Sunday in the Park with George
New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1986. Item #05878
“White. A Blank Page or Canvas. The Challenge: Bring Order to the Whole.”
Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Pulitzer Prize-Winning Masterpiece
One of 250 Copies Signed by Both Authors - With a Sondheim TLS and Signed Photograph
SONDHEIM, Stephen. LAPINE, James. Sunday in the Park with George. A Musical. Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. Book by James Lapine. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, [1986].
First edition, limited to 250 numbered copies specially bound and signed by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, this being copy no. 87.
Small octavo (8 1/4 x 5 1/2 inches; 210 x 140 mm.). [2 limitation], [1-6], 7--203, [5, blank] pp. With a portrait of Georges Seurat.
Publisher’s green cloth over boards, spine lettered in gilt. A fine copy in the original matching green cloth slipcase with printed paper label.
The limitation leaf reads: “Of the first edition of Sunday in the Park with George two hundred and fifty copies have been specially bound, numbered, and signed by the authors.” Numbered “87” and signed by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine.
Together with a typed letter signed by Stephen Sondheim to Paul R. Palmer, written in response to Palmer’s request for a signed photograph; and the accompanying black-and-white photograph of Sondheim, measuring approximately 5 1/4 x 6 1/8 inches, signed by Sondheim.
Thus the volume contains three Sondheim signatures: the signed limitation leaf, the typed letter signed, and the separately signed photograph.
An exceptional presentation of one of Stephen Sondheim’s greatest achievements, combining the scarce signed limited edition with personal correspondence from Sondheim and the signed photograph obtained as a result of that correspondence.
Inspired by Georges Seurat’s monumental painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, Sunday in the Park with George marked the beginning of one of the most important creative partnerships in modern American musical theater - that of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine.
The musical began at Playwrights Horizons in 1983 and transferred to Broadway the following year, opening at the Booth Theater on May 2, 1984, with Mandy Patinkin as George and Bernadette Peters as Dot.
Its first act imagines the obsessive creation of Seurat’s masterpiece and the artist’s increasingly difficult relationship with Dot. The second moves forward a century to another George, Seurat’s fictional great-grandson, himself an artist struggling with the demands of creativity, reputation, patronage, and artistic renewal.
At its heart, Sunday in the Park with George is not really a biography of Seurat. It is Sondheim and Lapine’s meditation upon the act of creation itself - the isolation of the artist, the sacrifices demanded by art, the tension between human relationships and creative obsession, and the necessity of continuing to make something new.
Its score contains some of Sondheim’s most admired work, including “Sunday in the Park with George,” “Color and Light,” “Finishing the Hat,” “Beautiful,” “Move On,” and the extraordinary ensemble finale “Sunday.”
The musical received ten Tony Award nominations and won two, but its greatest contemporary recognition came in 1985 when Sondheim and Lapine were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It remains one of the relatively small number of musicals ever to receive that honor and is now widely regarded as one of Sondheim’s masterpieces.
The present signed limited edition is itself an important issue of the published text. Only 250 copies were specially bound, numbered, and signed by both creators. Bibliographical records identify the Dodd, Mead first edition as appearing in 1986 and distinguish the limited issue by its separate ISBN.
What makes this copy considerably more interesting, however, is the survival of Sondheim’s letter to Paul R. Palmer together with the signed photograph Palmer had requested.
Palmer evidently assembled a collection of books relating to important figures in theater, film, music, and American cultural life, frequently augmenting them with signed photographs. The Sondheim correspondence provides unusually useful evidence of how at least part of that collection was formed: Palmer approached the subjects directly, and Sondheim personally responded to his request.
This provenance becomes particularly significant in light of the other Palmer material in our collection, including signed or inscribed photographs of Howard Dietz, Harold Arlen, Orson Welles, and others. Rather than regarding the photographs simply as later embellishments to the books, the Sondheim letter demonstrates that Palmer was deliberately creating association copies by bringing together appropriate books and autograph material obtained from their subjects.
Stephen Sondheim (1930-2021) was the dominant American musical-theater composer and lyricist of the second half of the twentieth century. Beginning as the lyricist of West Side Story and Gypsy, he went on to transform the possibilities of the Broadway musical through such works as Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Merrily We Roll Along, Sunday in the Park with George, and Into the Woods.
James Lapine (b. 1949) is an American playwright, librettist, and director whose collaboration with Sondheim produced Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, and Passion. Their partnership represented a new phase in Sondheim’s career and produced some of his most introspective work.
A superb copy of the signed limited edition of one of the landmarks of modern American musical theater, considerably enhanced by Stephen Sondheim’s typed letter signed to collector Paul R. Palmer and the signed photograph supplied in response to Palmer’s request.
Price: $2,250.00