Review Round-up: 'Here We Are' – At Last, Sondheim's Final Musical Premieres

Unquestionably the fall's biggest theatrical opening is "Here We Are," the Stephen Sondheim/David Ives project that had been gestating for more than decade that was left unfinished at Sondheim's death November 2021. The production, directed by Joe Mantello, features a starry cast – 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 – who wowed critics. The official opening was Sunday night at The Shed, a multi-use performance space in Hudson Yards, 15 blocks south and west of Broadway.

Though unfinished, Sondheim gave permission for the production, which he discussed in an appearance on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" just weeks prior to his death. During its long process, where it went through a number of workshops, "Here We Are" was abandoned and returned to a number of times.

Its source material is two surrealistic masterworks by the Spanish master Luis Buniel – "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" and "The Exterminating Angel," both seen as scathing satires of wealthy Europeans. In the former, a group of diplomats and businessmen and their wives cannot find service at a number of swanky restaurants; in the latter, a group of aristocrats attend a dinner they inexplicably cannot leave. Sondheim and Ives combine the films by having the aristocrats unable to find service end up at a chateau where dinner is served, but they can't leave.

Not unusual for Sondheim, the reviews are decidedly mixed, with praise for the production, the casting, and the bravura nature of the project; but criticism of the storytelling and a lack of synergy between Sondheim's songs and Ive's satiric book. Complicating matters is that there is no new music in the second half – a decision made not so much by Sondheim's death, but by the way the creators saw the use of music in the piece.

Whether or not the show, which was just extended its run until January 21, 2024, will move to a different theater remains to be seen. The Shed is considered off-Broadway.

Here is a sampling of the reviews:

The New York Times, Jesse Green

"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 ...

"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?...

"More important, 'Here We Are' is as experimental as Sondheim throughout his career wanted everything to be. To swim through its currents of echoes of earlier work – some 'Anyone Can Whistle,' some 'Passion,' some 'Merrily We Roll Along' – is to understand the characters' monstrous insatiability. We, too, will always want more, even when we've had what by any reasonable standards should already be more than enough."

The Washington Post, Peter Marks

"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...

"It would be a particular satisfaction to declare that their contributions spell unqualified success. But 'Here We Are' – reportedly unfinished at the time of Sondheim's death – is only about 60 percent of an entertaining musical, and not even an entire musical, really: Given the mostly fragmentary songs and the tedious, drawn-out denouement Ives devises, it's what you might term an 'usical.' The brisk and funny storytelling and witty musical interludes of Act 1 give way in Act 2 to endless bloviating on the Meaning of Everything. 'Please,' you find yourself musing, "let them start singing again."

Vulture, Sara Holdren

"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 same seething consciousness of caste and cruelty that ripples through Sweeney forms the backbone of 'Here We Are,' a show equally preoccupied with trendy restaurants and one with, if anything, even more of an impulse to eat the rich. There's no blurring of the composer-lyricist's inimitable, agile and angular forms, no blunting of his wit, no comfort in nostalgia. 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.

"... 'Here We Are' is torn between its reasonable desire to obliterate its characters and its aspiration, if not quite to save them, then to remain open-ended as to where they – and we–go from here. If it's sometimes a muddled impulse, it's also a humane one. Sondheim certainly didn't go gentle into the apocalypse of late capitalism, but he didn't go heartless either. He stayed complicated. He gave us more to see."

Slant, Dan Rubins

"Sometimes people leave you halfway through the wood," Cinderella sings in 'No One Is Alone,' Stephen Sondheim's clear-eyed reassurance of support and survival at the end of 'Into the Woods.' Sondheim himself, who passed away in November 2021, left artistic companions, including book writer David Ives and director Joe Mantello, halfway through a wood they were constructing together: the musical 'Here We Are,' now playing off-Broadway at the Shed's Griffin Theater. With his final offering, Sondheim sends one last jolt of structural inventiveness coursing through the veins of the musical theater form. 'Here We Are' may not operate on the grand scale of 'Sweeney Todd' or 'Into the Woods' or 'Follies,' but it is, to quote the composer-lyricist, small and funny and fine ...

"'Here We Are' isn't unnerving in the spine-crawling way that 'The Exterminating Angel' and 'The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie' are (for more faithfully terrifying music, listen to Thomas Adès's seething operatic adaptation of the former, which premiered in 2016). But the show still moves from a frothily weird and wonderful first act to an opaquely heartbreaking second act that – as has been widely reported – offers almost no music at all...

"What music there is, though, doesn't disappoint. Sondheim's score is decidedly within his most familiar vocabulary, a final master class in pressing music into the service of character. As the recent revivals of 'Sweeney Todd' and 'Merrily We Roll Along' also demonstrate, one of Sondheim's superior gifts was his impeccable understanding of how the ear processes language. Rhythm and melody, under his pen, allow the text to crash like a wave over us, somehow guiding the listener response so that everyone gets the joke at the exact same moment...

"'So, old friends, now it's trying to start growing up,' Sondheim wrote in 'Merrily We Roll Along.' 'Taking charge, seeing things as they are.' Even though 'Here We Are's' characters will not step up to the threshold to peer beyond the world they've built for themselves, that doesn't mean we can't. If Sondheim's ouevre was always all about awakening–from fairy-tale characters learning to live in reality to aging Broadway babies learning to live in the present and 35-year-old bachelors learning how to live fully in their own lives – 'Here We Are' is one last invitation to let Sondheim's music guide us through the woods as he teaches us to see things as they are."

The Guardian, Gloria Oladipo

"With much anticipation, Stephen Sondheim's final musical, 'Here We Are,' is making its debut after Sondheim's death in 2021. Enjoyable and necessary as further evidence of Sondheim's breadth, the full work feels severed from its radical origins and potential...

"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. Director Joe Mantello seamlessly puppeteers the cycle of outrageous scenarios from restaurant to restaurant. 'Here We Are's' excellent cast stands to attention, particularly Diamond, Jones and David Hyde Pierce as a job-hunting bishop. Tracie Bennett and Denis O'Hare are essential chameleons, playing the various wait staff throughout the musical's restaurants.

"But the second act loses some of the meticulous chaos that buoyed the first. Unable to leave the Miranda embassy, the dinner guests devolve into their typical antics as they struggle to survive.

The lack of momentum is not because of the musical's incomplete nature (Sondheim died before the musical's technical finish, but gave permission for its production). But the musical becomes more about a salon between the characters as they reflect on their complicity and evilness...

"... But 'Here We Are' lacks the audacious ending to justify the chicanery of earlier. Interestingly enough, the characters of 'Here We Are' are not dissimilar to the musical's mostly white audience – the kind of theatergoers who can pay ample for exclusive tickets to Sondheim's posthumous release. The quarantine in the 'room' isn't far off from the early days of the pandemic, as celebrities compared penthouses to jail.

"'Here We Are' has the potential to be a mirror, in true satirical nature. But instead, it ends with a curtain, a closed circuit with the final note: 'The world is pretty messed up.' Indeed it is."