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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;
The Guardian
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Here We Are review – Sondheim's desperate diners have a double helping of Buñuel
Stephen Sondheim's final musical is a passion project in more ways than one. An adaptation of two films by Luis Buñuel, it reflects his lifelong love of cinema. Sondheim began mulling over the idea more than four decades ago (with playwright-director James Lapine) and started working on it almost a decade before he died in 2021. This production's programme notes speak of its development as a slow process with email exchanges between Sondheim, director Joe Mantello and book writer David Ives. A parting gift from Sondheim, left in draft form, it makes its European premiere after a run in New York in 2023 – two actors from that production are joined by an otherwise new cast. It is full of adventurous imagination, with some signature Sondheim sparks, but the trouble spots are still clear to see. Its plot is a blended rearrangement of the 1972 social satire The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, in which a group of idle rich types make plans for dinner which are repeatedly foiled, and The Exterminating Angel (1962), about the aftermath of a party in a house where the servants have fled and the diners are mysteriously trapped. The first act is based on the former film, the second largely on the latter. Mantello's production begins energetically with wryly satirical humour about the charmed lives of the 1%. There are funny exchanges in the first restaurant they visit, Cafe Everything, which falls woefully short of its name. Subsequent restaurant scenes are a pale reflection, bordering on farce, and where The Discreet Charm is filled with surreal hauntings and dreams within dreams, this does not translate with the same air of intrigue on stage. The actors are vibrant nonetheless, though some are wobbly singers. Paulo Szot, as ambassador of the imaginary South American nation Miranda, has an impressive operatic depth to his voice and Chumisa Dornford-May, who plays the revolutionary Fritz – a trustafarian who is given an unconvincing romance with a soldier – is a strong singer, too, while Rory Kinnear is fun as the arrogant Leo Brink. But as the show travels from movement to stasis, with emphatic repetition that is as existential as it is literal, it falters in momentum and brings longueurs, despite urgent warnings about the end of the world. Musically, the sound is unmistakably Sondheim's but there is no one great song, not even one memorable song. There is heartiness and humour but little of Sondheim's usually intimate or penetrating psychology. Lyrics contain some good satire but also banal rhymes such as 'Ladies and gents before we dine / Let us thank the lord for cheese and wine'. Recitative with deliberate dissonance seems strained at times. The unravelling after the dinner of the second act gains significance in its metaphor and becomes a dystopia in a drawing room: these spoiled rich people's inertia leads to their own imprisonment once the servants have left. But the class satire is not potent enough. The couples speak in disparaging ways about the servants who, in the film, seem quietly fulminating (one even speaks of her hate of Jesus) but who do not have the same alienation and contained rage here. They are comical stock figures without sharp edges until we get to the ambassador's home when his butler bluntly spells out his frustrations. If the script and music lack fizz, there are at least the visual thrills and spills of David Zinn's set, with a blinding luminosity giving the effect of a hallucination, and the realist setting of the last act in the ambassador's opulent home abounding with surreal edges. Is this whole scenario a dream in the vein of Jean-Paul Sartre's Huis Clos, a play in which hell really is other people when they become stuck in the same room for eternity? Here We Are should leave you scratching your head but for all its interesting ideas on life and death, rich and poor, it melts away rather too quickly afterwards. At the Lyttelton, National Theatre, London, until 28 June
