Latest news with #TheDiscreetCharmoftheBourgeoisie
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
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
