Defining the Relationship

American Theatre – March 2014: In the basement office where he presides over the bustling activities of New York City’s not-for-profit Lincoln Center Theater, Andre Bishop tells a story about Sunday in the Park with George that sounds downright comical.
The current artistic director of LCT formerly held the same post at Playwrights Horizons, the Off-Broadway nonprofit that commissioned Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s 1984 musical about George Seurat. “When it was announced that Stephen Sondheim, until then a commercial Broadway composer, was coming to us Off Broadway at Playwrights Horizons, we got enormous criticism that we had sold out,” he recalls. “I remember thinking, ‘If you think this musical about a pointillist painter is us selling out, you’re crazy.’ But people tried to stop us from getting whatever government money we were getting at the time, because they thought we were straying from the path of right. That would be unimaginable today.”