Here We Are: Sondheim’s Last Musical Delights London Audiences

Here We Are | National Theatre until 28th June

Sondheim’s final musical Here We Are is playing now at the National Theatre’s Lyttelton. It’s a stylistic, surreal dinner-party musical full of oddities and black humour. Director Joe Mantello (two-time Tony winner for Take Me Out and Assassins) leads a stellar team: David Zinn (Tony-winning designer for The Humans, SpongeBob) on sets and costumes, choreographer Sam Pinkleton (Tony-nominated for Great Comet) shaping the movement, and orchestrator Jonathan Tunick, Sondheim’s longtime musical partner, on the orchestrations.

The show is an adaptation of two Luis Buñuel films: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and The Exterminating Angel. What they have cleverly done is to combine the two films, making them now feature the same characters in both acts.

The first act sees a group of wealthy New York socialites going out to have brunch, and everywhere they go, they can’t get food. For example, they go to Café Everything, which turns out to have nothing! As one character observes, “It should be called Café Nada!” As the waiter sings, “We do expect a little latte later, but we haven’t got a lot of latte now” – it’s a typical Sondheim intricate lyric.

Act 2 moves to the embassy of a slightly dubious ambassador from a fictional country, who is involved in arranging drug deals. They do get a meal, but then find they are trapped and can’t leave while the world is coming to an end outside.

The result is gleefully absurd: defiantly unrealistic in its staging – snow falls indoors, a bear emerges out of the darkness, a stuffed sheep is carried by an actress, and a waiter shoots themself because they haven’t got food to serve! Picture Dinner for One meets Monty Python, with a dash of Waiting for Godot – but Sondheim’s signature poetry underpins all the absurdity.

I saw Here We Are at The Shed in New York before, and this London production feels at once very familiar and fresh. Some roles have new faces and only Tracie Bennett and Denis O’Hare reprise their roles as various waiters and servants. O’Hare being particularly impressive with an impeccable English accent at one point.

Jane Krakowski is a total joy as a veteran of many Broadway musicals and last seen in Schmigadoon, she has impeccable comic timing and wonderful vocals.

This is a first-class cast, and it is stronger than what I saw in New York, which was hardly second-tier, featuring, as it did, David Hyde Pierce! So, a fabulous ensemble, and as one character observes, “and then some!” The high-calibre cast also includes Jesse Tyler Ferguson (from Modern Family), Martha Plimpton delivering killer lines, as well as Richard Fleischman and Rory Kinnear, amongst others. We will never see a cast of this pedigree, an ensemble of principals – each one normally seen playing major roles, delivering this show!

The music and lyrics are vintage Sondheim: there are echoes of his previous shows. However, it is amazing and wonderful that in his nineties, he was still pushing boundaries and testing what musical theatre can be.

He never quite finished it before his death in 2021. Although he did appear on a chat show days before his passing, announcing that the show was ready to go into production. At that time he was calling it Square One. Actor-director Mantello and David Ives kept at it, cutting and polishing after Sondheim passed, so that now his last stage work finally has life.

Sondheim said that he found it difficult to write songs for the second act, and this is honoured in a touching moment when the shoe-fetishist bishop, played by Harry Hadden-Paton, announces that the piano has stopped playing. He has another lovely tender scene with Krakowski, which is a meditation on mortality.

Mantello’s staging is near-identical to New York, but the National’s Lyttelton Theatre makes it slightly tighter and more resonant, as you really feel every silence, and every laugh lands. British audiences have always responded to Sondheim’s irony and dry wit.

It’s not perfect, it was never meant to be, and half a musical is half a musical, after all. However, it is absurd, audacious, and strangely tender. Sondheim fans (that’s me, shamelessly) will cherish it. It’s like getting a postcard from the great composer’s final years.

For new audiences, it’s an oddball fantasy that somehow still resonates. Here We Are indeed, all of us, once more, at the table with Sondheim, and it’s a delight.

[Image Credits | Marc Brenner]

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