On August 3, Farrar, Straus and Giroux released James Lapine’s Putting It Together: How Stephen Sondheim and I Created Sunday in the Park with George, which has received overwhelming praise from critics. Appropriately dedicated to artist Georges Seurat, the book’s 416 pages not only includes conversations with the creative team and cast of the Pulitzer-winning musical but also the complete text of Lapine’s script and Sondheim’s lyrics as well as reproductions of handwritten notes, sheet music, costume drawings, and more. You can read an excerpt on the Macmillan Publishers website.
Kirkus Review: This delightful book revisits the two years they [Lapine and Sondheim] spent telling a fictionalized version of Seurat’s life. Lapine conducted conversations with around 40 people involved with the show to create “a mixed salad: one part memoir, one part oral history, one part ‘how a musical gets written and produced.’” … The author is refreshingly candid about his role in his actors’ frustrations … as when he told cast member Brent Spiner, “You’re not a character, you’re a color,” to which Spiner replied, “Would you mind telling me what color?”
Library Review (Stephanie Sendaula): The narrative shines when Lapine and Sondheim reflect on their weekly planning meetings in 1982. … Theater lovers will be drawn in by the details: casting and funding the original Off-Broadway production in 1983; nerve-racking Broadway previews in 1984; several Tony nominations; and the success of “Finishing the Hat,” as sung by Patinkin. Lapine more than succeeds at putting together the four-decade narrative of the production. … Beyond its obvious appeal to Broadway fans, this insider guide to creating art, including making mistakes and accepting criticism, will spark the interest of aspiring artists and writers.
New York Times (Alan Cumming): Putting It Together … is not so much a book at all, but a post-mortem, a forensic investigation into what surely must be one of the most unlikely and chaotic journeys to a Pulitzer Prize and a place in the highest echelons of the American musical theater canon. … Putting It Together cleverly concludes with the script of Sunday in the Park with George, a fitting finale to remind us of the very essence of the show being discussed as well as the painting it is based on: Up close it seems confusing and chaotic but as we stand back and look at it as a whole — as Lapine does, having waited nearly 40 years to let the dust settle — it comes into focus, its lofty ambitions seem clearer and the pain of its inception merely the stuff of life.
Newsweek (Joe Westerfield): Putting It Together works on many levels. Primarily it is the story of how one musical came about. But in talking to all the creatives … it is a primer on everything that goes into making a musical, from costuming to orchestrating. … And while no two shows are alike in their construction, Putting It Together offers a general road map for the making of a musical. … There are also plenty of insights to be had by the casual theater fan: This is a detailed look into theatrical art and business of a specific period, but most importantly it offers much insight into the greatest musical theater minds of the 20th century — and by extension ever.
Publishers Weekly: In a captivating oral history, Lapine revisits his experiences writing and directing Sunday in the Park with George. … 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, … actorly meltdowns, and persistent bafflement at Lapine’s directing techniques. … 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.
