Here We Are review – posthumous Stephen Sondheim musical is hit-and-miss

With much anticipation, Stephen Sondheim’s final musical, Here We Are, is making its debut after Sondheim’s death in 2021. Enjoyable and necessary as further evidence of Sondheim’s breadth, the full work feels severed from its radical origins and potential.

The blended musical adaptation is based on two surrealist films from the Spanish-Mexican director Luis Buñuel: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and The Exterminating Angel,both films providing a scathing critique of the upper crust.

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In Sondheim and book writer David Ives’ version, a group of wealthy Americans pursue a classic Sunday brunch that is ever out of reach. Leo Brink (Bobby Cannavale) and wife Marianne (Rachel Bay Jones) are taken to a surprise brunch by their equally high-powered peers. There’s entertainment executive Claudia (Amber Gray); her plastic surgeon husband Paul (Jeremy Shamos); and Raffael (Steven Pasquale), ambassador to the fictional country of Miranda. Fritz (Micaela Diamond), Marianne’s sister, has financed a revolution behind the group’s back – an uprising that ultimately traps the crew in the Miranda embassy.

Accompanied by Sondheim’s airy melody, Marianne muses about “what a perfect day” it is. But the group is unable to secure a morsel of food, despite having the combined wealth of a small country.

At every turn, shenanigans ensue – of the morbid, darkly comedic variety. At Cafe Everything, a restaurant boasting its infinite menu, an anxious waiter decries the lack of food before killing himself offstage. The group finds no luck at the next restaurant – a French bistro – where the staff is holding a funeral for the dearly departed chef. Ives also builds out the world of frivolous indifference. In one flighty moment, Claudia asks, “What’s up with the water today?” as if such access is a universal given. Their intense bliss is captured in a string of increasingly blase and hilarious reactions to the musical’s mounting death count.

Sondheim, with arrangement from Alexander Gemignani, emphasizes the disquiet nature of the so-called faultless day. The music is punctured by dissonance, knocks, and the off-whistle. Thoughtful repetition further underlines the group’s robotic attempt to get brunch versus witnessing the end-of-the-world around them.

Here We Are captures the chasm of ignorance separating the haves and the have-nots. Like Here We Are’s ensemble, white, wealthy people have always enjoyed the myth of “before”. The “before” of George Floyd’s murder. The “before” of the pandemic. The fairytale that justice, equity and the riches of life exist to all who want to experience it. But so many of us have lived in the “after,” the full, bracing knowledge that institutional racism exists and that the US empire has always been in decline.

The first act includes the full absurdity (and inevitable humor) in audacious displays of wealth. Sondheim’s lyrics, in characteristic brilliance, feature clever wordplay and melodrama, including rhymes about vodka martinis and saffron omelettes. Director Joe Mantello seamlessly puppeteers the cycle of outrageous scenarios from restaurant to restaurant. Here We Are’s excellent cast stands to attention, particularly Diamond, Jones and David Hyde Pierce as a job-hunting bishop. Tracie Bennett and Denis O’Hare are essential chameleons, playing the various wait staff throughout the musical’s restaurants.

But the second act loses some of the meticulous chaos that buoyed the first. Unable to leave the Miranda embassy, the dinner guests devolve into their typical antics as they struggle to survive.

The lack of momentum is not because of the musical’s incomplete nature (Sondheim died before the musical’s technical finish, but gave permission for its production). But the musical becomes more about a salon between the characters as they reflect on their complicity and evilness. Ives spent Act 1 emphasizing everyone’s repulsive nature: Raffael is a sexist pig, Claudia makes tired jokes about Fritz’s name change. But the musical seems to lack a higher calling, with characters declaring what they learned from the quarantine (provided via awkward interlude).

It’s an indulgent end. Characters have been allowed to fully roll around in their foulness (Leo fully confesses to murdering the parents of Colonel Martin (Francois Battiste, one of the show’s few Black characters)). But Here We Are lacks the audacious ending to justify the chicanery of earlier. Interestingly enough, the characters of Here We Are are not dissimilar to the musical’s mostly white audience – the kind of theatergoers who can pay ample for exclusive tickets to Sondheim’s posthumous release. The quarantine in the “room” isn’t far off from the early days of the pandemic, as celebrities compared penthouses to jail.

Here We Are has the potential to be a mirror, in true satirical nature. But instead, it ends with a curtain, a closed circuit with the final note: “The world is pretty messed up.” Indeed it is.