Quote from: KathyB on May 11, 2025, 06:35 PMIf only public radio would instantly stop the pledge drive when one makes a donation. 

Quote from: Sarah Hemming, Financial Times 12 May 2025So, here it is, and it's hard to imagine it better done. Stephen Sondheim's final musical, first produced posthumously in New York, arrives in London: a bonkers, bitty and sometimes brilliant coda to the great composer-lyricist's work, superbly delivered by a terrific cast.

As many have noted, it's barely a musical — more a surreal drama in which music is part of the texture — and it certainly doesn't match Sondheim's masterpieces. But in Joe Mantello's affectionately precise staging, even the work's unfinished state makes sense. When the songs dry up, early in the second act, it seems in tune with the context: the shift from satire to something more reflective. Here, the piece feels like both an acerbic comment on a world on the brink and an ironic meditation on the nature of theatre where characters remain suspended in their own hermetic little world. It's not Sondheim at his greatest, but it's still uniquely him: witty, wry and suddenly wise.

The plot, which could be subtitled Five Go Feral, is drawn from two films from the Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and The Exterminating Angel), deftly tailored by playwright David Ives into two linked acts. Part one sees a handful of tiresome, uber-privileged types bustle about town in search of the perfect brunch, only to be met with the dismaying news that every establishment has run out of food.

Conversation sparkles with expensive dysfunction: billionaire Leo (Rory Kinnear, in designer tracksuit) and his sweet, airhead wife Marianne (Jane Krakowski in drifty sky-blue négligée) plan to clone their dogs so they have identical pooches in all their houses. Martha Plimpton's bristling film agent, Jesse Tyler Ferguson's cynical plastic surgeon and Paulo Szot's lecherous diplomat squabble, sulk and flirt. Tagging along supposedly reluctantly is Marianne's wannabe anarchist kid sister Fritz (Chumisa Dornford-May), who growls about bringing down capitalism and the end of the world. Ominous offstage gunshots and bomb blasts suggest she could be right.

Sondheim's score propels and comments on the action: a capricious, spiky little running tune to accompany the desperate hunt for Insta-worthy food, a lush Piaf-style number for a waitress at the end of her tether. And there is superb work from Denis O'Hare and Tracie Bennett as a succession of eccentric, Mephistophelian waiting staff.

Cut to part two and the gang have holed up in the ambassador's lavish residence, only to find they can't leave. Soon all pretence at civility has evaporated as the friends (plus a couple of soldiers and a reluctant priest) haggle over the remnants of food, hack into the mains for water and resort to eating the library. The songs stop. As political comment on the excesses of late-stage capitalism, it's pretty blunt and the lack of action is problematic. But there's an edge to Mantello's staging that lifts it into something weird and existential.

"Here we are," runs a refrain. But where are they really? In purgatory? Certainly there are echoes of Sartre's Huis Clos in the second part and a nod to Beckett throughout. David Zinn's set design, all glossy surfaces in the first half and mad opulence in the second, makes the characters look like exhibits in a gallery. And, for all the piece's drawbacks, in the middle of it comes an unexpectedly deep and moving takeaway. Marianne asks the priest for meaning. "We're here. Actually here on Earth. Most probably," he replies. It feels like a quiet reminder from a great artist who is no longer here.

★★★★☆

To June 28, nationaltheatre.org.uk