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

When you’re working, there’s so much self-loathing. Everyone feels like their stuff is awful. When I was at CalArts I was studying painting—I’m a terrible painter—but I remember there’s a stage of a painting that just looks like a mess and then all of a sudden it becomes a painting. Movies are like that too. Magically it starts to take shape. Now I

Sondheim told me that, at dinner at the Chambord restaurant, Rodgers rolled up the lyric sheet and repeatedly banged it on the table in scorn—possibly because Mrs. Rodgers had detected in it a summation of her less than Happily Ever After with Dick. Sondheim had to rewrite that verse, though revivals reinstate the original.

Game Theory was an illustration of what happened when we planted our feet again. The tour that followed was augmented with a miniature brass band, a reminder of the collaboration with the TBC Brass Band we had envisioned and a kind of memorial to the fact that it was no longer possible.

Yes, Sondheim writes songs. But he writes, as well, “arias”: musical scenes that are more encompassing, more dramatically kinetic, than songs.