A talented colleague of mine and long time Sondheim fan, Samuel Eli Shepherd joins a Sondheim virgin (me), to review the musical (half musical?) Here We Are.
Satires of the wealthy are having a moment. From The White Lotus to Rian Johnson’s Knives Out films to the miniseries A Murder at the End of the World, viewers are flocking to stories of the ruling class getting their comeuppance on screen. On stage, too, Plautus’ The Haunted House and Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest have been satirizing the wealthy for centuries.
For all the repulsion audiences feel toward the rich and fabulous, they also derive a kind of karmic pleasure from witnessing their downfall: a schadenfreude that has kept this genre popular from ancient Greece to the age of HBO.
Enter Here We Are, a new play premiering at The Shed from September 2023 to January 2024, with book by David Ives and music and lyrics by Broadway legend Stephen Sondheim. After a tumultuous ten-year production process and the death of its beloved composer, the play provides a musical theater take on this evergreen genre.
“Why are we here?” asks Leo Brink (Bobby Cannavale) to his group of shamelessly self-important and obnoxious brunch-going friends. For two hours and 20 minutes, the star-studded clique –made up of Marianne Brink (Rachel Bay Jones), Paul Zimmer (Jeremy Shamos), Claudia Bursik-Zimmer (Amber Gray), Raffael Santello Di Santicci (Steven Pasquale), and Fritz (Micaela Diamond) – try their damnedest to answer the question.
In the first act, based on Buñuel’s 1972 film The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, this group of one-percenters goes out for brunch… or at least they try to. Every time the group sits down for food, a new complication arises preventing them from enjoying their meal.
As the friends search for food, they encounter an absurd cast of characters, including a career-changing bishop with a foot fetish (David Hyde Pierce), a colonel with a mysterious past (Francois Battiste), and even a dancing bear – who all become entangled in the group’s misfortune.
Sondheim passed away in December 2021 having only completed the first act of Here We Are. As a result, Ives took charge of the second act, which is an adaptation of a different Buñuel film, The Exterminating Angel, and sees the would-be brunchers even further trapped by their own folly.
Here We Are is significant both for its timely subject matter, and because it stands as the final project of America’s most beloved musical theater composer, Stephen Sondheim.
But after a decade of revision, rewriting, and building expectations among an adoring fanbase, does Here We Are earn its place in the Sondheim canon, or is the final result an unfinished cash-grab capitalizing on the late composer’s name?
Thoughts From a Sondheim First-Timer: Giulia
I cheated. There, I said it. I had never seen a Sondheim show before, and I felt like I had to do my homework beforehand. So I read the synopsys (and maybe a couple reviews) of Here We Are on my way to The Shed. By the time I sat down in the theater, I knew I had signed up to meet the love child of Broadway musicals and absurdist theater. I came prepared.
What I got was an Oscar Wilde meets Pirandello meets Beckett meets Baldurs’s Gate 3 sort of play. And yes, there’s a bear. And yes, there’s some sort of (short lived, quite hallucinatory) romance involving said bear.
When a colonel (François Battiste) and a lieutenant (Jin Ha) break into Osteria Zeno, the third restaurant the group of friends attempts to have brunch at, the fourth wall is not just broken but entirely shattered, and you get metatheatre at its best.
“We are all in a play, on a stage, in a theater,” realizes the lieutenant at one point. Suddenly, the lights come up. You turn to face the person sitting next to you, and you even have enough time to exchange an awkward smile and mouth “what the fuck.” For a few minutes, the characters are hyper aware they only exist as, well, characters. And you, too, are reminded this is all fake. Throughout the entire musical, Fritz warns the end of the world is coming. But what if the end of the world is just the end of the play?
This is where Beckett comes in. It’s Endgame all over again. The key components are there: the sense of doom, the eternal forgetfulness, the characters who are like pawns in a game of chess, their repetitive actions and movements on the stage/chessboard meticulously studied so they can finally break free. So they can learn the lesson that Beckett’s Hamm speaks at the end of Endgame: “well, there we are, there I am, that’s enough.”
If you, like me, are willing to approach the play with zero context (besides a little bit of Googling) and an English Literature degree (or just a passion for the classics and an obsession with spotting references and allusions in everything you see), be assured Here We Are will be food for thought.
Thoughts From a Sondheim Veteran: Sam
I am a Sondheim superfan. Merrily We Roll Along, Company, and Sweeney Todd provided the soundtrack to my adolescence, so I was happy to hear the composer’s familiar lyrical genius materialize in the first act. “We do expect a little latte later but we haven’t got a lot of latte now,” sings a flustered waiter at Cafe Everything, which has run out of every ingredient. Earlier, Fritz raps about her nihilism with the lyrical density of “Not Getting Married Today.”
At the same time, it is jarring to hear Sondheim’s classical, dense musical theater style embrace modern-day sensibilities. I never thought I would hear America’s most treasured theater composer include “Fuck” or “Boobies” into his lyrics. The material, skewering modern-day capitalism with an absurdist lens, sometimes clashes with his grand, intelligent style. It’s as if Shakespeare were to write a season of Arrested Development in iambic pentameter.
Likewise, for all these nuggets of pure Sondheim magic, there is also the overwhelming sense that this story is incomplete. The second act, written by Ives alone, hardly includes any music, perhaps out of fear of living up to the audience’s high expectations of Sondheim. That’s fine and all, but while the first act is a clear critique of the bourgeoisie, the second act is a befuddled mess with no clear message. Perhaps the play would have been better presented as just the first act alone.
Standouts from the cast are Rachel Bay Jones, who infuses the ditzy Marianne Brink with a sweetness that almost eclipses her vanity. Micaela Diamond also shines with comedic timing as the nihilistic Fritz: a character that seems like a composite of every old person’s stereotypes about Generation Z. Other characters in the ensemble cast, including Amber Grey’s Claudia and David Hyde Pierce’s priest, feel underwritten in comparison. Talent cannot substitute character development, and even Broadway’s A-list actors can only shine as much as their script allows.
Much like the cast’s experiences at brunch, Here We Are promises a lot of ambitious ideas in fancy dressing, but most substance gets lost in the delivery. A few bites of delicious Sondheim magic might be enough to whet a theater fan’s appetite. However, you’ll leave hungry for something more substantial and a lingering sense that your meal was not quite complete.
Giulia Leo 