A new book by the playwright and director James Lapine examines the long and complicated process of putting the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical together.
)—and he behaved accordingly. “I remember she walked in the room and my heart just went crazy from the moment I set eyes on her,” Patinkin says.
Patinkin also very seriously considered leaving the show when it was in previews at Playwrights Horizons.’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, already a ball of nerves, was beginning to lose it.
Replies Lapine: “Yeah, I think I went running out of the building and chased you down Forty-second Street.”One of Sondheim’s best-loved melodies,some three weeks into its run at Playwrights Horizons. Explicating Seurat’s passionate devotion to his art, the song managed to be both narratively significant and utterly beautiful. All of this was clear from the moment it was first performed.
To help the cast’s morale, Lapine implored Sondheim to discuss some of his past false starts, of which there’d been many. He shared an anecdote about, after the opening number, I saw a couple rise from their seats and begin to leave the theater,” Sondheim told the actors. “I caught the man’s eye and I could just see in his expression, I’ve had a hard day at the office. Dancing gang members? Not my thing. And I totally understood it.
“So much for congeniality in the theater,” Lapine writes of the moment. Yet Sondheim, at that point, had heard it all before. “Steve, who was sitting in front of me, turned to me and gave me a wry smile that said, ‘Welcome to my world.’ ”
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