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In June 1982, Stephen Sondheim, still reeling from the flameout of the original Broadway production of Merrily We Roll Along seven months earlier, had his first meeting with the Off Broadway playwright and director James Lapine. The future collaborators soon were comparing their tastes not just in plays but in movies, Sondheim’s greatest cultural passion after music. Lapine had recently seen and liked The Exterminating Angel, the 1962 classic by the Spanish Mexican director Luis Buñuel. Sondheim was a fan of Buñuel’s 1972 The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. This meeting inspired a torrent of riffing, and a week later Lapine brought Sondheim the first five pages of what would become Sunday in the Park With George.
This fall, Here We Are, Sondheim’s musical adaptation of both Discreet Charm and Exterminating Angel, written with the playwright David Ives, will have its premiere — more than four decades after Lapine floated the notion of a Buñuel musical, a decade after Sondheim and Ives started serious work on it, and nearly two years after Sondheim’s death late Thanksgiving Night in 2021. |
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