Here We Are – Broadway Reviews

"The Last Sondheim, Cool and Impossibly Chic"

"This inventive, beguiling and not quite fully solved puzzle of a show is a worthy and loving farewell to the great musical dramatist"

"The best good news about “Here We Are,” the combo platter Buñuel musical that opened on Sunday at the Shed, nearly two years after Sondheim’s death in November 2021, is that it justifies the idea of merging these two works and succeeds in making a surrealist musical expressive. In Joe Mantello’s 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’s 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."

"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 “Here We Are” worthy of punishment in the second act has meant making them too obviously awful in the first."

"Had Sondheim written more songs for Act II — there are just a few, bunched at the beginning — 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’d already written? 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."

"There are riches in Stephen Sondheim's final musical"

"The aggrieved would-be diners wind up spending the entire first act of Here We Are in a literally fruitless quest to be fed, and some audiences at this collaboration between the playwright David Ives and the composer Stephen Sondheim may feel similarly confused and undernourished. Yet I should say up front that I enjoyed it very much. Sondheim’s final musical is not quite a full meal—not, at least, as a Sondheim musical per se—but how could it be?"

"But if Here We Are amounts to a plate of hors d’oeuvres in the Sondheim oeuvre, it is exquisitely well served in its world premiere at the Shed; Ives, director Joe Mantello and the superb ensemble cast deliver a deluxe production."

"While maintaining a general air of surrealism, and occasionally dipping into the metatheatrical zone, Ives plumps up the films’ characters and plots, sometimes more fleshily than others"

"Here We Are is meticulously assembled—including by choreographer Sam Pinkleton, lighting designer Natasha Katz, and sound designer Tom Gibbons—as well as cleverly written and wonderfully performed."

"Posthumous Stephen Sondheim musical is hit-and-miss"

"The legendary composer and lyricist’s take on two surrealist Luis Buñuel movies is a patchy satire"

"Enjoyable and necessary as further evidence of Sondheim’s breadth, the full work feels severed from its radical origins and potential."

"Sondheim, with arrangement from Alexander Gemignani, emphasizes the disquiet nature of the so-called faultless day. The music is punctured by dissonance, knocks, and the off-whistle. Thoughtful repetition further underlines the group’s robotic attempt to get brunch versus witnessing the end-of-the-world around them."

"The first act includes the full absurdity (and inevitable humor) in audacious displays of wealth. Sondheim’s lyrics, in characteristic brilliance, feature clever wordplay and melodrama, including rhymes about vodka martinis and saffron omelettes."

"But the second act loses some of the meticulous chaos that buoyed the first."

"Sondheim’s Final Musical Is a Surreal and Starry Feast"

"Chasing brunch to the brink of apocalypse is Stephen Sondheim at his most extreme, and the world premiere of “Here We Are,” which opened Off Broadway at the Shed on Sunday, is a study in overabundance."

"Performances from the pinch-me-this-can’t-be-real cast are like a Broadway gourmand’s fever dream. Whatever else this deeply strange and Frankenstein-ed musical delivers — which is a lot — the production’s outrageous lineup of stars are as delectably odd as they’ve ever been"

"... the combination of Sondheim’s score with Ives’ absurd and often hilarious book, rather than generating synergy, feels uneasy and disjointed, like they’re pulling in opposite directions. Partly that’s because the plot itself only stumbles forward, first through non sequiturs and then inevitability."

"“Here We Are” delights in the flavor of its vapid jet-sets, but ultimately spits them out in a resolution that betrays its own internal logic. It’s too much, and robs the show of its potential teeth. Better to know when the feast is done."

"‘Here We Are’ brings Sondheim back to us. Just not as a raging success"

"The world-premiere musical is blessed with a dazzling cast and design, but a sense of incompleteness diminishes its impact"

"A dream cast has been assembled for “Here We Are,” the final musical in the illustrious career of the late Stephen Sondheim. A dreamy first act unfolds, too, courtesy of director Joe Mantello and a sparkling physical design in the Shed’s Griffin Theater, the off-Broadway space where the world premiere had its official opening Sunday night."

"For as long as the music lasts, in fact — and it essentially comes to an abrupt halt early in Act 2 — “Here We Are” is a delightful riff on Luis Buñuel’s surrealist films, including the Oscar-winning “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.” But in art as in life, it seems, all good things must come to an end, and on this occasion, they end about 45 minutes before the curtain call."

" Sondheim’s swansong is clever and ambitious – but not a crowd-pleaser"

"The late composer's last musical has finally made it to onto a New York stage – but it won't be remembered as one of his best"

"Wisely, Here We Are – an imperfect show but a touching requiem for the man who reinvented and reinvigorated musical theatre – has come to life in The Shed, a 550-seat Off Broadway space. It’s a venue well suited to this odd, adventurous tuner that Sondheim worked on before he died in 2021 at the age of 91, since it’s not a show likely to stimulate audiences who aren’t already devoted Sondheim-ites."

"After an enchanting first act, these same characters end up trapped in a room by some existential dread or invisible force. It’s a palpable metaphor for what we endured during the days of Covid lockdowns, but it fails to resonate, largely because the songs stop."

"Director Joe Mantello’s mostly smooth production – in which characters emerge from the darkness with renewed expectations for their lives, even as shadows linger – benefits from a high-calibre cast of New York theater regulars, with especially notable performances from O’Hare, Bennett, Jones, Ha and Pierce."

"Sondheim’s last musical sadly doesn’t sing"

"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."

"“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."

"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."

"The Last Midnight: Sondheim and Ives’s Here We Are A strange, dark, fragmented, and compelling final message from the master"

"So although it’s not a surprise, it’s still an invigorating relief that Sondheim’s final offering to the world, the long-time-coming new musical Here We Are, is a fittingly complex and thorny one."

"The play has sharp, savage urges, springing from its sense of injustice. When it wobbles, and it does so increasingly as it goes along, it’s not because it began without a clear proposition: It’s because the logical conclusion of its premise is in fact so dark, so extreme, that you can feel the opposing, more compassionate (or at least more ambivalent) instincts of the show’s creators kicking back at it — stalling, equivocating, looking for alternative exits."

"But what an astounding set of performances! What a striking, protean mise-en-scène! What a thrill to hear the unmistakable syncopations, the spikes and leaps and the intermittent yearning silkiness of this music, one last first time."