It takes two...

The Dynamic Duo of Sondheim & Lapine

Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine have worked together on several productions over the years. The first fruit of their collaboration was Sunday in the Park With George (1984). The musical was inspired be Georges Seurat's pointillist painting, "Sunday Afternoon On the Isle of the Grande Jatte", and intertwines the story of Seurat and his mistress with that of a contemporary painter and his lover. Sunday in the Park With George was a solid success and brought Sondheim and Lapine the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Besides Sunday in the Park With George, James Lapine has written the book for and directed several of their collaborations including Into the Woods, Passion, and the multi-media revue Sondheim on Sondheim. He also co-produced and directed the HBO documentary Six By Sondheim, for which he received an Emmy nomination. 

Stephen Sondheim

Stephen Joshua Sondheim was born on March 22, 1930 in New York City. He began studying piano and organ at a young age and became friends with the son of Broadway lyricist and producer Oscar Hammerstein II, who gave Sondheim advice and tutelage in musical theatre as well. In his teens, Sondheim had penned a satire about his school, the musical By George! and worked as an assistant on 1947's Allegro, one of Hammerstein's collaborations with composer Richard Rogers. The experience had a long-lasting implication on the young composer's approach to his work.

Sondheim attended Williams college where he majored in music, graduating in 1950. In the early 1950s, Sondheim moved to Los Angeles and wrote scripts for television shows Topper and The Last Word. Upon returning to New York, he composed background music for the play The Girls of Summer in 1956. An acquaintance with director Arthur Laurents brought Sondheim into contact with composer Leonard Bernstein and choreographer Jerome Robbins, who were looking for a lyricist for a contemporary adaptation of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Writing the song lyrics for West Side Story, which opened in 1957, Sondheim thus became part of one of Broadway's most successful productions of all time. Next, he teamed up with composer Jule Styne to write the lyrics for Gypsy, which opened in 1959 with Ethel Merman as its star.

The first musical Stephen Sondheim was credited with writing both the music and lyrics was A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, a Zero Mostel farce based on comedies by ancient playwright Plautus. It opened in 1962, ran for nearly 1,000 performances and won a Tony Award for best musical. Sondheim won several more Tony Awards in the 1970s for his collaborations with producer/director Harold Prince, including the musicals Company (1970), Follies (1971), A Little Night Music (1973), and Sweeney Todd (1979). His collaboration with James Lapine in the 1980s produced several more Tony nominations. 

James Lapine

James Elliot Lapine was born on January 10, 1949 in Mansfield, Ohio. When Lapine was in his early teens, his family moved to Stamford, Connecticut. He attended public schools there before eventually moving to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to attend Franklin and Marshall College as a history major. He then moved to Valencia, California to pursue an MFA in design at the California Institute of the Arts. After completing his education, Lapine moved to New York City and held several jobs including a freelance photographer, graphic artist and architectural preservationist. He also did some freelance design work on the magazine for the Yale School of Drama. Lapine's work so impressed the school's dean, Robert Brustein, that he asked Lapine not only to design all of the school's printed material but also to join the faculty as a design teacher. Lapine ended up directing a Gertrude Stein play called Photograph and it was there that the seed was planted for his most enduring success. The production of Photograph, which in 1977 was innovative in its use of image projections, moved to an off-Broadway house in New York City, and its success earned Lapine an Obie, his first of many theatre awards. His next staged project, Twelve Dreams, also combined his visual sensibilities with his interest in history, memory and surrealism.

However, it was Lapine's work with composers William Finn and Stephen Sondheim that would lead to his most notable successes. In 1981, he and Finn collaborated on March of the Falsettos that evolved over the years into the Tony Award-winning Falsettoland. Lupine's introduction in 1982 to composer Stephen Sondheim led him to revisit the image of Georges Seurat's "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" that he had used in Photograph. The resulting Sunday in the Park With George became a groundbreaking musical that would go on to win two Tony Awards and a Pulitzer Prize. Laine went on to create more award-winning shows with Sondheim and Finn. He has also directed numerous other plays and musicals, and he has also produced, written and/or directed several films over the years. In 2011, Lapine was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame. In 2014 he wrote the film adaptation of Into the Woods for Disney.