Sondheim Forum

After Buñuel and Square One, I guess the third title's the charm.

Final Sondheim Musical Will Be Staged in New York This Fall (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/16/theater/sondheim-musical-bunuel-shed.html)
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/16/theater/sondheim-musical-bunuel-shed.html


(Hey, it worked for Bounce, finally getting a full-scale Hal Prince production after languishing under the titles Wise Guys and Gold!  Still, even if it got us to Road Show eventually, Bounce's own reception might make it a candidate for the Careful What You Wish For files).

Fun fact: Here We Are is also the title of a 1931 Dorothy Parker short story (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_We_Are_(short_story)) about a just-wed young couple, en route to their NYC honeymoon, nervously avoiding the topic of sex.  Originally published in Cosmopolitan, set in a Pullman car and written mostly in dialogue, the story was adapted (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_We_Are_(one-act_play)) into a short one-act play of the same name (https://www.concordtheatricals.com/p/63059/here-we-are#).

Sondheim and Ives's Here We Are, opening at The Shed (https://theshed.org) in September, will be directed by Joe Mantello (https://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/11/theater/theater-surviving-assassins.html) (Wicked, Assassins).

For the past couple of days I've been idly trying to imagine how Mantello and his (as yet unspecified) designer might use the Shed's flexible (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KX_odXZqHIY) 1,200-seat McCourt space (https://theshed.org/about/building) to surreal effect by having its vast, retractable shell slowly grow or shrink so that the theater itself morphs subliminally-gradually, from being agoraphobically large to claustrophobically small (or vice versa) over the course of the evening.  Even knowing next to nothing about the show itself, the idea struck me, in broad sloppy terms, as perhaps appropriately Buñuel-ian.



But the NYT article actually specifies that Here We Are will be staged in "a 500-seat theater at the Shed", which sounds more like The Griffin, a nondescript blackbox space on the Bloomberg Building's 6th floor where I saw The Search For Signs... (https://theshed.org/program/226-the-search-for-signs-of-intelligent-life-in-the-universe) with Cecily Strong (honorable (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/11/theater/search-for-signs-of-intelligent-life-review.html), but unfortunate (https://www.vulture.com/2022/01/theater-review-cecily-strong-search-signs-intelligent-life-universe-tomlin-wagner.html)) a little over a year ago.

Probably for the best anyway.  Rightly or wrongly, there's no way for this production not to become a BFD, but it probably doesn't need grandiose design to inflate expectations even further.  With a score that's only ever been reported as being half-finished at best, HWA's first time out in public is probably best treated as a curio.

Here We Are Cast & Creatives Announced (https://www.theatermania.com/news/stephen-sondheims-here-we-are-to-star-david-hyde-pierce-rachel-bay-jones-bobby-cannavale-steven-pasquale-and-more_1708398/)


Namely:

Francois Battiste (Bronx Bombers),  Tracie Bennett (End of the Rainbow),  Bobby Cannavale (The Motherf**ker With the Hat),  Micaela Diamond (Parade),  Amber Gray (Hadestown),  Jin Ha (Hamilton),  Rachel Bay Jones (Dear Evan Hansen),  Denis O'Hare (Assassins),  Steven Pasquale (The Bridges of Madison County),  David Hyde Pierce (Curtains),  and Jeremy Shamos (Clybourne Park).

Understudies:  Bradley Dean, Adam Harrington, Bligh Voth, Adante Carter, Mehry Eslaminia, and Lindsay Nicole Chambers.

Music & Lyrics:	Stephen Sondheim
Book:	David Ives
Director:	Joe Mantello
Choreographer:	Sam Pinkleton
Orchestrations:	Jonathan Tunick
Musical Direction & Supervision:	Alexander Gemignani
Set & Costume Design:	David Zinn
Lighting Design:	Natasha Katz
Sound Design:	Tom Gibbons
Hair Design:	Wigmaker Associates
Casting:	The Telsey Office

Produced by Tom Kirdahy, Sue Wagner, John Johnson, and The Stephen Sondheim Trust
Associate Producer:  Oscar Arce
Co-Presented by The Shed

Previews begin Thursday, September 28, 2023
Opening night Sunday, October 22, 2023
Runs through January 7, 2024

https://theshed.org/program/301-here-we-are

Here comes the NY Post, stirring up shit in its usual fashion.  (Headline notwithstanding, nothing herein will be especially "shocking" to anyone who's been paying attention).

Stephen Sondheim's mysterious final musical has shocking Act 2: insiders (https://nypost.com/2023/08/18/stephen-sondheims-final-musical-has-almost-no-songs-in-act-2/)

From Vulture this morning:



By Frank Rich, roughly 10,000 words; includes clickable footnotes; illustrated with a photo of Sondheim, Ives and Mantello taken at SJS's Connecticut home in late 2021, a rehearsal photo taken last week, a couple of pages from the famous yellow legal pads, and a pair of Buñuel film stills.


(Ed.: The lead photo of the three collaborators is really two adjacent photos framed and/or cropped to kinda-sorta roughly align; this much is obvious, at more than the briefest glance.  But according to the caption, the pic of Ives and Mantello was actually taken this summer, with the room apparently either preserved in, or restored to, nearly its exact condition in 2021 when the pic of Sondheim in his chair was taken there "days before his death."  Despite subtle differences in lens and camera placement, the two shots do appear to have been posed and color-corrected to give an eerily-plausible impression of having been snapped at a single sitting, with the shoeless Ives and Mantello sitting at Sondheim's slippered feet.  Clever; surreal; just a tiny bit ghoulish?  I'd like to think the Master would have approved...?)

Poster art was released (https://www.broadwayworld.com/article/Photo-First-Look-at-Artwork-for-Stephen-Sondheim-and-David-Ives-HERE-WE-ARE-20230912) a few days ago:

image.jpg

Without yet having seen HWA (which begins previews a week from next Thursday, but I won't be seeing it until November 1, a Wednesday matinée), it's hard to judge this image in relation to the show it's meant to advertise -- but from what we know about the Buñuel films (as summarized by SJS himself in various interviews), I'll give it the benefit of the doubt.  Meanwhile, the combination of simple form and searing color has a certain elegance, and it certainly gets your attention.  I like that the people are rendered in heightened but basically plausible real-world colors; it's their context -- a blank red void (Hell?) with a grassy cyan path snaking through it -- that feels disorientingly weird, in ways that are at once innocuously simple (it's just a background color), visually startling (...a really aggressive background color), and teasingly open to interpretation.

So this might be overselling the idea -- the sheer visual drop from the image to the title below already has this pretty well covered -- but part of me wants the white-jacketed leading figure, in his approach to the road's abrupt dead-end, to have inadvertently kicked a tiny bright-cyan pebble or two off its edge, which we'd see in mid-freefall through the undefined red space below.  Just this tiny visual detail would instantly clarify the logic of the composition (whose intense colors might, at first glance, have blinded us to its equally eccentric narrative premise) and the figure's downward gaze over the precipice; I'd almost be mildly surprised if the designer hadn't considered it at some point.

Then again, in a surrealist context, instant clarity and logic aren't necessarily the point.  Such a detail might actually nail things down too fussily -- a little cartoony, a little on-the-nose -- so if a pebble-drop did by any chance appear in some earlier draft, I can just as easily see why they might have opted against it.  Especially for a Sondheim show, it's always a good idea to preserve some ambiguity.

I'm guessing that the remaining text (producers, cast and creatives, theater and box office info), when it arrives, might be right-justified, preserving a generous margin of empty red space at left below the drop-off, from the path's cleanly-sliced leading edge all the way down to the title.  That alone, without belaboring the point, would tend to get it across... just whisper-gently.

<sigh> ...

NYT:  How Complete Was Stephen Sondheim's Final Musical? (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/27/theater/sondheim-musical-shed.html)

A friend sent me the link just now.  With the show beginning previews tomorrow night, I'll be making an effort not to spoil myself with other people's hot takes before seeing it myself.  But this isn't that -- in fact, fortunately for spoilage purposes, it tells us exactly nothing about the show itself that hasn't already been covered in more (which still isn't to say much) detail elsewhere.

I wonder what the chances are, if any, of a cast album in time for the holidays...?

Once more from the top (though actually published a week ago, someone just texted me this tonight), this time from Reidel...

Headline notwithstanding, his article actually makes no pretense of having anything to say about Here We Are per se; at the time of the interview, Tunick was constrained by a company-wide NDA from discussing the show.  But it's nevertheless lovely to hear from him, as one seldom does:

Putting It Together:
How do you complete a Stephen Sondheim musical without Stephen Sondheim?
Call for Jonathan Tunick. (https://airmail.news/issues/2023-9-23/putting-it-together)


Not that I've been spoiling myself or anything... but early reports have been pretty positive.  Starting now (while they're fixed in my mind that way), I'm going to try harder to avoid reading any more before seeing it.  <pause for laughter> ...And to help lessen that temptation by minimizing the wait, I'm also going to try to remember to keep entering the show's weekly online lottery (for $25 tix) and daily digital rush ($40)—or, failing that, possibly pony up for another full-price ticket ($89 and up) sooner than later.

Despite the early frenzy when tickets first went on sale, they've by no means all been snapped up—though I suppose that might change if the reception stays positive (and especially if the critics see fit to rave, a few weeks hence).  But for now, as sales have cooled, prices have been easing their way down a bit, currently holding at what passes for the new Broadway normal (most performances top out at $259 for premium seats)—while on B'way proper, and with almost twice HWA's seating capacity, Merrily's have remained altogether insane ($599 premium, $144 for the absolute nosebleeds) despite also remaining not that hard to come by.  (Merrily's preview houses, like HWA's so far, have been reliably sold-out by curtain time each night, without any advertised discounts that I'm aware of; but a random search just now for Merrily tix on a Tuesday night later this month turned up dozens of available seats in all sections, especially the pricier ones—which suggests to me that they might start to come down from the stratosphere at some point, though again, a[nother] run of critical raves could alter that equation).

The main bits of scuttlebutt I've, ahem... stumbled across while minding my own business... are that HWA is deliciously smart and decidedly more-than-just quirky ("I guarantee you it's not what you're expecting," per (https://www.instagram.com/p/CxuCKxYtmKa/) designer David Zinn, but non-employees have echoed the same vague-yet-tantalizing sentiment), with a classic-Sondheim score hovering somewhere between Forum, Road Show and Passion [!]; and that the production is first-class: perfectly suited to the sleek, intimate Griffin (https://thevendry.com/venue/26710/the-shed-new-york-ny/space/10344) space, yet Broadway-plush and constantly surprising.  The all-star cast is said to be absolutely ideal, fervently committed to the material and visibly having a ball onstage.  Ives's book hasn't drawn a whole lot of comment, pro or con, though one or two preview-goers have gone so far as to call it both an ideal marriage of sensibilities and an exciting departure—a la Lapine in '83—from all of SJS's previous collaborations.  And while no one seems 100% thrilled by the relative paucity of music—however symbolically-justified—in the show's longish second act, the overall impression is of neither a cynical lunge for money or prestige (by the producers, the estate or the surviving collaborators), nor the mortifying embarrassment to SJS's memory (even if undertaken with the best of intentions) that one might have feared in one's darker moments.  Here We Are might not be Broadway-ready, now or ever: even lovingly polished to a gratifyingly-high sheen, as it apparently has been, and with several weeks left for further tinkering before press opening, the material itself may simply be too weird and niche for an open-ended commercial run (which all involved keep insisting isn't the aim anyway).  But on its own unique terms, this production at least sounds like a worthy and fitting final tribute.

Of course, plenty of people were ecstatic about Sweeney in previews last February, too...

Here We Are is extending its run by two weeks, now closing January 21 instead of the 7th.  I can't actually find an announcement online yet, but The Shed sent me an email about it this afternoon, saying there will be a member presale for the new dates starting next Monday 10/16 at 2pm before they become available to the general public on Wednesday 10/18.  [Ed.: The extension has now (Monday morning, just hours ahead of the presale) been announced (https://playbill.com/article/here-we-are-sondheims-final-work-extends-off-broadway) more widely].


Also, HWA souvenir merchandise is now available for purchase at the theater (https://twitter.com/OfficialTracieB/status/1712604908354969767/photo/1) or online (https://www.broadwaymerchandiseshop.com/collections/here-we-are):

https://www.broadwaymerchandiseshop.com/collections/here-we-are

Quote from: scenicdesign71 on Sep 16, 2023, 12:32 AMI'm guessing that the remaining [poster] text (producers, cast and creatives, theater and box office info), when it arrives, might be right-justified, preserving a generous margin of empty red space at left below the drop-off, from the path's cleanly-sliced leading edge all the way down to the title.  That alone, without belaboring the point, would tend to get it across... just whisper-gently.

...Or I guess one could simplify things even further by just leaving it as-is (more or less) (https://www.broadwaymerchandiseshop.com/products/copy-of-here-we-are-rocks-glass)*, with no further info beyond the title and Sondheim's, Ives's and Mantello's names.

---

* [Dept. of Too Much Time On My Hands]:  If you look closely at the poster graphic originally released online (scroll up (https://sondheimforum.com/index.php?topic=2233.msg7729#msg7729)), you can see small shadows of the characters' feet on the path, visually anchoring the figures and lending them a modicum of weight and groundedness.  But the actual finished windowcard (https://www.broadwaymerchandiseshop.com/products/copy-of-here-we-are-rocks-glass), as well as the coffee mug (https://www.broadwaymerchandiseshop.com/products/here-we-are-logo-mug), apparently lacks these foot-shadows -- though they appear on all other items, including the program cover (https://www.ebay.com/itm/166373369226).

Other changes: the program sets the title in a house font of The Shed's, rather than using the show's own logo font (this seems to be how the venue does all (https://www.ebay.com/itm/235008454362) their program (https://www.ebay.com/itm/334286146166) covers).  And most noticeably, the title on the windowcard and program (in their respective fonts) has been spread out to occupy a single line across the width of the image, rather than having the three words stacked and left-justified as in the originally-released design.  (Among the various souvenir items, some use the single-line title, others the stacked version, as compositionally appropriate for each item -- standard procedure for most advertising and merchandising campaigns involving multi-word title text).

But these are all clearly deliberate choices, whereas the missing foot-shadows -- precisely because they're so tiny and subtle anyway -- seem more like a random oversight: someone turned off a Photoshop layer and forgot to turn it back on before sending the windowcard and mug designs to print.  @KathyB, does that sound right to you?  Or can you think of a reason why they might have intentionally 86ed the shadows for just these two items?

(Ed.:  Some weeks ago in the course of my NON-SPOILING, um, accidental Internet overhearings-that-I-really-couldn't-possibly-help-but-stumble-across, I did happen to read something about a scenic effect in HWA that might make some sense of both the missing foot-shadows and, perhaps more persuasively, the distinctive color of the "path" in the poster image.  The effect in question, a water feature of some sort, was being bandied about as a possible Sondhead Easter egg referencing Anyone Can Whistle's Miracle Rock -- though, thinking of HWA's poster, I kept randomly imagining a sort of reversal of Heidi (Landesman) Ettinger's gorgeous scenic concept (https://americanrepertorytheater.org/shows-events/big-river-the-adventures-of-huckleberry-finn/) for the original Big River, in which she rendered the Mississippi River as the quintessential American "open road".  But I doubt the waterworks in HWA are so expansive [or so floor-focused?] as to literalize its poster image; and, more to the point -- since posters and stage sets are altogether different animals -- I don't yet have any idea whether the stage effect, whatever it looks like, is thematically central enough to justify such symbolic amplification on the poster; @DiveMilw might be able to shed some light, having, I believe, seen the show last weekend.  Regardless, it still wouldn't really explain the inconsistent appearance of foot-shadows on all but two of HWA's souvenir items.)

It's annoying because, despite being tiny and subtle, once you've noticed the missing shadows, the difference is impossible to un-see -- and the design is perceptibly more effective with them than without.  If I were to buy any merch (which I almost never do, but might for this show), a mug or especially a windowcard would actually be my likeliest purchase(s) -- but this minor flaw grates.  If the show itself does catch my fancy when I see it in a couple of weeks, I might just have to buy the windowcard and then bust out a dark grey fine-tip marker and ever-so-carefully "fix" it.

[/Waaaay Too Much Time...]

Eight new production photos (https://www.broadwayworld.com/article/Photos-First-Look-at-the-Final-Sondheim-Musical-HERE-WE-ARE-at-The-Shed-20231020) have been released as Here We Are heads into its opening weekend.

Before the critics weigh in, here is an interesting think-piece that was published at the end of August.  It's not so much about the show itself -- about which the writer presumably, like the rest of us, had almost no detailed knowledge at that time.   It's really more about the broader affinities between Sondheim and Buñuel -- plus a dash of Bergman for good measure.  But it's a fascinating read:

https://forward.com/culture/559268/sondheim-bunuel-here-we-are/


In other news, today, for no particular reason, I took a look at the current state of the seating chart (https://www.theshed.org/program/301-here-we-are#mmi-5120) for the performance of HWA I'll be seeing ten days from now, and discovered that a sizable smattering of extremely good center seats were still (or had randomly become) available for that performance -- now priced at least $50 less than they would have cost back in July, and in fact even $27 less than what I had paid back then for seats in the side section.  Ah, dynamic pricing.  (When I bought them during the presale, these side seats were already expensive, while the even-better, even-pricier center seats were simply not feasible for me, what with being unemployed and all).

The Shed doesn't do refunds, but their website says exchanges are possible.  At best, I assumed an exchange would mean forfeiting the difference in price -- but I'd still end up with better seats than the ones I originally (over)paid for; and I hoped that some of that price difference might at least be allowed to cover the $15 exchange fee mentioned on the site.  It seemed theoretically possible that, without any more money changing hands, I might be able to get a free seating upgrade.

So I called the box office... and, miracle of miracles, they did indeed allow me to exchange my original tickets (row G, Left side section, on the center aisle: already good seats, no doubt) for even better ones (row F, right in the dead-center of the auditorium: among the best seats in the house, as far as I can tell).  Furthermore -- wonders never cease -- the exchange fee appears to have been $9, not $15, taken (as I'd hoped) out of the price difference... the remainder of which they did in fact give me back, to the tune of $72, in box-office credit!

So, to recap: just from idly noticing the price drop, and acting quickly on it, I was able to trade good seats for GREAT ones at the same performance, not only without paying a cent for the upgrade, but actually getting enough money back for a serious head-start toward another ticket, should I wish to see the show again.  Which I suspect I very well might, if only to get another look at it while it's here: it's historic, and even if it turns out to be a baffling disappointment on first viewing, new Sondheim always rewards, even requires, repeat exposure.  But, if not, I can always use that credit toward seeing something else at The Shed, like maybe this (https://www.theshed.org/program/302-shakespeare-s-king-lear-directed-and-played-by-kenneth-branagh).

I should NOT be this elated to have gamed the dynamic-pricing system (mostly through sheer luck) into letting me pay "only" two hundred bucks apiece for the "best" seats in a 500-seat Off-Broadway theater.  But still... today is a good day.

NYT:   The Last Sondheim, Cool and Impossibly Chic
This inventive, beguiling and not quite fully solved puzzle of a show is a worthy and loving farewell to the great musical dramatist. (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/22/theater/here-we-are-review-stephen-sondheim.html?unlocked_article_code=1.40w.QRwY.FN63xUpdoI-4&smid=url-share)

---

Variety:   Sondheim's Final Musical Is a Surreal and Starry Feast (https://variety.com/2023/legit/reviews/here-we-are-review-stephen-sondheim-final-musical-1235764499/)

Vulture:   A strange, dark, fragmented, and compelling final message from the master. (https://www.vulture.com/2023/10/theater-review-sondheim-here-we-are.html)

Time Out:   There are riches in Stephen Sondheim's final musical. (https://www.timeout.com/newyork/theater/here-we-are-review-musical-stephen-sondheim-bunuel)

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(More reviews):   https://playbill.com/article/reviews-read-what-critics-have-to-say-about-sondheims-last-musical-here-we-are

---

I haven't read any of these yet.  I'm not sure I'll be able to hold off for nine days until after seeing the show, but for now I'm just savoring the headlines.

[Ed.: Yeah, that didn't last long (16 hours, half of them asleep).  I've just now read the four reviews directly linked above.  God, that Sara Holdren is good.]

Posted several times on the FB group, by Ryan Smedley and others including the reporter himself, Jeff Lunden:

Morning Edition (NPR):  The task? Finish Stephen Sondheim's last musical. No pressure. (https://www.npr.org/2023/10/23/1207224793/stephen-sondheim-last-musical-here-we-are)

Quote from: Ryan Smedley, "Finishing The Chat" Facebook GroupIf you press on 'Listen to this article' then in between the spoken sections you have a segment of O'Hare singing part of his waiter song, and then the ending has an instrumental with some of the musical themes.  Don't actually recognise it from its place in the show; might have been part of the playout?  Either way, notably the first official release I know of recorded audio or video from Here We Are!

From the "waiter song" as heard in the clip (there have reportedly been no song titles listed in the program, at least through previews):

---

WAITER:	(PAUL?):	CLAUDIA:
I couldn't be more sorry, Madam, But, sad to say, the fact is that      Not only do we have no soy... We have no mocha. We're also out of Latte. We do expect A little latte later, But we haven't Got a lotta latte now.	Oh, boy...	Don't tell me that You have no mocha! Then just A decaf latte— What?!

---

People keep quoting these last few lines ("We do expect...") as if to insist that SJS was on his A-game right to the end.  But I'm not sure "a little latte later / got a lotta latte" is really any more or less clever than "the puddle where the poodle did the piddle," which for almost 40 years now has elicited as many groans as giggles.   I'm more tickled by the exchange with Claudia, her impatient demands and the waiter's polite refusals simultaneous-to-the-syllable (mocha), or nearly so (latte), as he crisply vetoes each component of her order en route to the presumable punchline that they're out of literally everything.  (Also, following both voices through the drum-tight scansion of these few lines makes my brain hurt so good).

Meanwhile, the other lyric that keeps getting quoted (it's cited in three of the four directly-linked reviews above (https://sondheimforum.com/index.php?topic=2233.msg7773#msg7773), though not in the NPR piece) blends keen wit with sidelong insight, in what might just qualify as top-drawer Sondheim:

MARIANNE:
Goodness me, how superficial!
Well, what's wrong with superficial?
...
I want things to shine—
Is that so bizarre?
I want things to gleam,
To be what they seem
And not what they are.

---

The quirky instrumental playout (if that's what it is) ending the NPR segment is delightful.  I hope they include it on the (inevitable, surely?) cast album.

The New Yorker:  Stephen Sondheim's Last Musical, Here We Are, Comes to the Shed (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/06/here-we-are-theatre-review)

I saw the show Wednesday: a bright spot in a truly surreal week.  It was fantastic, hard to describe, and I very much want to see it again at least once.  The likelihood of that happening will depend both on the overall work situation (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/04/business/media/actors-strike-final-offer.html?unlocked_article_code=1.8Ew.aTdh.6g9hKwl5YJex&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare) (if any) and on how an unexpected move (I need to find a new apartment) shakes out.

I will say that Here We Are and Parade (https://sondheimforum.com/index.php?topic=2287.0) have been -- in ways too different from each other to compare, but by a wide margin relative to everything else -- the twin high points of my otherwise relatively sparse and uninspiring theatergoing year.

David, now that you've seen it, what do you think about the water feature in the show/path on the poster theory?  My take is that someone was really stretching and thinking far too much about the show.  But I've been in a little bit of a sarcastic mood this weekend so that could just be me.   ;)

Sorry to hear about the moving woes.  Packing and unpacking (la la la) is not as fun as one might wish it to be.  Not to mention the stress of finding a suitable place to live on a deadline.  

Quote from: DiveMilw on Nov 05, 2023, 06:46 PMDavid, now that you've seen it, what do you think about the water feature in the show/path on the poster theory?  My take is that someone was really stretching and thinking far too much about the show.  But I've been in a little bit of a sarcastic mood this weekend so that could just be me.   ;)

Stretching and thinking too much about a show — who would ever do that??   :o

Yeah, no, the water/path connection, at least as far as the water in the show is concerned, doesn't add up -- as, the more I overthought it in advance, the more I pretty much suspected it wouldn't.  That was indeed a stretch on my part.

But I do remember seeing the poster art for the first time a couple months ago, and thinking -- well before hearing anything about a water feature in the show -- that cyan was an ambiguous color for the path.  Surreal, even:  if we assume it's a solid path, the color is conspicuously bizarre; but if we interpret it as a stream of water, it's behaving in conspicuously bizarre ways (it's walkable-upon, and it ends sharply at a drop-off over which not a drop spills).

But no, none of that bears any likely relation to the "waterworks" moment onstage (which is borrowed directly from The Exterminating Angel, released two years before Anyone Can Whistle).  In both the Buñuel and Sondheim/Ives scenarios, the water effect is neither (fake-)magical, like ACW's Miracle Rock, nor even particularly surreal, at least by the standards of this story's deliberately opaque narrative logic -- indeed, it's the almost grittily-naturalistic result of our desperately dehydrated captives busting into a wall to access a water pipe, which gushes forth to general (somewhat feral) jubilation.

...but, speaking of miracles, I won Here We Are's TodayTix lottery and saw the show again last night, from the second row of the center section, a few seats off the aisle, for a mere 25 bucks!  BWW's Richard Ridge (https://www.broadwayworld.com/topic/Backstage-LIVE-with-Richard-Ridge) happened to be seeing the show last night too (also not for the first time, I'd guess).

Oddly, the sound seemed more-distant and less-clear than it had a few weeks ago from six rows further back.  Which, given the abundance of rapid-fire dialogue and lyrical complexity, leaves me even more eager for a published script and an OCR than I already was; overall, I'm not sure I emerged with any more detailed understanding of the show after a second viewing than after the first.

But I did find myself agreeing with la Holdren (https://www.vulture.com/2023/10/theater-review-sondheim-here-we-are.html) more and more.  (The New Yorker's Helen Shaw (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/06/here-we-are-theatre-review), too).  The show itself is as fascinatingly imperfect as most of the Master's oeuvre.  The cast is flawless, and the production so coruscatingly smart and beautiful as to flirt with slickness.  Time will tell, but I wouldn't be surprised if some future staging like the one Holdren hypothesizes -- starker, less well-funded, perhaps more anarchic -- and unburdened by the irony-overload of this production's Hudson Yards setting -- were to make a sharper case for Here We Are as one of His darker works.

Meanwhile, I still wouldn't rule out a third viewing.  And I do wish they would get an OCR out in time for the holidays, though that's starting to seem unlikely.

Nothing really new here, but, for what it's worth:

The Observer:   David Ives On Collaborating With Sondheim On His Final Work, Here We Are (https://observer.com/2023/12/david-ives-on-collaborating-with-sondheim-on-his-final-work-here-we-are/)


 

With lyrics, helpfully if imperfectly transcribed (playlist here (https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEDofAEaJ4NdTUVD0tn2s-RGTMIXMRTKL&si=LFFX5FtNqfN0-Avj)):

"Café Everything (Part 1)" (https://youtu.be/6ZWSVowE4G8?si=onlQLUxuI624VTio)

"Soldier's Dream" (https://youtu.be/O_0zr7GgvcQ?si=0Lxj9Iac4dhbaThU)

"Final Song" (https://youtu.be/VhwtkK-i0A8?si=7hG9K6TKsErzsv-t)

I somehow missed this one last fall, but it's well worth a read:

Slant:  Stephen Sondheim's Final Master Class Is Small and Funny and Fine (https://www.slantmagazine.com/theater/here-we-are-review-stephen-sondheim/)

Quote from: Dan Rubins, Slant Magazine, 23 October 2023Here We Are isn't unnerving in the spine-crawling way that The Exterminating Angel and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie are. ... But the show still moves from a frothily weird and wonderful first act to an opaquely heartbreaking second act that—as has been widely reported—offers almost no music at all.

What music there is, though, doesn't disappoint. Sondheim's score is decidedly within his most familiar vocabulary, a final master class in pressing music into the service of character.  As the recent revivals of Sweeney Todd and Merrily We Roll Along also demonstrate, one of Sondheim's superior gifts was his impeccable understanding of how the ear processes language.  Rhythm and melody, under his pen, allow the text to crash like a wave over us, somehow guiding the listener response so that everyone gets the joke at the exact same moment.

And because the scenario seems to hold these characters, at least for the first act, in a sort of satirical contempt, that frees Sondheim, who was so frequently accustomed to injecting irony into many a dissonant chord and slightly caustic melody, to write with often unadulterated warmth and buoyancy.

"[Sondheim's] impeccable understanding of how the ear processes language" is a phrase worth remembering.  But Rubins's writing moves from strength to strength in this article -- the extended quote above is just a sample, and there's plenty more to enjoy. 

In other news, one more belated holiday gift from my father arrived yesterday: Criterion's Blu-ray set of three Buñuel films (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08L95Y3SFl) including The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, to go with the Criterion Exterminating Angel I received (https://sondheimforum.com/index.php?topic=2328.msg7834#msg7834) on Christmas Day. 

From The New York Review of Books:

Quote from: Hannah Gold, www.nybooks.com, Saturday 16 December 2023

Before Stephen Sondheim learned to read, he could identify records from his household collection by the particular shapes of the words on their spines.  At parties in his family's handsome Central Park West apartment, his biographer Meryle Secrest writes, "his parents would trot him out in the evenings to demonstrate this parlor trick" for the arty and ambitious circles they mingled with.  Imagine the splendid living room ringing with genteel applause, like the clinking of martini glasses that never overspill: already Sondheim was delighting crowds with performances poised at the juncture where music and words meet.

Reading, however, never became a great pursuit for the prodigious composer and lyricist, who brought a new set of themes to the forefront of musical theater: loneliness, ambivalence, aging, the process of making art, and remaining single well into one's thirties.  One of Sondheim's most brilliant and experimental musicals, Sunday in the Park with George (1984), deals in its first act with the life of the pointillist painter Georges Seurat and the creation of his masterpiece A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, then gallops forward in its second half to the painter's legacy in the 1980s.  Assassins (1991), a revue of successful and would-be killers of American presidents, features John Hinckley Jr. and Lynette Fromme singing "Unworthy of Your Love," which assumes the guise of a sweet duet (the kind typically sung by lovers to each other), but is in fact addressed to the public figures they're violently obsessed with—Jodie Foster and Charles Manson.  Sondheim was always keener on mixing bitterness with affection than uniting two besotted people.  In Company (1970), his signature musical about a chronic bachelor named Bobby, the protagonist's settled friend Joanne—she of the brassy demeanor and tedious husband—sings,

It's the little things you share together,
swear together,
wear together,
that make perfect relationships.
The concerts you enjoy together,
neighbors you annoy together,
children you destroy together,
that keep marriage intact.

All of these subjects were more closely associated with the novel than with musical theater when Sondheim got his start.  But he mostly abstained from reading fiction and poetry, although he did enjoy plays and the occasional detective story, since he loved, in addition to parlor tricks, puzzles of every form.  In interviews he attributed his scant engagement with novels to slow reading speed and a short attention span.  There were too many words in novels, and not all of them judiciously chosen, whereas for the lyricist every word must matter, but unobtrusively.  As Secrest writes, he learned early on from his mentor Oscar Hammerstein "that lyrics must not overtax the ear."  Sondheim's shelves were packed with foreign dictionaries in Romance languages, Oxford Companions to American and English Literature, rhyming dictionaries, and reference books for "quotations, proverbs, slang and modern English usage, acronyms, initialisms and abbreviations."  All the tiny, irregular puzzle pieces awaiting unity.

Rather than literature, the art form that had the greatest impact on Sondheim, from a young age, was film.  His knowledge was encyclopedic, especially of studio movies from the 1940s and 1950s.  According to Secrest, he was only able to recall the date of his mother's wedding to her second husband because it coincided with the day All About Eve opened at the Roxy.  He would have been eighteen at the time and his mother, "Foxy," was a Joan Crawford type with well-tailored appeal and a tendency toward sadism.

Sondheim welcomed success early, having written the lyrics for West Side Story (1957) in his mid-twenties.  (His comedic hit A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, which he composed and lyricized, opened on Broadway five years later.)  That success brought him into casual acquaintance with the silver screen glamour he'd long idolized.  His neighbor in the building where he bought an apartment after his first wave of triumphs was Katharine Hepburn, and he kept a piano in a soundproofed room upstairs lest the noise bother her.  He once dined with Grace Kelly and later privately faulted her for holding the menu too close to her face.  He and his high society friends sometimes played "Stardom," a boardgame he invented in which, he said, wannabe actors "fuck [their] way to the top."  Now he'd become the proverbial glass-clinker in the proverbial room, or the parties were held in his honor.

*

For the last several years of his life, as his health gradually declined, Sondheim worked, with a great deal of frustration, on a musical based on two films by the Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), about a group of wealthy friends failing to find a restaurant that will serve them, and The Exterminating Angel (1962), in which guests of a similar milieu find it existentially impossible to leave the dinner party they've attended.  The resulting show, Here We Are, opened earlier this fall at The Shed, in a room that in many ways reflects the tastes of the upper classes today: high above the ground, with a view facing inward.  To get there I passed an enormous new Spanish restaurant with fancy food-court airs and a cafe for cycling enthusiasts where an after-hours drinking event was underway.  Nestled within the phony corridors of Hudson Yards, both establishments looked more like concepts than places, and prepared me well—maybe too well—for the first act of Here We Are, which recounts its six protagonists' many failed attempts at fine dining.

The butler and maid have been polishing the minimalist, mirrored set for fifteen minutes when the brunch guests start arriving at the home of Leo and Marianne Brink, and the musical begins in earnest.  Leo (Bobby Cannavale) is a rude arriviste who's made a fortune itemizing credit derivatives, whatever that means; his ditzy, kind wife Marianne (Rachel Bay Jones) takes immense pleasure in the cadence of words like "soupçon" and "huevos rancheros."  Claudia (Amber Gray) "represent(s) a major entertainment entity" and wears her haughty girl-boss blazer draped over her shoulders like an ermine cape.  Her husband, Paul (Jeremy Shamos), is a plastic surgeon celebrating his thousandth nose job and a drug trafficker in cahoots with Leo and another guest, Raffael Santello Di Santicci (Steven Pasquale), who bears the farcical title Ambassador of Moranda as cover for his nefarious purposes.  The crew is rounded out by Marianne's sister Fritz (Micaela Diamond), who is hellbent on bringing about the end of capitalism, unless it involves dipping into her trust fund.  Each represents a certain kind of wealthy hedonist, dressed in a colorful costume that never changes (red velour tracksuit, blue silk nightie, and so on), like cartoon characters that turn up for every episode unfazed and unaffected by their pasts.  They are concept people, soon to be dining out at concept restaurants.

After arriving, the Brinks' guests are disappointed to learn that they weren't expected for brunch at all, but their hosts insist they pile inside the car and head to Cafe Everything, whose preposterously thick menus are like War and Peace for hungry people.  There, the waiter (played with excellent, upsetting panache by Denis O'Hare) systematically tells each of them, in song, that they are out of whatever it is they want.  "We have no Coke, / we have no Sprite, / we have no Mountain Dew, / no Fresca Lite."  From one unsatisfactory bruncherie to the next, there's a lot of elaborate ordering, occasionally punctured by Fritz's insurrectionary remarks and clandestine phone calls with a mysterious anticapitalist cell.

O'Hare plays all the male attendants and Tracie Bennett plays all the female ones, including the server at a French haute cuisine restaurant where everything "is what it is."  At yet another restaurant—Italian—Colonel Martin (Francois Battiste) shows up with his Lieutenant (Jin Ha), claiming to have traced the leaders of a drug smuggling conspiracy to this very joint, which seems to contain only drug smugglers and their spouses.  Certainly no food.  But this is an absurdist comedy in which anyone might casually be nudged off course, so the military officials pause their mission and join their suspects in search of gustatory delights.

Between these scenes the main characters travel with inscrutable purpose around a luminous white stage, posing and huddling at calculated distances from one another like chess pieces moving through a void.  They mostly sing about the beauty of the day, dining out, and, in the case of Fritz, everyone else's hypocrisy:

Marianne: What is happening to decent restaurants?
Leo: If it isn't the food it's the service.
Fritz: Didn't you hear?
Rafael: If it isn't the noise it's the queue.
Fritz: Are you insane?!
Paul: Or the backs of the chairs.
Leo: Or a waiter with airs.
Claudia: Or the long flight of stairs to the loo.

Eventually they arrive at what is to be the location of the second act (the one they can't leave, the "Here" in "Here We Are"), the Morandan Embassy, where David Hyde Pierce enters, playing a bishop with a shoe fetish who would like any other job, please, and delivers the most winning number of the evening: "Wouldn't anybody like to have their windows washed? Their sinks repaired? Their faith restored?"  No, no, and no.

In fact, Fritz has already procured funding for all the ammunition her comrades need to bring about the end of the world, and Raffael's butler, Windsor, is unmasked as Inferno (O'Hare again), a resentful leader of the revolution.  The first act concludes with the sounds of explosions and great flashes of light.  When the second act begins the ensemble is still at the embassy, in a living room furnished with bookshelves, cushioned chairs, and a chaise-longue.  They find, of course, that they cannot leave.  Also that the food supply is scarce, and their cellphones are dead.

*

Despite promising beginnings, Here We Are increasingly seems to become one with the stuffy, expensive rooms it emanated from.  It is all surfaces, but they don't connect much, and no larger achievement takes shape.  To draw a metaphor from Sunday in the Park with George, this is pointillism without enough points, so that the end product looks less like Seurat and more like the Damien Hirst spots that adorn the Brinks' glaringly white walls.  The upstairs-downstairs drama never really delivers a coherent critique or absorbing storytelling the way it does in A Little Night Music (1973), Sweeney Todd (1979), or Assassins.  Subplots are broached like the daily specials and abandoned in various states of warming up.  Raffael is having an affair with Claudia and eager to get with Marianne, who nonchalantly rebuffs him.  Coincidentally, Leo murdered Colonel Martin's father, way back when.  Marianne is trying to remember the thing she was supposed to do today.  The world is ending.

Buñuel's films are themselves meandering satires, but I'm tempted to attribute at least some of the show's diffuseness to the fact that Sondheim didn't finish it.  In several of his final interviews, he said that the second act remained a work-in-progress, and it was giving him trouble.  The show's production team has said that Sondheim gave them permission to go ahead with the project anyway, two months before he died, in 2021.  David Ives wrote the book and Joe Mantello signed on to direct.  Sondheim's frequent collaborator James Lapine told The New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/27/theater/sondheim-musical-shed.html) in September, "I really trust David and Joe, and don't think they would be putting up something they didn't feel was finished."

Nevertheless, whatever trouble Sondheim thought he was having is reflected in the show itself.  The second act contains only two musical numbers and quickly peters out into platitudes that capture neither the contempt of Buñuel's films nor, as Helen Shaw has pointed out (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/06/here-we-are-theatre-review), the exquisite ambivalence one expects of Sondheim.  "What we are putting on stage now is as finished as any production about to play its first preview," the production team told the Times. "It's ready for audiences, and very much the musical Steve envisioned."  But it seems unnecessary, and a little dubious, for anyone to claim the piece in its current instantiation is finished—or could ever be finished in Sondheim's absence.  I can't fault the team for doing their best to punch up skimpy material; still, I found myself wishing the production had explored the show's lack of completion rather than politely ignore it.

As it is, the actors are bold, the set is easy on the eyes, the music is jaunty, and the moral is something something life goes on.  Until it doesn't.  Life is a cosmic hors d'oeuvre and art is a flattering commodity hung in a gilded frame.  The moments in the show's second act that best reflect Sondheim's sensibility, whether or not they originated with him, are those of irreverent philistinism, like when Marianne sings, "All these books / all these polished leather books / I don't mean to read / no no not to read / no I mean the way it looks."

In one of the final scenes set in the room, we find Marianne alongside the bishop, who is contentedly munching on some pages from A Tale of Two Cities.  It's been a while since they had decent food to eat, but neither seems particularly worried about it.  It's Marianne's birthday!  A light dusting of snow filters down through a crack in the ceiling.  The pair of de facto prisoners regard these falling flakes as a kind of miracle, a sign that goodness and hope are still possible in a ruined world.  To me they looked more like all the little irregular pieces that stay swirling about for some time in the aftermath of an awe-inspiring storm.

•

Finally...

BWW:  Final Sondheim Musical  Here We Are  Teases Cast Recording (https://www.broadwayworld.com/article/Final-Sondheim-Musical-HERE-WE-ARE-Teases-Cast-Recording-20240108)

No release date given, but a studio photo, posted (https://www.instagram.com/p/C12Nxo8u4jX/) on the show's IG account yesterday, implies that the recording itself is done or at least underway.

:) :) :)

---

In other HWA-related news, today I won the show's lottery again, but was unfortunately unable to claim the tickets in time because I was in a movie theater with my phone off all afternoon, watching an impromptu double feature of The Color Purple and Wonka (a rather purple-themed moviegoing day, as a friend observed, though it turns out they've shifted Timothée Chalamet's younger Wonka more toward burgundy (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6166392/mediaviewer/rm3474347521)).  I hope whoever did end up getting those HWA tickets enjoyed the show more than I enjoyed the movies (meh:  I didn't not enjoy them, they were okay, but the whole outing was more an excuse to see my friend for the first time in several months.  Ironically, if I'd taken a raincheck on the movies and thus been able to respond to TodayTix today, I might have ended up seeing him very soon anyway -- at HWA: coincidentally, he happens to be seeing tomorrow's matinée).

The recording has been confirmed, though still without a release date more specific than "spring".

BWW's announcement (https://www.broadwayworld.com/article/Video-Final-Stephen-Sondheim-Musical-HERE-WE-ARE-to-Release-Cast-Recording-This-Spring-20240110) includes this 30-second video clip:



On a tangent, HWA's David Hyde Pierce (delightful as always) will be back on Broadway next season, playing Major General Stanley (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major-General's_Song) in what sounds like an interesting new adaptation (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/09/theater/roundabout-broadway.html) of The Pirates of Penzance also starring Ramin Karimloo as the Pirate King (https://youtu.be/uH4IuO55U9I).  (Tangent on tangent: last year a YouTuber posted the full pro-shot (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Bp_M0NQkrg) 1980 Shakespeare in the Park production with Kline, Ronstadt, Rose etc., on which the 1983 film (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086112/) -- adding Lansbury (https://youtu.be/HD8YMVRSuxk?si=JzENllrA7iFpFBHq&t=29) for good measure -- was based).

My birthday is in spring. :)

Quote from: Naveen Kumar, Variety, 22 October 2023(FULL REVIEW HERE (https://variety.com/2023/legit/reviews/here-we-are-review-stephen-sondheim-final-musical-1235764499/))

...Though Sondheim made light sport of critiquing bourgeois mores in shows like Company and Merrily We Roll Along, here the rich are served hot like a bottomless buffet.

And let's cut straight to the sweet stuff: Performances from the pinch-me-this-can't-be-real cast are like a Broadway gourmand's fever dream.  Whatever else this deeply strange and Frankenstein-ed musical delivers — which is a lot — the production's outrageous lineup of stars are as delectably odd as they've ever been (yes, even Denis O'Hare).  By the time David Hyde Pierce makes a late act-one entrance as a martini-swilling bishop who covets designer heels, the needle on one's pleasure odometer simply snaps off.

Never truer than last night (https://sondheimforum.com/index.php?topic=2332.msg7862#msg7862).

In his (annual?) NYT cast album roundup (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/29/theater/broadway-cast-albums-sweeney-todd.html) last week, Jesse Green said that the Here We Are recording is scheduled for a May release.  Online, the article includes 30 seconds of "The Bishop's Song" as sung by David Hyde Pierce.

Green's roundup also cites the recordings of last year's revivals of Parade, Sweeney and Merrily; the London concert recording of Old Friends; and Melissa Errico's Sondheim in the City album, among others.  (Excerpts from each are also included online; Harmony (https://sondheimforum.com/index.php?topic=2334.msg7868#msg7868) is represented by the very track I would have chosen: not a group number for the Harmonists but a haunting solo for Sierra Boggess -- although, just as when I saw the show, a very fine song in an equally adept performance is just a bit dampened for me by its distracting final note).

Theatermania:  Here We Are Cast Recording to Be Released Next Month (https://www.theatermania.com/news/here-we-are-cast-recording-to-be-released-next-month_1736736/)


Specifically (at long last): May 17 for CD & digital.

For the double LP -- in baby-blue vinyl, if you please -- one must wait until September 6.

BWW:  Pre-Order Cast Recording For Sondheim's Here We Are (https://www.broadwayworld.com/article/Pre-Order-Cast-Recording-For-Sondheims-HERE-WE-ARE-Plus-Watch-the-New-Music-Video-For-Exit-Music-20240426)

This article includes the complete songlist, 27 tracks in all.

As a teaser for the album, the full 3-minute orchestral "Exit Music" track can be heard on Spotify, Apple Music, etc.; and also as a video (featuring footage from the recording studio, not the show):