Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine outside the Booth Theatre, on 45th Street, in Manhattan, where their Pulitzer Prize– and Tony Award–winning musical, *Sunday in the Park with George,* premiered in 1984.

Double Act

By Asher Fogle Paul

Putting It Together: How Stephen Sondheim and I Created Sunday in the Park with George by James Lapine

On a June afternoon in 1982, fledgling playwright James Lapine sat nervously on a sofa in Stephen Sondheim’s Manhattan town house. The composer promptly lit a joint and passed it to his visitor, and an improbable partnership was born.

“I just figured that anybody of your generation smoked dope all the time, which was true,” Sondheim tells Lapine, nearly 20 years his junior, in Putting It Together. Part memoir, part oral history, part Baedeker guide, this captivating new book chronicles Lapine and Sondheim’s two-year odyssey to create the 1983 hit musical Sunday in the Park with George.