‘Art Isn’t Easy’: Making Musical Theatre in <i>Sunday in the Park with George</i>

Sunday in the Park With George (Sunday) was a pivotal piece of work for Stephen Sondheim, written in the early 80s, at a time when he broke away from Broadway production processes to work in the nonprofit sector, developing this musical with James Lapine and other key collaborators. Although Sunday focuses upon the late-nineteenth century artist Georges Seurat (1859-1891), it also represents Sondheim's own attitude to the process of creating new work. Certainly a number of publications about, and also by, Sondheim take lines from Sunday as their title, for example, two volumes of collected lyrics compiled by Sondheim himself: Finishing the Hat (2010) and Look, I Made a Hat (2011). Seurat and a fictional great-grandson, George, are depicted in the musical as torn between creative work, interpersonal relationships and broader contextual factors, and for George in 1980s Chicago, those factors include the challenge of sourcing funding for new creative projects. Examining topics tackled within the musical in relation to Sondheim's engagement with the nonprofit sector and with Broadway, this article examines how Sunday comments upon a developing New York theatre industry in the early 1980s, emphasising the rich and complex range of subjects Sondheim engaged with through his career.