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, 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 seminal 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 Mantello’s production is basically a David Ives play.
It’s hard to know how to assess this thing fairly, but 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 1972 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 all-timers, Sondheim’s lyrics are delightfully flippant and spiky. And modern: it feels surreal for the guy who wrote West Side Story to be making snide references to Teslas and the works of Damian Hirst. But that’s Sondheim: it was presumably 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, if relatively restrained.
It’s also important to stress that the cast is preposterously talented: Jane Krakowski is 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; US star Denis O’Hare (retained from the show’s 2023 off-Broadway premiere) 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 – style out the absence of songs in the second half.
Combined with Mantello’s stylish direction – quirky minimalism 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 note for the master to bow out on.
Is it a great musical? Well not really. Half of it’s missing and if we’re going to dig into what’s there then ultimately it feels a bit frothy – much fonder and more forgiving of its subjects than the source films were. It would be magnificent if Sondheim went out giving capitalism the finger, but Here We Are is a lot archer than that, really. But as final unfinished works go, it’s pretty bloody good. Here We Are is a really, really great example of half a musical. The luxury casting doesn’t simply flatter flimsy material: what Sondheim actually wrote was very good, and Ives’s second half is hardly a hack job.
It’s worth saying that few of Sondheim’s shows worked perfectly the first time; the dearth of songs is a problem here, but not necessarily an insurmountable one. I wouldn’t dismiss this as a mere curio – we’ll see Here We Are again one day, I imagine.
