[ad_1]
In September, 2021, two months before Stephen Sondheim died, at the age of ninety-one, he attended a read-through of his then incomplete final musical. Based on two lacerating, Surrealist Luis Buñuel films, “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” and “The Exterminating Angel,” it had, at various times in its decade of development, been called “Buñuel” and a title that Sondheim announced in a television interview—“Square One,” a reference to the work’s preoccupation with recursion and stasis.
Sondheim, a dizzyingly complex lyricist with an unparalleled ear for syncopation and sour-sweet harmonies, could seemingly turn anything into a musical: a 1934 Kaufman and Hart play (“Merrily We Roll Along”), a Victorian penny dreadful (“Sweeney Todd”), a Post-Impressionist painting (“Sunday in the Park with George”). According to David Ives, a comic playwright best known for the claustrophobic “Venus in Fur,” and the director Joe Mantello, who won a Tony for his direction of the 2004 production of Sondheim’s “Assassins,” the composer was still creatively sharp yet somehow unable to make progress on the Buñuel show’s second act. Buoyed by the reading, Ives and Mantello apparently convinced Sondheim that they could complete it by using what he had already written and leaving the second half mostly without songs. The situation itself is surreal: the legendary Sondheim, like Penelope in the Odyssey, weaving and unravelling, promising and procrastinating—and then, after all delaying tactics fail, watching as the tapestry is cut from the loom.
This tapestry, with its associated loose threads, became “Here We Are,” now in a handsome, starry production at the Shed, in Hudson Yards. Simultaneously the last Sondheim musical and the lost one, it contains familiar textures: barbs aimed at his own rarefied social set (there’s tart treatment for those who clone their dogs), a measure of “Company” ’s loving-hurtful friends, and “Merrily” ’s bitter conviction that wealth kills creativity. Despite the multivalent talents of Ives and Mantello, though, the piece, finished without Sondheim, cannot mend the ragged edge torn by his absence.
For the first act, Buñuel’s dream-film about upper-crust corruption, “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” from 1972, has been streamlined and modernized. We meet the brash, tracksuit-wearing one-per-center Leo (Bobby Cannavale) and his daffy wife, Marianne (Rachel Bay Jones), who’s still in her nightgown. It’s midmorning, and they aren’t expecting company. But phone rings, door chimes, in come their dearest friends—a plastic surgeon, Paul (Jeremy Shamos), his power-agent wife, Claudia (Amber Gray), and Raffael (Steven Pasquale), a lustful ambassador from the made-up country of Moranda—all insisting that they’ve been invited for brunch. Marianne’s sister, Fritz (Micaela Diamond), a self-styled anticapitalist revolutionary, is borne along by the pack, which proceeds, in absurd(ist) fashion, to a series of cafés, none of which, for some reason, can feed them.
The set designer David Zinn presents Leo and Marianne’s apartment as a gleaming white box, as glassy as an Apple store, with a knockoff Damien Hirst dot painting in a corner. (Zinn also designed the costumes, and Hirst’s gelato-bright shades show up in the characters’ clothes, like Leo’s frutti di bosco tracksuit.) At the klatsch’s first stop, Café Everything, there’s absolutely nothing in the kitchen. “I am so sorry, Madam,” the waiter (Denis O’Hare, as slimy as two eels) sings in the show’s crispest, patteriest number: “We do expect a little latte later / But we haven’t got a lotta latte now.” (I sat in a row with other critics; this lyric prompted a great bustling of pens.)
Along the way, the group is serenaded by a grieving waitress (Tracie Bennett, her voice beautifully weary) and joined by a rat-a-tat colonel (François Battiste) and a lieutenant (the exhilarating Jin Ha), who instantly falls for Fritz. Marianne remains the most blithe of the posse—even clues that society is breaking down around them can’t diminish her enthusiasm. “Buy this day for us, sweetheart!” she sings to Leo. After each café, Leo tells his entourage, “Back to square one, everybody into the car!” Mantello articulates these resets by lining the characters up on the blank white stage, flanked by dioramas of a grassy field. It’s an image borrowed from Buñuel, but it also makes the adventurers seem as if they’re off to see the Wizard. Marianne, in a baby-blue silk peignoir, is our Dorothy; she certainly seems to be the one having the dream.
The group ends up at Raffael’s embassy, where a nervous bishop thinking about changing careers (David Hyde Pierce, magnetically kind as always) joins them. In the second act, which adapts the “No Exit”-like “Exterminating Angel,” from 1962, the whole gaggle, bishop included, find themselves mysteriously trapped in Raffael’s black-panelled library, along with two servants, played by Bennett and O’Hare. After a lifetime of making out like bandits, the rich have to make do. Following one last gorgeously sung hymn from Marianne, existential paralysis sets in, and the songs stop. For the last forty-five minutes, Sondheim’s musical presence is communicated mainly via underscoring, thanks to his gifted longtime arranger, Jonathan Tunick, and a vamp, one of his broken-in-the-middle arpeggios, that shocks the characters whenever they try to leave. This purgatorial situation is, of course, deliberately frustrating, and other perversities of “Here We Are” occasionally serve that mood: for instance, the choice to have the non-singers, like O’Hare and Pierce, deliver solos in the first act, while the generational voices, like Gray and Pasquale, perform only small portions of ensemble numbers. (Hell is being at a Sondheim musical with so many great singers not singing.)
I felt the composer’s absence even more, though, as a guiding intellect. Surely the turn to sentiment in the second half was uncharacteristic? After all, Sondheim was our bard of ambivalence. The Buñuel films glint with class warfare: the parasitic rich are gunned down at dinner in a dream sequence in “Bourgeoisie”; in “Angel,” literal lambs run to their slaughter, barbecued on the charred splinters of a cello. But “Here We Are” has taken that same dramaturgy-as-bayonet and dulled it—mainly through sympathy for sweet Marianne and the gentle bishop, who finally discovers a talent for pastoral care. Ives has also bougified and depoliticized the story to the point that the only clearly villainous character is one of the servants, which upends Buñuel’s social critique. The central metaphor moves from patrician complicity with totalitarianism to, seemingly, the “square one” of COVID isolation, in which many of us were at the mercy of our inner resources. There’s even a little coda in which the characters tell us what they most “miss about the room.” No one says sourdough, but I worry they were thinking it.
At the Shed, unfortunate resonances emerge between the “Here We Are” scenario and the venue itself, a chilly culture palace, which contains a discombobulating stack of escalators that switch directions when you’re not looking. You do carry warmth away, though, as you wander out of Hudson Yards. The rest of the city, like a huge singing wake, is full of Sondheim now, with stunning revivals of “Sweeney” and “Merrily” on Broadway and a concert staging of “The Frogs,” one of his deeper cuts, coming to Jazz at Lincoln Center. Even though the Sondheimiest stuff drains away at the two-thirds point in “Here We Are,” the evening is still full of a certain familiar sonic pattern, an only-Steve-could-do-it interval, which hops jarringly upward in the middle of a phrase. It’s earwormy, so it follows you out of the Shed, into the subway, and all the way home. You hear it, and know Sondheim has been somewhere nearby. Perhaps he was here and you missed him? Perhaps he’s just in another room. ♦
[ad_2]
Source link
