"HERE WE ARE" Unwrapped

I finally caught Stephen Sondheim’s posthumous “final” musical, Here We Are, during its closing weeks at The Shed recently. I then went back for a look at my emails over many years with Steve about, what he called: “The Bunuel/Ives.” Just to reconfirm my recollection.

In brief (and by year) here is what he wrote:

2017: “Trying to work (very slowly, I’m sorry to say).”

2018: “I’m okay, but writing super-slowly.”

2019: “As for the Bunuel/Ives, I’m in Connecticut doing just that for as long as it takes.”

2020:  “I should be taking the time to write, but, as is the human wont, having all the time in the world makes me procrastinate.”

2021: No further Bunuel/Ives updates arrived during Steve’s final year of life. Mostly our emails kicked around my then-forthcoming book, EVER AFTER. (“Send a galley but remember, I’m a very very slow reader.”) In one fleeting exchange, though, in answer to my question about Bunuel/Ives, he did say: “I may be done.”

And then he was gone.

What I have to say about Here We Are is just as fleeting. 

Here We Are is very slender, even fragmentary, as a musical — more a clutch of Sondheim riffs, rewoven, refreshed, but redolent of earlier, fuller Sondheim. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad to have even Sondheim riffs as a farewell. Jonathan Tunick, Sondheim’s Sondheim of an arranger, has dressed these riffs up elegantly for final viewing — I mean, auditorily. There are a few in the first act and really one, only, in the second.

Let me add that these riffs are rife with rhymes, most of them relentlessly alliterative, characteristically ingenious and (sometimes scabrously) clever. “Rhymes,” Steve once (or twice) said to me, “do not make a song,” but he was the very best at it, so no complaints here.

I would not share SS’s words of Here We Are procrastination if they were, in any way, news. Media coverage on this subject was plentiful preceding Here We Are’s arrival. In the case of his collaborators —bookwriter David Ives and director Joe Mantello — it was even confessional. Their self-baring interview with Frank Rich, which originally ran in New York magazine, is actually reprinted in the Here We Are program.

What’s not printed is a Song List.

For Stephen Sondheim’s farewell musical?!

I went through the program four or five times to make sure I wasn’t crazy. There are two pages of “Co-Presenter Notes” from the Shed’s Artistic Director and Chief Executive, respectively. There is a traditional Title page, dense with production credits, plus a Cast list, and two pages of cast headshot snaps. There are twelve pages of Bios. (Including one for Co-Producers Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw. Her portrait series UNACCOMPANIED apparently came to the Park Avenue Armory in October.) There are three pages of Here We Are Staff. The Shed’s Board of Directors and Supporters get four pages. And then there are three final pages for The Shed’s own staff.

I searched diligently for a QR code offering an off-site Song List, perhaps? A frantic, empty search — like dining out for the first time during the pandemic and looking for a menu.

I even ventured to Here We Are’s official website. There is a page for Tickets. There is a page for Merch. There is no Song List.

And so, I have nothing further I can say about the nameless “songs” in Here We Are.

The large cast, by the way (all named), comprises some of the best Broadway can supply these days. They work very hard, with great reverence for their material. I thought that Denis O’Hare simply killed it in Act 1 as a variety of hapless waiters. Bobby Cannavale almost swallowed the show whole, as a belching corporate titan.

Most of the people I’ve spoken to who enjoyed Here We Are had no clue that it is entirely derived (and this was Steve’s idea) from two surrealist film classics made by the Spanish-Mexican surrealist master, Luis Buñuel: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Act 1) and The Exterminating Angel (Act 2).

Hardly the audience’s fault — how could they know this, unless previously briefed? Surely not from the program, which generically acknowledges (in typeface more than discreet): “Inspired By The Films of Luis Buñuel.”

In fact, watching Here We Are’s nouveau riches stumble through their first act in search of a brunch endlessly withheld from them is probably funnier if you don’t know that their plight and their plot is from The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. As for the distress of  Act 2 — wherein the show’s creeps and assholes, after finally getting fed, find themselves trapped in a luxurious room that they cannot exit, with barely a song to sing — this torture may or may not be enhanced by knowing (or not knowing), that it is all (essentially) The Exterminating Angel.

I leave you with my own lingering image of Here We Are — a musical mostly about not eating. As the lights came down for the show to begin, a sparkly-garbed 20-something couple seated right in front of me (three rows from the stage, on the side) pulled out two freshly wrapped, steaming cheeseburgers — as if they’d been waiting for this perfect, curtain-going-up moment, to begin eating. And eat they did, throughout a first act blatantly premised upon the notion that no one onstage can get anything to eat.

I’ll bet you the actors could smell those burgers.