Review: ‘Here We Are’ opens off-Broadway, Sondheim’s final, life-loving musical

NEW YORK — As his last musical “Here We Are” confirms, Stephen Sondheim died happy, at the top of his lyrical and compositional game and clearly in love.

“To love is to live” was a Sondheim creed. So the chance to sit in a theater seat at The Shed in New York and hear not just the words “Shakespeare” and “Tesla” sharing a lyric, but cascades of beautiful new Sondheim music spilling from the stage, with a roaring sense of late-in-life optimism cutting through Sondheim’s natural cynicism, is about as fulfilling an experience as I could ever imagine.

Especially when given a production, directed by Joe Mantello, orchestrated by Jonathan Tunick and conducted by Alexander Gemignani, filled with deeply emotional actors who understand that to honor Sondheim is to eschew reverence while performing his work at the highest possible level. Especially its crucial internal contradictions.

“Here We Are,” which features a book by David Ives, is based on two surrealist films by Luis Buñuel: “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” about a group of rich urbanites trying to find a place to eat dinner, and the more macabre “The Exterminating Angel,” wherein mostly the same bunch of rich people go to a dinner party but find themselves strangely unable to leave. Perhaps they are no longer alive?

The piece was clearly unfinished, musically, when Sondheim died in 2021. Act 2, almost all book, lacks numbers Sondheim surely would have added. So what? The show is what it is. To natter on about that is as absurd as complaining about Act 2 of Lorraine Hansberry’s “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window.” These final works are capstone gifts from great theatrical geniuses. The American theater can be pathetically slow at recognizing their worth — look at the shabby New York treatment of Arthur Miller’s “Finishing the Picture” — but, thank god, this production has done right by Sondheim’s final effort, with the design work from David Zinn and Natasha Katz poking gentle fun at this pretentious Hudson Yards venue.

Sondheim would have loved that.

In Act 1, which lampoons what Sondheim liked to call “The Blob” — the chattering entitled for whom he had much disdain in life — the actors Rachel Bay Jones, Bobby Cannavale, Tracie Bennett, Steven Pasquale have fun at the expense of pretentious eateries and the New Yorkers who fight for influence therein. The satire is rich — Sondheim rhymes Lamborghinis and Vodkatinis and the server at all the restaurants the crew visits is viscerally played by Denis O’Hare. But the actual heart of the music, which has lyrical flights and melodic motifs that recall both “Sweeney Todd” and “Into the Woods,” has soaring swells that insist on a kind of optimism Sondheim found in later life and that also was so clearly manifest in “Road Show.”

“Are We Not Blessed?” goes one lyric. “Buy the perfect day for me!” goes another line. “Buy” is the joke, the lust for the “perfect” feels more like the composer’s true feeling. One of the songs sung by Jones recalls “Who Will Buy?” from “Oliver.” It is so much in love with life. How great to hear that from a man who was composing this show just before his own end; he followed Ives’ satirical bent throughout this surely quixotic project, but he simultaneously expressed his awareness of the preciousness of life.

Toward the end of Act 1, we meet a young soldier (played by the gorgeously voiced Jin Ha) who arrives at the weird dinner party and declares his love for Fritz (the superb Micaela Diamond), a young millennial whom the show lampoons for both attacking and benefiting from her own privilege. (It’s very cathartic for us oldsters, good for Mr. S.) The love song he sings to her is unspeakably gorgeous:

“It’s the end of the world. There is nothing but you. I’ve been looking for love all my life. I’ve no farther to go. I want only to be with you, live with you, die with you. That much I know.”

And if there is one stanza in one song that encapsulates this show and its worth, there you have it. Its clarified, minimalist, definitive beauty leaps down your throat and into your heart.

Still to come is David Hyde Pierce, playing a bishop with ideas on life after death and achieving remarkable emotional intensity. There is also much fine work throughout from Francois Battiste, Amber Gray and Jeremy Shamos. There is so much, and yes there is so much to wish for, too. Alas, none of us go on forever.

But “Here We Are.” Thank God. Thank Sondheim.

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(Through Jan. 21, 2024 in The Shed’s Griffin Theater, 545 W. 30th St., New York; www.theshed.org)

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