Side by Side With Sondheim: Alan Cumming Reviews a New Book About ‘Sunday in the Park’

PUTTING IT TOGETHER
How Stephen Sondheim and I Created “Sunday in the Park With George”
By James Lapine

I have long maintained that each and every one of us is a scientist or an artist.

That is not to imply we spend our days either fiddling with Bunsen burners and test tubes or composing odes and flinging gobs of paint at inanimate objects. No, being a scientist or an artist — by my definition anyway — refers more to how we look at life, how we maneuver it. Do we crave order and rationality or are we more comfortable with the abstract and the laissez-faire? Or, at its simplest and most precise: Do we see life in straight lines or curvy ones?

I’m sure there are many actual scientists who are, by this theory, artists. And in James Lapine’s fascinating and rigorous, no-punches-pulled investigation into the provenance and parturition of his and Stephen Sondheim’s first collaboration, “Sunday in the Park With George,” he completely confirms my theory that many artists are also massive scientists.

Of course, music is as much a science as an art. It is literally written on and contained by straight lines — five of them. So it should come as no surprise that Sondheim’s approach to writing is meticulous to the point of — at least to this scatty artist — a military operation. In one revealing section he explains how he favors yellow notepads for the list-making potential of their margins, in which he catalogs rhymes — though occasionally he’ll push the boat out and go for synonyms. Several facsimiles of these notepad pages are helpfully included here for us to peruse in awe.

Lists in fact are seminal to the Sondheim oeuvre, as many of them are accrued (in strict order of course) before any composing begins at all. First there are general lists about the subject of a song, and once they have borne the fruit of the idea he moves onto rhymes (aided and abetted by Clement Wood’s rhyming dictionary. “That’s the only one to use. It’s unlike all others because the rhymes are listed vertically as opposed to horizontally,” he adds arcanely). Then lists of quatrains and, finally, thoughts.

“So these are like free associations?” inquires Lapine, today, after many collaborations with the maestro. “Free associations but within the rhythm I’d established,” corrects Sondheim. I rest my artist/scientist case.

Legal terminology is actually very apropos for “Putting It Together,” which 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.

There are some interjections and explanations by the author, but its majority content is transcribed testimony from a vast array of the people who were part of its faltering progress toward a Broadway opening, and who reveal with increasing frankness just what a dark and troubled path it was.

It begins in 1982. Lapine was a theatrical naïf who had stumbled into writing and directing through poster design and a series of happy accidents — like writing to Jasper Johns to ask for financial aid to put up an avant-garde show about Gertrude Stein in a SoHo loft (Johns said yes!). This won him an Obie and he became the fresh, hot meat in the New York theatrical market. Then after a show about a Jungian case history (you really couldn’t make this up!) and a commission for Playwrights Horizons he describes as “Neil Simon, only very stoned,” he created “March of the Falsettos” with William Finn and soon after the fated introduction to Sondheim was ordained.

It is not difficult to imagine why Sondheim — who has always struck me as a most curious, contrary and even countercultural American theater legend — would be entranced by Lapine’s young, idealistic and totally out-of-left-field fawn (and fellow stoner to boot) flinging photographs across the carpet of his townhouse and lobbing ideas to him across the downtown/uptown net.

Sondheim was in the doldrums after the recent commercial failure and critical lashing of “Merrily We Roll Along,” apparently considering forgoing the theater altogether and mulling a career designing video games. Yes, you heard me.

They decide to collaborate and after a couple of false starts — including an idea to adapt a Buñuel film — they begin riffing on a postcard Lapine brings of Georges Seurat’s “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.” Some sorcery occurs. Both try to explain it in these pages, but like all magical moments it can never be fully captured. What is transparent is that they floated each other’s boat, that the scientist was revivified by the young artist’s idealism, and the artist both dazed and comforted by the scientist’s gaze. Together they defied the prevailing musical theater augury and decided to make a piece based on the painting.

So far, so yadda yadda, and I must admit to having slight dread that this was going to be the literary equivalent of the many masturbatory galas honoring Sondheim I have attended — and occasionally performed in — over the years. Yes, he’s a genius, yes there’s no one like him, yes we aren’t worthy. I can’t imagine how bored he must be of that form of blind adulation, especially when his work seems to promote its antithesis, with many of his characters seeming to squirm and shrivel when they are feted, and look inward, or to bigger ideals than self-glory.

But soon things gallop apace and in the blink of an eye the first half of the show is produced by Playwrights Horizons as a workshop production, an artistic luxury unimaginable in today’s theatrical climate where science has long conquered art. The show was moved to Broadway despite the fact it had no second act, and this explained why it feels to me like two disparate pieces, the first eminently more successful. It was received with bafflement and scorn by preview audiences, so much so that concern is expressed for the actors’ mental state at witnessing the sheer volume of post-intermission empty seats as well as the phenomenon of “walking ovations” — audience members clapping as they flee from the theater.

The second act was further impeded by Sondheim’s failure to deliver two final songs until the 11th hour. A lot of notepad pages were filled but the actors were left to perform spoken monologues in their stead until the songs eventually arrived, less than a week before the Broadway opening.

But there was trouble at every turn. Lapine’s inexperience and curvy ways jar with several of the original cast, including Kelsey Grammer, who becomes incensed at Lapine’s confusion over upstage and downstage.

“It was a strange dyslexia I had for years,” explains Lapine in the transcript of their interview together. “Same with remembering stage left and right.”

Mandy Patinkin, who triumphed in the starring role of the painter Seurat, is also revealed to have butted heads with Lapine and many others in the company, and indeed a stage manager of the eventual Broadway production reveals she had to remonstrate with the crew not to drop a sandbag on the actor’s head.

But despite these and many other hilarious musical theater geeky gems, this is not a collection of gossip. It is actually a story of artistic steadfastness, revealing as much about the ultimate work as the experience the participants endured while making it. “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. A true fusion indeed, of art and science.