In May 1985, Sunday in the Park with George opened at the Booth, and was hailed as a theatrical breakthrough by the then drama critic of The New York Times. Indeed, it was such a breakthrough that it could not be contained by a single review. Week after week, some further significance in the work was discovered and discussed in the paper’s arts pages; every Sunday was a Sunday in the Times with George; it broke all records as Broadway’s longest-running review. The effect was to keep a steady stream of traffic heading to the box-office—not enough for the show to recoup its investment but enough to let it stagger on for a year and catch the eye of the Pulitzer jury, which gave it the prize for 1985. I’m told that at a Times editorial meeting shortly afterwards there was consternation that the paper hadn’t won a single Pulitzer that year. Someone said: “But we did. For Drama.”

The Times has just won another Pulitzer Prize in Drama, with the first musical to take the award since Sunday. Students of the constantly accelerating trajectory of contemporary celebrity will note that they pulled this one off in a fifth of the time: the Times had to work Sunday for almost a year; they stitched up the Pulitzer for Rentin little more than a month, a month filled with background features on its deceased author’s childhood friends and think-pieces pondering from every conceivable angle its