Music and Lyrics: Stephen Sondheim
Book: David Ives
Director: Joe Mantello
David Zinn’s set is the best thing about Stephen Sondheim’s final musical. Although to call it a musical is perhaps difficult when there are precious few songs in the second half. But it’s the second act, with its existential angst, that is the better half. However, it’s not absurdism that you go to see Sondheim for. It begins with the worst kind of first-world problems: Where to go for brunch.
A group of privileged New Yorkers drive around the city, their mission for a meal thwarted by restaurants that have no food (despite Bible-sized menus) or sell only fake hors d’oeuvres and wine. Cutesy young wife Marianne (Jane Krakowski) parades around in her negligee, grasping a white rose, while her billionaire husband Lee (Rory Kinnear) wears expensive athleisure.
Joining them on the odyssey for a meal is married couple Paul and Claudia Zimmer (Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Martha Plimpton), also rich; he’s a plastic surgeon celebrating his 1000th nose job. Coming along for the ride are Raffael (Paulo Szot), the sleazy ambassador of fictional Miranda and Marianne’s sister Fritz (Chumisa Dornford-May), a champagne revolutionary busy photographing the end of the world.
Inspired by the films The Exterminating Angel and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie by Luis Buñuel, Here We Are only becomes interesting when the group, now with the additions of a general, a soldier and a bishop, finds itself in a room that they cannot leave: A room that receives its own applause. There’s also something of An Inspector Calls as the secrets and faults of the elite are exposed. In the plans for the musical before his death, Sondheim stipulated that there should be no singing in the room where the characters face their crises.
As the only two members of Joe Mantello’s original Off-Broadway production of 2023, Tracie Bennett and Denis O’Hare shine brightly in their various comedic roles, although their funny foreign accents seem a little old-fashioned in today’s climate. O’Hare’s Waiter’s Song is the best number in the show; indeed, the only one you might want to hear again.
On press night, the orchestra, conducted by Nigel Lilly, is a little too loud, with the result that not every lyric is clear, frustrated further when the performers turn their backs to the audience. Some pithy lines, those we have to expect from Sondheim (after all, he rhymed ‘your gravy grander’ with ‘coriander’), just get lost in the music. Only Harry Hadden-Paton as the Bishop with a fetish for women’s shoes is able to make every word count.
However, it’s not all bad. Zinn’s set is a marvel; sleek, shining walls in the first half with restaurant tables lowered down from above; an elegant Edwardian drawing room in the second half. If this play is to win any awards in London, they will come from its design. There’s also a lovely breaking of the fourth wall when the characters realise they are actors in a play, looking over the stalls as the house lights come on.
We would have complained if Sondheim’s final play had never reached London, so it’s good to see it, even if it is a far cry from Company or A Little Night Music. It may not be the swan song we wanted, but it’s the end of an era for sure.
Runs until 28 June 2023
The Reviews Hub Score
End of an era
