Creativity & Collaboration with James Lapine
Three-time Tony Award-winning writer, director, and Broadway legend JAMES LAPINE speaks with eloquence and expertise about the creative process and allowing our collaborations to be transformative – elevating our work, and ourselves, to new heights. In striking multi-media presentations utilizing video and images from his shows, Lapine offers dynamic insights about maximizing the creativity on our teams, in our businesses, and in our personal lives, perfectly tailored for individual audiences.
A Conversation with James Lapine
Three-time Tony Award-winning writer, director, and Broadway legend JAMES LAPINE is a devoted student of humanity, enriching conversations with insatiable curiosity, humor, and poignant observations on art and life. Creator and collaborator on some of the most iconic Broadway musicals, Lapine shares star-studded stories and creative insights with enraptured audiences.
‘Putting it Together’: The Art of Collaboration
Inspired by his New York Times bestselling book Putting it Together: How Stephen Sondheim and I Created Sunday in the Park with George, JAMES LAPINE shares creative insights from his legendary career on Broadway. Lapine speaks with eloquence and expertise about the creative process and allowing our collaborations to be transformative – elevating our work, and ourselves, to new heights.
James Lapine inspires audiences with the legacy of his work with late Broadway legend Stephen Sondheim
Many-time award-winning director and writer JAMES LAPINE is heralded for his inspiring creative insights and star-studded stories of some of the most important musicals of the modern era, particularly his collaboration with the late legendary composer Stephen Sondheim. As audiences around the world tuned in to the 2022 Tony Awards show, they were captivated by a tribute to Sondheim performed by Bernadette Peters, reminiscent of the global outpouring of appreciation for the seismic Broadway force upon his death last year. Lapine and Sondheim won the Pulitzer for their genre-defining collaboration Sunday in the Park with George, which is the subject of Lapine’s instant New York Times bestseller, Putting it Together: How Stephen Sondheim and I Created Sunday in the Park with George. A deeply personal remembrance of their collaboration and friendship, both the highs and the lows, Lapine’s book serves as a remarkable tribute to the legacy of Sondheim’s life and work and their process for creating a great work of art together. At a magnetic event presented by the Getty Museum titled ‘Sunday at the Getty with James: The Making of Sunday in the Park with George’, Lapine shared an insider look at the craft and insatiable curiosity behind this memorable work of art.
James Lapine was born in Mansfield, Ohio and lived there until his early teens when his family moved to Stamford, Connecticut. He attended public schools before entering Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania where he majored in History. He went on to get an MFA in Design from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia.
After graduate school, he moved to New York City where he worked part-time as a waiter; a page and tour guide at NBC; a free-lance photographer and graphic designer; and an architectural preservationist for the Architectural League of NY. One of his free-lance jobs was designing the magazine of the Yale School of Drama, yale/theatre. The dean of the School of Drama, Robert Brustein subsequently offered Lapine a full-time job designing all of the printed materials for the School of Drama and the Yale Repertory Theatre as well as a faculty position teaching a course in advertising design.
While at Yale, his students urged him to direct a play during the annual January period when both faculty and students undertook a project outside of their areas of study or expertise. At their suggestion Lapine directed a Gertrude Stein piece, Photograph. The play was five acts, and just three pages in length. Assembling students and friends, it was presented in New Haven and came to the attention of director Lee Breuer who helped arrange for a small performance space in Soho to produce the work for three weeks. The production was enthusiastically received by The New York Times and won Lapine an Obie award. Lapine was then approached to create a new piece for the Music Theatre Group. He wrote and directed a workshop version of Twelve Dreams, a work inspired by a Jungian case history. The play was later presented at the Public Theater and revived by Lincoln Center Theater.
Lapine eventually left the visual arts for a career in the theatre where he has also written and directed the plays Table Settings; Luck, Pluck and Virtue; The Moment When; Fran's Bed and Mrs. Miller Does Her Thing. Among his many other off-Broadway offerings were three Shakespeare productions for the Public Theatre.
On Broadway he has written the book for and directed Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George; Into the Woods; Passion; and the multi-media revue Sondheim on Sondheim. He also directed Merrily We Roll Along as part of Encores at New York City Center. With William Finn he has collaborated on March of the Falsettos and Falsettoland, later presented on twice Broadway as Falsettos; A New Brain; Muscle; and Little Miss Sunshine. He has also directed on Broadway David Henry Hwang’s Golden Child; The Diary of Anne Frank; Michel Legrand’s Amour; The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee; the 2012 revival of Annie, and his stage adaptation of the famous Moss Hart autobiography Act One, which premiered at Lincoln Center Theater on the Beaumont stage.
With Frank Rich he co-produced and also directed the HBO documentary Six by Sondheim for which he received an Emmy nomination and a Peabody award. Lapine wrote the screenplay for the film version of Into the Woods directed by Rob Marshall and the film Custody which he also directed.
His book, Putting it Together: How Stephen Sondheim and I Created Sunday in the Park with George was released in August 2021 and immediately made it to the New York Times bestseller list. He is also completing a documentary In the Company of Rose about the life and times of Rose Styron: the poet, human rights activist and widow of the famed author William Styron. His collaboration with composer Tom Kitt and lyricist Michael Korie, Flying Over Sunset, will premiere December 13th on Broadway for Lincoln Center Theater. He has written the book and directed, collaborating with the celebrated contemporary choreographer Michelle Dorrance.
Lapine has been nominated for twelve Tony Awards winning on three occasions and has received five Drama Desk Awards and the Pulitzer Prize. In 2011, he was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame and in 2015 was the recipient of the Mr. Abbott Award presented by the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers for a lifetime of exceptional achievement in the theatre. Lapine is a member of the Dramatist Guild Council and for the last twenty years has been a mentor for TDF's Wendy Wasserstein Project which introduces the world of theater to a select group of underserved students from New York City public high schools.
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