without its difficulties. Lapine, who wrote and directed Sunday, was new to the musical-theater scene then, having only worked with the composer William Finn on March of the Falsettos while Sondheim had already found huge critical success as a composer-lyricist with Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. (The work should be a familiar one to fans of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, especially.) The show imagined the fractured interior life of Georges Seurat, the 19th-century post-Impressionist artist known to most for his painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Sunday in the Park With George, James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim’s Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning 1984 musical, had a rather odd premise. ![]()
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