It was always wishful thinking to believe that Stephen Sondheim’s final musical, which was tinkered with for almost a decade before the composer died in 2021, would hold a candle to his finest works.
But even going in with modest expectations and the awareness that Sondheim hadn’t created a strong show in nearly 30 years — the last one being “Passion” in 1994 — “Here We Are” still disappoints.
It’s less a musical than it is a shiny curiosity.
Two hours and 20 minutes with one intermission. At The Shed, 545 W. 30th Street. Through Jan. 21.
In this theatrical mash-up of two surrealist films by director Luis Buñuel from the 1960s and ‘70s that opened Sunday at The Shed, the songs taper out a few minutes into Act 2 because the “Sweeney Todd” composer obviously couldn’t finish any more.
So, director Joe Mantello and book writer David Ives have come up with a dubious reason for the growing lack of a score: the music drains from the story as the characters’ situation becomes increasingly forlorn.
“Here We Are,” therefore, gets by on disguising wafer-thin material with visual splendor and tiresome wackiness. Ives, the occasionally indulgent writer of Broadway’s “Venus in Fur” and “All In The Timing,” is the dominant artistic force here — not Sondheim.
The first half of this upper-crust send-up, based on “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” is about six well-to-do, hyperactive friends who are hellbent on having brunch. But no matter how many restaurants they sit down in, they leave not having eaten a scrap.
There’s Leo (Bobby Cannavale) and Marianne (Rachel Bay Jones), the husband-and-wife hosts; Paul (Jeremy Shamos), a plastic surgeon, and his crass spouse Claudia (Amber Gray); Marianne’s sister Fritz (Micaela Diamond), a loudmouth revolutionary; and Raffael (Steven Pasquale), the ambassador of a fictional European country called Miranda — and a shameless lothario.
Kookiness is on the menu. The wrongly named Cafe Everything is completely out of food, and there’s a not-so-fashionable funeral taking place inside Bistro À La Mode. The confusion and comedy are amped up far more than in Buñuel’s sophisticated satires, and onstage it all starts to feel like an hourlong, drunken conga line at Club Med.
You can’t have class commentary without the downtrodden. Denis O’Hare and Tracie Bennett amusingly play beleaguered waiters at all three eateries, with changing accents and attitudes to match.
The tunes in the first half are pleasant, but just not up to the composer-lyricist’s usual level of wit or musical distinctiveness. The cast sings a repeated, ho-hum song about “this perfect day,” as the afternoon ironically becomes worse and worse, and Leo muses that “we are what we are.” Most are forgettable.
Best is a sweet, cutting love duet between Diamond and the buttery-voiced Jin Ha, as a lieutenant who arrives at Osteria Zeno. Fritz, an outspoken activist, does a fast 180 and is humorously now an emptily outspoken romantic instead.
What’s missed everywhere is passion. In Sondheim’s other experimental musicals — “Assassins,” profiling presidential killers, and “Sunday In The Park With George,” about Georges Seurat’s famous painting — heat arrives in the most unexpected ways and places. The sound of “Here We Are,” however, lands on either soothing or silly, always.
And there’s not much to hear at all in Act 2, a take on the movie “The Exterminating Angel” that begins with a scenic stunner (set by David Zinn), as the friends from Act 1 become trapped in the Miranda embassy and are mysteriously unable to leave.
By now they’ve been joined by David Hyde Pierce as the Bishop, who dryly confides, “I’m a terrible priest,” and Francois Battiste as Colonel Martin.
The always fabulous Jones, whose Marianne is a self-satisfied dimwit, starts the act off crooning about the joys of superficiality and utters one of the few lyrics that calls back to Sondheim at his best: “I don’t need to read between the lines — the lines are just fine.”
Then the show becomes all lines.
Tedious lines, at that. Talk of drug cartels and retro revolutionary terrorists is contorted into a somewhat important plot point, but comes off superfluous all the same.
Ives’ scenes in the embassy of Miranda meander and peter out, even as the denizens’ behavior turns animalistic, and the audience is distracted by moments in which never-written duets and ballads were clearly meant to have been placed. What could have been dominates what is.
The novelty of attending Sondheim’s final musical and experiencing its non-stop zaniness wear off long before “Here We Are” ends, and the whole thing falls apart.
Many elements here are ideal. The wonderful cast is as dream-like as Buñuel’s strange story. Mantello, the director who finally got “Assassins” right in 2004, sleekly stages the action, such as it is. And Zinn’s set is a dying breed of design that gets entrance applause.
But none of that matters much when the hat isn’t finished.
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