HERE WE ARE

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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


(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 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 into a short one-act play of the same name.

Sondheim and Ives's Here We Are, opening at The Shed in September, will be directed by Joe Mantello (Wicked, Assassins).

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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 1,200-seat McCourt space 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... with Cecily Strong (honorable, but unfortunate) 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.

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Here We Are Cast & Creatives Announced


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

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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

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From Vulture this morning:

The Final Sondheim

The complete, from-beginning-to-end story of how Stephen Sondheim,

David Ives and Joe Mantello created the musical Here We Are

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...?)

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Poster art was released a few days ago:

You cannot view this attachment.

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.

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<sigh> ...

NYT:  How Complete Was Stephen Sondheim's Final Musical?

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...?

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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.


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 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 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...

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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 more widely].


Also, HWA souvenir merchandise is now available for purchase at the theater or online:

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

I'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)*, 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), 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, as well as the coffee mug, apparently lacks these foot-shadows -- though they appear on all other items, including the program cover.

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 their program 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 for the original Big River, in which she rendered the Mississippi River itself 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...]

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Eight new production photos have been released as Here We Are heads into its opening weekend.

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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 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.

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.

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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.


Variety:   Sondheim's Final Musical Is a Surreal and Starry Feast

Vulture:   A strange, dark, fragmented, and compelling final message from the master.

Time Out:   There are riches in Stephen Sondheim's final musical.


(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.]

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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.

If 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 Café Everything is fresh out of 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, 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.

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The New Yorker:  Stephen Sondheim's Last Musical, Here We Are, Comes to the Shed

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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 (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 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.