It’s a pleasure to hear the vamps, the syncopated rhythms of Steven Sondheim’s final new musical, Here We Are, with topical lyric shout-outs to “infinity pools and Damien Hirsts” and the familiar juxtaposition of surface wit with the suggestion of deeper truths.
The poet Paul Valery once wrote that “a poem is never finished, only abandoned.” And that sense of abandonment hangs over Here We Are. There is no way to know what shape this show might have taken had Sondheim not died in 2021, but director Joe Mantello’s first-rate production, with his incomparable cast, makes a strong case for the virtues of what remains. After all, Luis Buñuel’s surrealism resists any effort to be explained away. “What does anything matteur?” Tracie Bennett’s French waitress asks at one point. “It is what it is. Things are what they are.” In the end, we can be grateful for what Sondheim has left us.
Read my full review in the December/January issue of Musicals magazine.
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