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Stephen Sondheim had a genius for genre. Some of his best works were adapted from very niche sources like penny dreadfuls (\u201cSweeney Todd\u201d), epistolary novels (\u201cPassion\u201d) and Roman comedies (\u201cA Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum\u201d). Leaning hard into their specific styles, he mined their expressive potential in songs that could hardly be improved and never sounded alike.<\/p>\n
Still, for him and for others, surrealism was often a genre too far. Musical theater is surreal enough already. (Why did that taciturn man suddenly start singing? Who are those dancing women in lingerie?) Building a show on a willfully irrational source risks doubling down on the weirdness, leading to \u201cHuh?\u201d results like Andrew Lloyd Webber\u2019s \u201cCats\u201d and Sondheim\u2019s own \u201cAnyone Can Whistle.\u201d<\/p>\n
So as we waited what seemed like decades for what would turn out to be his last musical, never quite knowing if he\u2019d ditched it or not, the dribbles of information he and his collaborators let drop suggested that the new show \u2014 eventually titled \u201cHere We Are\u201d<\/a> \u2014 might be misbegotten.<\/p>\n Not only are the two Luis Bu\u00f1uel films that Sondheim and the playwright David Ives took as their inspiration maximally surrealist, they are also surreal in different, seemingly incompatible ways. \u201cThe Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie\u201d (1972) is a sunny romp about a group of friends who, seeking a meal, are mysteriously unable to find one. \u201cThe Exterminating Angel\u201d (1962) is a much darker affair, about a dinner party no one can leave. Both movies ridicule aristocrats who are underfed yet over-sated: people for whom nothing is ever enough. But one is like the silky tartness of a lemon meringue pie and the other like chicken bones stuck in your throat.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The best good news about \u201cHere We Are,\u201d the combo platter Bu\u00f1uel musical that opened on Sunday at the Shed, nearly two years after Sondheim\u2019s death in November 2021<\/a>, is that it justifies the idea of merging these two works and succeeds in making a surrealist musical expressive. In Joe Mantello\u2019s breathtakingly chic and shapely production, with a cast of can-you-top-this Broadway treasures, it is never less than a pleasure to watch as it confidently polishes and embraces its illogic. Musically, it\u2019s fully if a little skimpily Sondheim, and entirely worthy of his catalog. That it is also a bit cold, only occasionally moving in the way that song would ideally allow, may speak to the reason he had so much trouble writing it<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The first act, about an hour long and with perhaps seven numbers \u2014 though it\u2019s hard to count because they weave in and out of the dialogue \u2014 introduces us to Ives\u2019s American versions of Bu\u00f1uel\u2019s French gourmands from \u201cThe Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.\u201d Leo Brink (Bobby Cannavale) is a crass tycoon and Marianne Brink (Rachel Bay Jones) a society decorator; their Saturday morning is interrupted when four of their circle arrive at the couple\u2019s hyper-sleek apartment, insisting they\u2019ve been invited for brunch.<\/p>\n The interlopers include Paul Zimmer (Jeremy Shamos), a plastic surgeon celebrating his 1,000th nose job, and his wife, Claudia Bursik-Zimmer (Amber Gray), an agent, she brays, for \u201ca major entertainment entity.\u201d Along with them are Raffael Santello Di Santicci (Steven Pasquale), the horndog ambassador from a Mediterranean country called Moranda, and Fritz (Micaela Diamond), Marianne\u2019s sour younger sister, a revolutionary with champagne tastes.<\/p>\n Ives quickly and amusingly delineates the six with specific and almost universally obnoxious traits. Raffael, who butchers his English, and Claudia, quick to pull rank, have a weekly assignation behind Paul\u2019s back; Paul and Leo run a drug cartel with Raffael\u2019s ambassadorial assistance. Fritz is a pill. As they go on the road in search of a meal, accompanied by a Sondheim vamp that starts out marvelously jaunty and ends like water swirling down a drain, each reveals worse and worse traits, except for Marianne, who is too dim to be venal. When she asks her husband to \u201cbuy this perfect day\u201d for her, it seems less acquisitive than sentimental.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The changes of scenery as they visit various establishments featuring outr\u00e9 waiters (Tracie Bennett and Denis O\u2019Hare) in ever more ludicrous wigs (by Robert Pickens and Katie Gell) are accomplished with swift grace on David Zinn\u2019s shiny white box of a set, as neon marquees descend from the flies and then descend further to form tables or banquettes. (Zinn\u2019s costumes are also telegraphic, including Leo\u2019s velour sweatsuit and Claudia\u2019s sky-high purple Fendis.) The theme-and-variations format is enchanting, allowing Sondheim, the great puzzler, to treat songs almost as anagrams. Eventually, along with three other characters they pick up \u2014 a colonel (Francois Battiste), a soldier (Jin Ha) and a bishop (David Hyde Pierce) \u2014 the crew lands, by now starving, at Raffael\u2019s embassy, where they dine as Act I ends.<\/p>\n Here the musical hinges into \u201cThe Exterminating Angel,\u201d only instead of a completely different set of characters (Bu\u00f1uel\u2019s were Spanish, living under Franco), Ives, in a neat piece of joinery, continues with Leo and Marianne and the others. It is they who find it impossible to leave after dinner, and wind up, in Act II, sleeping, bickering and eventually fighting over food scraps as their metaphysical entrapment persists for days. Ives also complicates Bu\u00f1uel\u2019s antifascist, anti-bourgeois glee, in which plutocrats are exposed as pigs, by implicating the revolution as well; Fritz turns out to be less of a threat to her own way of life than she intended.<\/p>\n Clever as all that is, the windup has problems, as is true for many new shows finding their final shape. To make the characters in \u201cHere We Are\u201d worthy of punishment in the second act has meant making them too obviously awful in the first. Their brutishness throughout also lets us off Bu\u00f1uel\u2019s hook: His movies are about people whose sophistication and disposable income we should recognize, but \u201cHere We Are,\u201d which sometimes feels like a butterfly box, is about people we don\u2019t dare to.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Had Sondheim written more songs for Act II \u2014 there are just a few, bunched at the beginning \u2014 that problem might have been eased. In any case, Mantello and Ives decided to reframe the dearth as an opportunity. Before his death, Sondheim apparently agreed with them that the lack of songs in fact made structural sense: Once trapped in a repeating nightmare of deprivation, these characters would have no reason to sing. But then why retain the ones he\u2019d already written?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Perhaps because the songs he did write are everything you could want them to be. There are fewer trick rhymes than usual, but laugh-out-loud jokes nonetheless. A rhapsodic love song for the soldier and a paean to superficiality for Marianne \u2014 \u201cI want things to gleam.\/To be what they seem\/And not what they are\u201d \u2014 have the familiar Sondheimian depth and luster to crystallize complex insights.<\/p>\n Though we sorely miss that in Act II, and especially at the attempted triple lutz of an ending (which is probably two lutzes too many), Ives, the author of \u201cVenus in Fur\u201d<\/a> and innumerable clever comedies, has done much to compensate. Some of his dialogue scenes \u2014 including a riveting colloquy between the questing Marianne and the questioning bishop \u2014 have the shape, rhythm and sorrowful wit of a Sondheim song. (Jones and Pierce are standouts in the excellent cast.) Also lovingly filling in blanks are the musical supervisor, Alexander Gemignani, and Sondheim\u2019s longtime orchestrator, Jonathan Tunick, who have arranged themes from the earlier part of the show as instrumental interludes to take up the slack in the later part.<\/p>\n You can understand their care. Pending the discovery of some unpublished juvenilia or yet another iteration of the penultimate \u201cRoad Show,\u201d<\/a> this is the last Sondheim musical we will ever have. That alone makes the production historic, a pressure that happily does not show in the product, which is fleet and flashy. Natasha Katz\u2019s lighting, Tom Gibbons\u2019s sound and Sam Pinkleton\u2019s droll choreography do a lot of the heavy lifting for Mantello\u2019s agenda.<\/p>\n More important, \u201cHere We Are\u201d is as experimental as Sondheim throughout his career wanted everything to be. To swim through its currents of echoes of earlier work \u2014 some \u201cAnyone Can Whistle,\u201d some \u201cPassion,\u201d some \u201cMerrily We Roll Along\u201d \u2014 is to understand the characters\u2019 monstrous insatiability. We, too, will always want more, even when we\u2019ve had what by any reasonable standards should already be more than enough.<\/p>\n Here We Are<\/strong>
Through Jan. 21 at the Shed, Manhattan; theshed.org<\/a>. Running time: 2 hours and 20 minutes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n