‘Here We Are’ Review: The Last Sondheim, Cool and Impossibly Chic

Stephen Sondheim had a genius for style. Some of his finest works had been tailored from very area of interest sources like penny dreadfuls (“Sweeney Todd”), epistolary novels (“Passion”) and Roman comedies (“A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum”). Leaning onerous into their particular types, he mined their expressive potential in songs that might hardly be improved and by no means sounded alike.

Still, for him and for others, surrealism was typically a style too far. Musical theater is surreal sufficient already. (Why did that taciturn man abruptly begin singing? Who are these dancing girls in lingerie?) Building a present on a willfully irrational supply dangers doubling down on the weirdness, resulting in “Huh?” outcomes like Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Cats” and Sondheim’s personal “Anyone Can Whistle.”

So as we waited what appeared like a long time for what would become his final musical, by no means fairly realizing if he’d ditched it or not, the dribbles of data he and his collaborators let drop advised that the brand new present — finally titled “Here We Are” — is likely to be misbegotten.

Not solely are the 2 Luis Buñuel movies that Sondheim and the playwright David Ives took as their inspiration maximally surrealist, they’re additionally surreal in numerous, seemingly incompatible methods. “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972) is a sunny romp a couple of group of associates who, looking for a meal, are mysteriously unable to search out one. “The Exterminating Angel” (1962) is a a lot darker affair, about a cocktail party nobody can go away. Both films ridicule aristocrats who’re underfed but over-sated: folks for whom nothing is ever sufficient. But one is just like the silky tartness of a lemon meringue pie and the opposite like rooster bones caught in your throat.

The finest good news about “Here We Are,” the combo platter Buñuel musical that opened on Sunday on the Shed, almost two years after Sondheim’s dying in November 2021, is that it justifies the thought of merging these two works and succeeds in making a surrealist musical expressive. In Joe Mantello’s breathtakingly stylish and comely manufacturing, with a solid of can-you-top-this Broadway treasures, it’s by no means lower than a pleasure to look at because it confidently polishes and embraces its illogic. Musically, it’s absolutely if a bit of skimpily Sondheim, and fully worthy of his catalog. That it is usually a bit chilly, solely sometimes shifting in the way in which that tune would ideally permit, might converse to the explanation he had a lot bother writing it.

The first act, about an hour lengthy and with maybe seven numbers — although it’s onerous to depend as a result of they weave out and in of the dialogue — introduces us to Ives’s American variations of Buñuel’s French gourmands from “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.” Leo Brink (Bobby Cannavale) is a crass tycoon and Marianne Brink (Rachel Bay Jones) a society decorator; their Saturday morning is interrupted when 4 of their circle arrive on the couple’s hyper-sleek house, insisting they’ve been invited for brunch.

The interlopers embrace Paul Zimmer (Jeremy Shamos), a plastic surgeon celebrating his 1,000th nostril job, and his spouse, Claudia Bursik-Zimmer (Amber Gray), an agent, she brays, for “a major entertainment entity.” Along with them are Raffael Santello Di Santicci (Steven Pasquale), the horndog ambassador from a Mediterranean nation referred to as Moranda, and Fritz (Micaela Diamond), Marianne’s bitter youthful sister, a revolutionary with champagne tastes.

Ives shortly and amusingly delineates the six with particular and nearly universally obnoxious traits. Raffael, who butchers his English, and Claudia, fast to tug rank, have a weekly assignation behind Paul’s again; Paul and Leo run a drug cartel with Raffael’s ambassadorial help. Fritz is a tablet. As they go on the highway in quest of a meal, accompanied by a Sondheim vamp that begins out marvelously jaunty and ends like water swirling down a drain, every reveals worse and worse traits, aside from Marianne, who is simply too dim to be venal. When she asks her husband to “buy this perfect day” for her, it appears much less acquisitive than sentimental.

The adjustments of surroundings as they go to varied institutions that includes outré waiters (Tracie Bennett and Denis O’Hare) in ever extra ludicrous wigs (by Robert Pickens and Katie Gell) are completed with swift grace on David Zinn’s shiny white field of a set, as neon marquees descend from the flies after which descend additional to type tables or banquettes. (Zinn’s costumes are additionally telegraphic, together with Leo’s velour sweatsuit and Claudia’s sky-high purple Fendis.) The theme-and-variations format is enchanting, permitting Sondheim, the nice puzzler, to deal with songs nearly as anagrams. Eventually, together with three different characters they choose up — a colonel (Francois Battiste), a soldier (Jin Ha) and a bishop (David Hyde Pierce) — the crew lands, by now ravenous, at Raffael’s embassy, the place they dine as Act I ends.

Here the musical hinges into “The Exterminating Angel,” solely as an alternative of a very completely different set of characters (Buñuel’s had been Spanish, dwelling underneath Franco), Ives, in a neat piece of joinery, continues with Leo and Marianne and the others. It is that they who discover it not possible to go away after dinner, and wind up, in Act II, sleeping, bickering and finally preventing over meals scraps as their metaphysical entrapment persists for days. Ives additionally complicates Buñuel’s antifascist, anti-bourgeois glee, wherein plutocrats are uncovered as pigs, by implicating the revolution as nicely; Fritz seems to be much less of a menace to her personal lifestyle than she meant.

Clever as all that’s, the windup has issues, as is true for a lot of new reveals discovering their ultimate form. To make the characters in “Here We Are” worthy of punishment within the second act has meant making them too clearly terrible within the first. Their brutishness all through additionally lets us off Buñuel’s hook: His films are about folks whose sophistication and disposable earnings we should always acknowledge, however “Here We Are,” which generally looks like a butterfly field, is about folks we don’t dare to.

Had Sondheim written extra songs for Act II — there are only a few, bunched originally — that downside may need been eased. In any case, Mantello and Ives determined to reframe the dearth as a possibility. Before his dying, Sondheim apparently agreed with them that the dearth of songs the truth is made structural sense: Once trapped in a repeating nightmare of deprivation, these characters would haven’t any purpose to sing. But then why retain those he’d already written?

Perhaps as a result of the songs he did write are every thing you can need them to be. There are fewer trick rhymes than traditional, however laugh-out-loud jokes nonetheless. A rhapsodic love tune for the soldier and a paean to superficiality for Marianne — “I want things to gleam./To be what they seem/And not what they are” — have the acquainted Sondheimian depth and luster to crystallize complicated insights.

Though we sorely miss that in Act II, and particularly on the tried triple lutz of an ending (which might be two lutzes too many), Ives, the writer of “Venus in Fur” and innumerable intelligent comedies, has performed a lot to compensate. Some of his dialogue scenes — together with a riveting colloquy between the questing Marianne and the questioning bishop — have the form, rhythm and sorrowful wit of a Sondheim tune. (Jones and Pierce are standouts within the wonderful solid.) Also lovingly filling in blanks are the musical supervisor, Alexander Gemignani, and Sondheim’s longtime orchestrator, Jonathan Tunick, who’ve organized themes from the sooner a part of the present as instrumental interludes to take up the slack within the later half.

You can perceive their care. Pending the invention of some unpublished juvenilia or yet one more iteration of the penultimate “Road Show,” that is the final Sondheim musical we are going to ever have. That alone makes the manufacturing historic, a stress that fortunately doesn’t present within the product, which is fleet and flashy. Natasha Katz’s lighting, Tom Gibbons’s sound and Sam Pinkleton’s droll choreography do a whole lot of the heavy lifting for Mantello’s agenda.

More essential, “Here We Are” is as experimental as Sondheim all through his profession needed every thing to be. To swim by way of its currents of echoes of earlier work — some “Anyone Can Whistle,” some “Passion,” some “Merrily We Roll Along” — is to know the characters’ monstrous insatiability. We, too, will all the time need extra, even once we’ve had what by any cheap requirements ought to already be greater than sufficient.

Here We Are
Through Jan. 21 on the Shed, Manhattan; theshed.org. Running time: 2 hours and 20 minutes.