The acclaimed Broadway musical, Sunday in the Park With George, famously lost the Best Musical Tony Award to La Cage Aux Folles in 1985, even as it picked up the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. But the years since the show’s debut have only seen the reputation grow for Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s musical about Georges Seurat’s creation of pointillist masterpiece “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.”
The original production spawned a successful cast recording, was preserved on film for a 1986 episode of PBS’ American Playhouse and has since enjoyed two Broadway revivals — most recently starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford as George and his mistress, Dot. Now, much like the plot of the musical itself, the story of its creation is given life in librettist Lapine’s new book, Putting It Together: How Stephen Sondheim and I Created Sunday in the Park With George (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux).
A Doodad Kind of Town 