SONDHEIMPart Two: The James Lapine Years

James Lapine and the Playwrights Horizon

Sondheim was devastated after the crushing and debilitating failure of Merrily we Roll Along. He wasn’t sure he wanted to continue writing for the theatre; he was worried he was washed up; a dinosaur who couldn’t write any more. Eventually however, he connected with James Lapine and began a new extraordinary partnership.

The first show they create, Sunday in the Park with George, was produced by the Playwrights Horizon – an off Broadway non profit group, which was the creative remanent of American theatre. The old Broadway system was breaking down (too expensive, etc) and Sondheim realized he needed to find a different world to experiment and explore. As a result, his talent changed and refined himself. His attempt to write for this new kind of stage had allowed him to write with far more subtlety and stylistic freedom than would have been the case if his work had been burdened by the need to make huge profits. This pioneering experience had clearly energized him and allowed aspects of his talent to emerge with a new clarity and vitality. Sondheim discovered how liberating it could be to experiment in a world that valued his art and nurtured his gifts.

In articulating the differences between writing for Broadway and writing for the non-profit theatre, Sondheim, says “ I found myself writing with more formal looseness than I had before, allowing songs to become fragmentary, like musicalizes snatches of dialogue. I worried less about punctuating the piece with applause and concentrated more on the flow of the story itself. Even more noticeable was the effect on the tone of the work. I see that my works before working with James Lapine were infused with a sense of detachment, whereas the new works are filled with vulnerability. With James detachment was replaced by a measure of compassion. When I think of songs like “Sunday”, “Move On” or “No One is Alone” I realize that by having to express the straightforward unembarrassed goodness of James’s characters I discovered the Hammerstein in myself – and I was better for it.

Sunday in the Park with George

What is the story of Sunday?

The musical was inspired by the painting "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" by Georges Seurat. A complex work revolving around a fictionalized Seurat immersed in single-minded concentration while painting his masterpiece and the people in that picture.

What is the concept?

I think the ‘concept’ of Sunday is most clearly articulated in Finishing a Hat.

What is this song about?It is when George resigns himself to the likelihood that creative fulfilment may always take precedence, for him, over personal happiness.

This play, like Merrily, deals with the issues of artistic compromise. On Your Toes addresses the dichotomy between art music and popular music and The Cradle Will Rock offers a devastating attack on compromising artists, but Merrily and Sunday may be unprecedented in the degree to which they explore the creative process and commercial pressures on artists. Merrily tells the disconcerting story of a Broadway composer, Franklin Shepard, who has sold out his ideals and his artistic soul, the road pointedly not taken by Sondheim. Sunday presents two portraits of artists. In act I we meet a fictionalized but nevertheless once-real artist in 1884, the uncompromising painter Georges Seurat, who refused to sell out. In fact, Seurat reportedly never sold a painting in his lifetime. One hundred years later in act II, we meet his great-grandson, also an artist named George, aman who evolves from a compromising sculptor grubbing for grants and commissions to a genuine artist more like Seurat by the end of the evening.

Sunday in the Park with George is not simply the completion of the painting. It is the completion of the artist as a human being. Sondheim clearly states his personal interpretation of the work in his interview with Savran: “He takes the trip. It’s all about how he connects with the past and with the continuum of humanity. The spirit of Dot in the painting is exactly what makes him do it. But he’s the one who comes to recognition at the end. If you don’t connect with the past, you can’t go on. People who say the second act’s not necessary misunderstand the play. The second act is what it’s about. The first act’s the set-up.”70

As in his other works Sondheim creates a unique sound music world that is inspired by the world of Seurat’s style of painting, Pointillism.

How would you describe the music in Sunday?

Into the Woods

For their next show, Sondheim and Lapine continued to explore the topics of personal growth and maturation in another musical with two quite different, but complementary, acts.

What is the story?

The musical is tied together by an original story involving a childless baker and his wife and their quest to begin a family, their interaction with a witch who has placed a curse on them, and their interaction with other storybook characters during their journey.

What is the inspiration for this show?

The musical intertwines the plots of several Brothers Grimm fairy tales and follows them to explore the consequences of the characters' wishes and quests.

This show has proved to be extremely popular amongst community theatre groups, colleges etc. Why do you think that is?

Because it has a lot of parts, which give a lot of people a chance to play a role and that it is familiar stories that they all know and have been given a bit of a twist.

Sondheim and Lapine decided to explore the deeper psychological properties of popular fairy tales. After getting what they wish in Act 1, these same fairy tale characters face the often unethical and unsavoury paths they have taken to fulfil their wishes and the negative consequences of attaining them, problems that their original fairy tale counterparts did not have to confront. The intricate and interactive dramatic connections among the characters from many tales demonstrate the aptness of John Dunne’s Meditation XVII: “No man is an island, entire of itself.” Eventually, after deflecting responsibility for their predicament to each other in the song “Your Fault,” they realize that if they work together they can resolve their collective crisis and grow, both individually and as a group. Sondheim acknowledges his connection to Dunne’s message in an interview with Michiko Kakutani:

I think the final step in maturity is feeling responsible for everybody. If I could have written “no man is an island,” I would have. But that’s what “No One Is Alone” is about. What I like about the title is it says two things. It says: no one is lonely, you’re not alone—I’m on your side and I love you. And the other thing is: no one is alone—you have to be careful what you do to other people. You can’t just go stealing gold and selling cows for more than they are worth, because it affects everybody else.

How is the music for Into the Woods similar to Sunday and how is it different?

Assassins and Passion

Sondheim went on to create two more significant shows: Assassins and Passion (this one also written with James Lapine).

What are the stories of these two shows?

Assassins: It uses the premise of a murderous carnival game to produce a revue-style portrayal of men and women who attempted (successfully or not) to assassinate Presidents of the United States

Passion: Set in 19th century Italy, the plot concerns a young soldier and the changes in him brought about by the obsessive love of Fosca, his Colonel's homely, ailing cousin.

What’s interesting about the music of each show?

In Assassins, the music varies to reflect the popular music of the eras depicted

It was during the 90’s (after the success of Sunday) that Sondheim went from a cult figure to being the most important figure in American musical theatre. What had once been seen as a perversity to ‘not give the audience what it wanted” was now seen as an asset to be admired? Sondheim continues to not do what he’s done before. He will always be knocking his head against another impossible subject.