It was at all times wishful considering to consider that Stephen Sondheim’s final musical, which was tinkered with for nearly a decade before the composer died in 2021, would hold a candle to his finest works.
But even getting in with modest expectations and the notice that Sondheim hadn’t created a powerful show in nearly 30 years — the last one being “Passion” in 1994 — “Here We Are” still disappoints.
It’s less a musical than it’s a shiny curiosity.
Two hours and 20 minutes with one intermission. At The Shed, 545 W. thirtieth Street. Through Jan. 21.
On this theatrical mash-up of two surrealist movies by director Luis Buñuel from the Nineteen Sixties and ‘70s that opened Sunday at The Shed, the songs taper out a number of minutes into Act 2 since the “Sweeney Todd” composer obviously couldn’t finish any more.
So, director Joe Mantello and book author David Ives have provide you with a dubious reason for the growing lack of a rating: the music drains from the story because the characters’ situation becomes increasingly forlorn.
“Here We Are,” subsequently, gets by on disguising wafer-thin material with visual splendor and tiresome wackiness. Ives, the occasionally indulgent author of Broadway’s “Venus in Fur” and “All In The Timing,” is the dominant artistic force here — not Sondheim.
The primary half of this upper-crust send-up, based on “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” is about six well-to-do, hyperactive friends who’re hellbent on having brunch. But regardless of what number of 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 Every thing is totally out of food, and there’s a not-so-fashionable funeral happening inside Bistro À La Mode. The confusion and comedy are amped up excess of in Buñuel’s sophisticated satires, and onstage all of it starts to feel like an hourlong, drunken conga line at Club Med.
You possibly can’t have class commentary without the downtrodden. Denis O’Hare and Tracie Bennett amusingly play beleaguered waiters in any respect three eateries, with changing accents and attitudes to match.
The tunes in the primary half are nice, but just lower than the composer-lyricist’s usual level of wit or musical distinctiveness. The solid sings a repeated, ho-hum song about “this perfect day,” because the afternoon paradoxically becomes worse and worse, and Leo muses that “we’re what we’re.” 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 quick 180 and is humorously now an emptily outspoken romantic as a substitute.
What’s missed all over the place 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 probably the most unexpected ways and places. The sound of “Here We Are,” nevertheless, lands on either soothing or silly, at all times.
And there’s not much to listen to in any respect in Act 2, a tackle the movie “The Exterminating Angel” that begins with a scenic stunner (set by David Zinn), as the chums from Act 1 develop into trapped within the Miranda embassy and are mysteriously unable to depart.
By now they’ve been joined by David Hyde Pierce because the Bishop, who dryly confides, “I’m a terrible priest,” and Francois Battiste as Colonel Martin.
The at all times fabulous Jones, whose Marianne is a self-satisfied dimwit, starts the act off crooning in regards to the joys of superficiality and utters considered one of the few lyrics that calls back to Sondheim at his best: “I don’t have to read between the lines — the lines are only wonderful.”
Then the show becomes all lines.
Tedious lines, at that. Talk of drug cartels and retro revolutionary terrorists is contorted right into a somewhat necessary plot point, but comes off superfluous all the identical.
Ives’ scenes within the embassy of Miranda meander and peter out, at the same time as the denizens’ behavior turns animalistic, and the audience is distracted by moments wherein never-written duets and ballads were clearly meant to have been placed. What might have been dominates what’s.
The novelty of attending Sondheim’s final musical and experiencing its non-stop zaniness wear off long before “Here We Are” ends, and the entire thing falls apart.
Many elements listed here are ideal. The wonderful solid is as dream-like as Buñuel’s strange story. Mantello, the director who finally got “Assassins” right in 2004, sleekly stages the motion, reminiscent of it’s. 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.
