Here We Are, legendary composer Stephen Sondheim’s final musical, features a book by Tony Award–nominee David Ives. It is inspired by Luis Buñuel’s films The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and The Exterminating Angel. Here We Are is directed by Tony Award–winner Joe Mantello.
The cast will include Francois Battiste, Tracie Bennett, Bobby Cannavale, Micaela Diamond, Amber Gray, Jin Ha, Rachel Bay Jones, Denis O’Hare, Steven Pasquale, David Hyde Pierce, and Jeremy Shamos. The understudies for Here We Are are Bradley Dean, Adam Harrington, Bligh Voth, Adante Carter, Mehry Eslaminia, and Lindsay Nicole Chambers.
Produced by Tom Kirdahy, its executive producers are Sue Wagner, John Johnson, and Jillian Robbins. Co-presented by The Shed.
Performances begin in September 2023.
What music there is, is playful and joyous. You wish there were more of it, especially a finale. But Ives and Mantello do heroic work endowing it with coherence and force. Sondheim always insisted on giving equal credit to his book writers, those who fed him and goaded him. It’s fitting that his last collaborator finished the epitaph. Viewed in the context of Sondheim’s monumental career—quirkiest since Anyone Can Whistle, most political since Assassins—Here We Are is a tenderly whispered coda. It shocks, how much he achieved: writing the lyrics to West Side Story and Gypsy before he was thirty; noodling at the piano in his nineties. Here he was. Yet he’s still here.
David Zinn’s minimalist set in Act I may inadvertently encourage theatergoers in the feeling that “Here We Are” is unfinished – that it would have been different, better, if Sondheim were still alive, especially since he was a self-confessed procrastinator with a track record of coming up with his most brilliant work way past deadline (such as, most famously, “A Comedy Tonight” in “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” the first musical for which he wrote both music and lyrics, in 1962.) But I prefer to see “Here We Are” in light of a different Sondheim track record. As both biographers and loyal fans know, the public rarely appreciates any of Sondheim’s musicals right away. It takes time to find them wonderful.
2023 | Off-Broadway |
The Shed Off-Broadway Premiere Production Off-Broadway |
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