Latest news with #HereWeAre
Telegraph
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Here We Are: Sondheim's swansong is like meeting an old friend
When Stephen Sondheim died in November 2021, he left behind a body of work that had collectively transformed the American musical and that ensured his pre-eminence among composer-lyricists of the post-war era. He also bequeathed us, tantalisingly, one last effort – unveiled in New York two years later: a reimagining and yoking-together of two films by that arch surrealist Luis Buñuel: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) and The Exterminating Angel (1962). Here We Are, as it was finally titled, had been stuck in development hell for much of the prior decade. What enabled its completion was the brainwave - amid the confinement of the pandemic - by the director Joe Mantello (securing the interest of the book-writer David Ives) that maybe an 'unfinished' score enabled a coherent artistic vision; a deficit could be a creative end-point. So, the first half has tunes a-plenty while the supply runs dry-ish after the interval, when the principal characters – a cohort of the well-heeled, modernised and plutocrat-Americanised in the screen-to-stage transfer – progress from being continually frustrated in their search for culinary gratification to being nightmarishly trapped in an ambassador's salon after a meal. It works on paper (the characters are mysteriously incapable of connecting with the outside world, so why wouldn't music cease too?) and accords with the narrative's hallucinogenic logic. It's a tough proposition in practice, even so. But watching the UK premiere at the NT (with Mantello directing a mainly new cast) to me the tension the conceit creates – is this legit or a cheap, fraudulent fix? – makes this anti-climactic coda the perfect Sondheim epitaph. He began his career as the lyricist on West Side Story, which challenged received ideas about a Broadway musical – and ploughed an experimental furrow thereafter. How apt, in a way, that at a moment when we're glutted with musicals, Sondheim's poignant last gesture should ask whether the sound of no-music can contribute to the form, too. And just as the device concentrates attention on the dialogue and a discussion of death, the slide towards silence flags a wider malaise about the capacity of song and dance to distract us; more than in the films, the production accentuates a mood of end-times. Beside food scarcity, ominous rumbles cut the arid atmosphere and the twinning of the stories ferments a sense of impending uprising. That possibly makes the evening sound heavy-going but, even if the chatter drags in the second half, it's mainly light on its feet and served with visual flair and orchestral heft. Exploring group dynamics and satirising facile types was long Sondheim's forte, and in revisiting familiar ground, the music also invites comparison with past triumphs. The jaunty extended opening number (The Road) has a Latin American shuffle that recalls biting, buoyant moments in Company – and in delectable ditties by put-upon serving staff (the brilliantly multi-roling Denis O'Hare and Tracie Bennett), we get lashings of the old wit and word play we'd expect, and a strong in-jokey soupçon of Sweeney Todd. Do we crave more? Yes, with the exception of Richard Fleeshman as a dreamboat soldier, plying a lushly romantic (quirkily interrupted) ballad and a droll sustained cri de coeur from a bishop (Harry Hadden-Paton), the male cast – including Rory Kinnear as a gruff (somewhat waywardly accented) billionaire – can seem under-used. And I'd love to hear more from Jane Krakowski as his ditzy wife and Martha Plimpton as a brash 'entertainment entity' exec (hats off, too, to Chumisa Dornford-May, as a comically headstrong anti-capitalist). We can carp until doomsday about what it lacks but it's a boon to have it over here. Sure, it's no masterpiece, but a minor-league swansong from a giant of musicals is still a major deal. Until June 20;
Irish Independent
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Rick O'Shea: One of America's smartest political minds makes a brave admission about Israel
Ta-Nehisi Coates admits he has a problem with an article he wrote in 2014 in The Message, while Seán Hewitt's Open, Heaven feels like a classic and What a Time to be Alive by Jenny Mustard will appeal to Sally Rooney fans Today at 21:30 Don't ever let anyone tell you that turning 50 is hard; turning 50 is a doddle. For me, it involved an eight-month series of arm-chancing trips to New York, Portugal and Iceland after I made sad puppy eyes at my impossibly lovely and soft-hearted wife. This week I turned 52, an age that is so unremarkable it seems pointless to mention it, let alone celebrate it. That has never stopped me before. I went to London and thoroughly enjoyed Conor McPherson's new play The Brightening Air at the Old Vic, was baffled but sort of entertained anyway by Here We Are, Stephen Sondheim's last musical – or half a musical if you want to be accurate – at the National Theatre, and I finally got to see the joyfully fun and incredibly complicated staging of My Neighbour Totoro.
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Here We Are, National Theatre, review: Stephen Sondheim musical is more Severance than sing-a-long
Here We Are review and star rating: ★★★★ Stephen Sondheim's final musical is nothing like his most famous works – in fact, it's barely a musical at all, but perhaps we shouldn't be surprised. As Here We Are writer David Ives remarked, the legend relished in challenging his loyal followers with reinvention. 'Sondheim makes people crazy in all kinds of interesting and different ways.' An absurd comedy about a bunch of rich Americans who try to go for brunch but can't seem to get served, Here We Are is a barmy satire with the existential trappings of a Beckett play. Proferring a message about overconsumption, it is certainly no gentle nostalgia vehicle like Old Friends, the blast through Sondheim's most famous tunes that scored a five-star review from City AM in 2023. Inspired by Luis Buñuel's absurdist films The Exterminating Angel and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, after Sondheim died aged in 2021 aged 91, there was controversy over whether the piece should be staged at all. Would this super experimental show dent Sondheim's legacy as perhaps the 20th century's greatest composer and lyricist, the man behind Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd and Into The Woods? Unlikely: the reality is that even if Here We Are ruffles the feathers of Sondheim purists, it wouldn't be the first time. Many of his shows didn't do big box office numbers or become classics for years after release. We meet a highly-strung group of yuppies, including a plastic surgeon, an ambassador and an industrialist. Wealthy central couple Leo and Marianne Brink, played by Rory Kinnear and Jane Krakowski, struggle to land a brunch booking for their group, and things go awry when the six friends become entangled with the radical left-wing group Prada – 'not the shoes' – and are taken down an absurdist rabbit hole not dissimilar to the Apple TV show Severance, where dream sequences become indistinguishable from reality. As a satire on wealth, Here We Are has some hilarious and pertinent bits, including the lady cloning her dogs so her fluffy friends are with her no matter which country she's in, and the insufferable chef who goes from serving French Deconstructionist cuisine to Post-Deconstructive, where 'everything is actually what it is.' Ives finds his biting point in how desperately out of touch these people are with reality. 'I want things to be what they seem and not what they are,' groans one character in one of the show's many interesting meta parts. It also works as a fascinating physical piece. Choreographer Sam Pinkleton, alongside director Joe Mantello and set and costume designer David Zinn spent seven years in development to orchestrate this frankly incredibly weird show, in which characters speak and move in time with Sondheim's accompaniment, like characters in an old black and white movie. Much of the comedy is mined from Fawlty Towers-style farcical faffing – but on a grand, complex scale. It's the type of tomfoolery that might look silly but is pulled off vanishingly rarely. As for Sondheim, he must have loved Ives' script. As for his ditties, they serve as a function to enable the story rather than existing to entertain us in and of themselves. Songs including Here We Are (Overture), The Road and Waiter's Song are more a final reminder of the legend's skill at employing music to bolster the plot rather than songs that stand alone. One audience member who sat near me joked that the songs and accompaniments were stitched together from bits of music he'd left on his cutting room floor from other productions, but I don't think that's necessarily a criticism. They add to the production's bags of natural charm. In the main, it's just refreshing to see something this surrealist and bonkers getting a mainstream staging. Here We Are plays at the until 28 June Error while retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data
Daily Mail
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
PATRICK MARMION reviews Here We Are at the National Theatre: Top-notch cast... but Sondheim's send-off is flimsy and forgettable
Here We Are (Lyttelton, National Theatre) Verdict: Stuck Full marks for effort. The National Theatre has really pushed the boat out for the last show by the late god of musical theatre, Stephen Sondheim, who died in 2021. The posthumous production – which premiered in Manhattan's Shed theatre in 2023 – stars Tony award-winner Jane Krakowski (30 Rock), Jesse Tyler Ferguson (Modern Family) and leading British thesp Rory Kinnear in a top-notch cast of 17. But not even they, nor a stunningly inventive and lavishly executed stage design, can make this mongrel sing. The programme tells, at length, how 'Steve' often gave up on this fusion of two surrealist films by Spanish-Mexican director Luis Bunuel – 1972's The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie and 1962's The Exterminating Angel. The first follows a group of middle-class Frenchies (reinvented as pampered Californians) in search of a restaurant. The second concerns a group of friends (the Californians again) stuck in a mansion. The material is breathtakingly thin – as flimsy as its satirical targets. It centres on hedge fund billionaire Leo Brink (Kinnear) and his bubble-brained trophy wife Marianne (Krakowski), who go looking for brunch after a surprise visit from a plastic surgeon friend (Ferguson) and his film agent wife (Martha Plimpton). They are joined by sundry cartoon characters, including a shoe fetishist bishop (Harry Hadden-Paton), before they all wind up getting trapped in that mansion. Tellingly – and unlike most Sondheim musicals – it's not sung through. The programme suggests this is because Steve got stuck. But his collaborators (book writer David Ives and director Joe Mantello) wouldn't let him drop it. 'We had to understand the absence of music WAS the score,' they explain. The result is fitful, burbling and totally forgettable. Early sonic capering yields a song about not getting a decaf mocha latte. Elsewhere, Krakowski sings about her love of surfaces (fabrics, etc). Nothing sticks, and two-and-a-half hours proves a long haul without an engaging plot, characters we care about, memorable tunes, emotional depths, or pleasing lyrics (at one point 'it' is rhymed, audaciously, with... 'it'). Wearing a gorgeous blue silk negligee, Krakowski's Marianne is a blissful airhead who's had her dogs cloned so she can have identical pooches in every home. Ferguson snorts a little coke but has even less to sing about. Kinnear struts about manfully in a Tom Ford tracksuit and giant, black-framed specs but is eventually reduced to belching, thanks to indigestion. It's curious to think that on this very stage, in 2010, he delivered one of the most celebrated Hamlets in living memory. Even with David Zinn's stunning set transforming a white box into opulent tableaux, Here We Are remains an empty pageant. Sondheim may not be everyone's dry martini, but he deserves to be remembered for something else. Until June 28 This study of loss and grief is the stage equivalent of extreme sports An Oak Tree (Young Vic, London) By Veronica Lee Verdict: Trick or treat Rating: To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Tim Crouch's groundbreaking two-hander, the Young Vic is staging it anew. Actually, every time it's performed it's being staged anew, because playing opposite the writer is a different guest actor at each show. A guest who comes to the stage without having previously read the play. It's the theatrical equivalent of extreme sports but — when it works — a chance to show some serious acting chops. At the performance I attended, the celebrity was Sope Dirisu (from Gangs Of London). Other stars appearing in this run are Jessie Buckley, Mark Gatiss, David Tennant and Indira Varma. The framing device is that Crouch is a stage hypnotist and the guest actor is Andy, whose young daughter he killed in a road accident. Andy comes to his show seeking answers, solace, perhaps closure as they both recall the tragic event. As Crouch flits between cringingly bad magician and master of ceremonies, the relationship between him and the grieving parent builds, layer by layer. It's very meta and complex — tricksy, even — as Crouch/the hypnotist directs the actor, feeding lines through their earphones, whispering in their ear or handing them a few pages of script to read, as well as breaking the fourth wall to address the audience. This can make the pacing uneven. Crouch's play is a study of loss, guilt and the power of suggestion; it's funny and moving by turns, and a chance to see art being created in real time, as Crouch interacts with his guest. But so much depends on the second performer grabbing the chance to shine — and the technology working properly. Crouch's microphone failed in the show I saw, further interrupting the flow and leaving Dirisu — normally such a commanding actor — looking rather lost. Until May 24 Two Pints (Belgrade Theatre, Coventry) By Patrick Marmion Verdict: Good craic Oscar Wilde once said: 'Work is the curse of the drinking classes.' That's very much the sentiment in this stage adaptation of a short story by another Irish writer, Roddy Doyle. Two Pints, about a pair of working-class, bar-room laureates in Dublin, was first staged in a pub in the Irish capital in 2017. It's audaciously sedentary — not to mention a minefield of 'F' and 'C' bombs… Alas Smith And Jones meets Mrs Brown's Boys. The duo's beery blarney has them chew over Nigella Lawson's prospects as a pro footballer, the dangers of reading the Koran, and the mystery of why all food seems to be female (chickens, sheep, cows). There's a good deal of absent-minded sexism, identifying women as 'bords', but it's never misogynistic and, interestingly, female titters rang loudest at the performance I saw. Excellent jokes include one about digital prostate testing. But another, about paedophilia in Ireland, prompted gasps of discomfort. Anthony Brophy, as the pasty-faced, skinny fella whose father is dying in hospital, looks like he's staggered in off O'Connell Street. Pink-faced Sean Kearns, as his hard-boiled but sympathetic buddy, seems welded to his stool. Both could use a more intimate staging, and although Sara Joyce's amiable production, in a hyper realistic boozer, is little more than a two-hour chin-wag, I for one enjoyed the craic.
Time Out
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Here We Are
Stephen Sondheim didn't finish his final musical Here We Are, something we can easily determine by the fact there aren't any songs in the second half. He did however give his blessing for it to be performed – he wasn't on his deathbed at the time or anything, but having reached the age of 91 with at least six songs left to write for a show he'd been working on for over a decade, I guess he knew this was likely to be its final form. And so here we are. Sondheim's last gasp is a relatively breezy mash-up of the plots of two Luis Buñuel films, with music and lyrics by the great man and book by US author David Ives – that is to say the second half of Joe Montello's production is basically an Ives play. It's hard to know how to assess this thing fairly, but I think it's reasonable to say that if you've snagged a ticket you're aware of the various caveats about the show's composition and are prepared to be quite indulgent, so let's approach it from that general perspective. The first half roughly corresponds to Buñuel's film The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and follows a group of ghastly rich people as they try and score some brunch, failing ever more weirdly at each attempt. If there aren't necessarily any obvious all-timers, Sondheim's lyrics are delightfully flip and spiky. And modern: it feels somewhat surreal for the guy who wrote West Side Story to have snide references to Teslas and the works of Damian Hirst. But that's Sondheim: it was presumably much harder for him to finish songs in his final years, but what he did finish feels startlingly fresh. Enormous credit must go to Ives. Not only did he have to finish the show on his own, but his transposition of Buñuel's mid-century satires into a coherent contemporary America-set narrative works brilliantly – deft, funny and perceptive. It's also important to stress that the cast is preposterously talented: Jane Krakowski is - within her comfort zone - one of the funniest actors alive today, and has a ball here as space cadet Marianne; Martha Pimpton is a hoot as uber-Karen Claudia; retained US star Denis O'Hare is wonderful as a succession of servants and waiters; the Brits keep their end up with Rory Kinnear's fine turn as velour-encrusted Main Rich Guy Leo Brink, while major rising star Chumisa Dornford-May is excellent as Leo and Marianne's anarchist daughter Fritz. Above all they're great stage actors who can by and large pull off the absence of songs in the second half. Combined with Mantello's stylish direction – quirkily minimalist in the first half, intentionally opulent in the second, which is based on 1962's The Exterminating Angel – and the fact that Buñuel's darkly surreal class satires remains relevant and cool, and it's an extremely respectable not for the master to bow out on. Is it a great musical? Well not really, half of it's missing and it ultimately feels a bit frothy - much fonder and more forgiving than the source films. But as the final unfinished work of a 91-year-old it's pretty bloody spectacular. The luxury casting doesn't flatter the material: we all know exactly what it is, and what it is is good as far as it goes. And it's worth saying that few of Sondheim's shows have worked perfectly the first time; the dearth of songs is a problem, but not necessarily an insurmountable one; I certainly wouldn't dismiss this as a curio – we'll see Here We Go
