Setting the Table
HERE WE ARE: An Anatomy of a Reading (Part One)
This January, for my birthday I took myself to see “Here We Are,” Sondheim’s final musical, which was presented posthumously at The Shed in New York City’s Hudson Yards development district. The experience was… very large, and I’ve been grappling with what to do with it ever since. I’m organizing my thoughts into an essay and figured I’d surface them up as I get “chunks” “done”. This is all first-draft stuff, but I’m trying to keep myself from being Emily Dickinson stuffing all her poems in a drawer.
Here we Are is the final play by Stephen Sondheim, which was produced posthumously and premiered off-Broadway at The Shed in October 2023. Its production is, as it often is, a character in this story.
In his article "The complete, from beginning-to-end story of how Stephen Sondheim, David Ives, and Joe Mantello created the musical Here We Are," longtime friend and theater critic Frank Rich traces the genesis of the Buñuel project to June of 1982 when a then 52-year old Sondheim found himself in the unenviable position of what to do next after a flop. His last project, Merrily We Roll Along flopped hard with the audience, and even worse with critics. As he relates to collaborator James Lapine in Putting it Together, "The reception of Merrily really shook me, because there was so much anger and, I think hatred toward the show in so-called Broadway circles... I thought, I don't want to be in this profession, it's just too hostile and mean-spirited." On November 28, 1981, lasting just sixteen performances over its twelve-day run, Merrily closed. A despondent Sondheim considered developing video games if things didn't turn around.
Nevertheless, he continued to pursue theatrical works. Upon seeing the play 'Table Settings' by 33-year old playwright James Lapine, he arranged a meeting with him to discuss potential projects to collaborate on. While this fateful meeting would eventually lead to the development of Sunday in the Park with George (itself a divisive, if significantly less cruelly received play), it was also where Sondheim and Lapine first discussed the possibility of adapting two of Spanish-born surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel's movies into a musical - the light comedy The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and the much darker Exterminating Angel.
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is a social satire from 1972 that follows a group of friends that move from scenario to scenario wherein strange circumstances prevent them from having a meal (problems range from a restaurant simply being closed to reality breaking down around them, revealing the friends to all be characters in a play-within-a-movie [that turns out to be a dream]. Got all that?). Exterminating Angel I haven't watched yet, so, #TODO , but the gist is a (different) group of socialites find themselves unable to leave a dinner party, leading to chaos and a breakdown of social norms.
While the musical would remain somewhere in the back of his mind for years, it wouldn't be until 2013 when Sondheim and playwright David Ives would begin to work on it in earnest. As Rich meticulously captures in "The complete, from beginning-to-end story..." progress on the show happened in fits and starts, in large part due to the difficulty of cracking Act Two - Sondheim in particular found the characters had no reason to sing once all trapped in the same room. It wouldn't be until a year into the pandemic in May 2021 that director Joe Mantello would have the realization that they shouldn't. When Sondheim's longtime friends Bernadette Peters and Nathan Lane performed a reading in September 2021, he saw that Mantello was right. Two weeks later on September 15th he'd announce to the Colbert Show that "Square One" (a title he hadn't cleared with his collaborators - Ives and Mantello eventually landed on "Here We Are") was hopefully going to be part of the 2022 Broadway season. Two months later, he died on Thanksgiving day leaving Buñuel in Ives and Mantello's hands to carry on.
In October 2023, Here We Are premiered at the Shed, seated in the Hudson Yards development district. One of the most ambitious private real estate developments in the country, Hudson Yards has been the subject of endless controversies. Billions of dollars in tax exemptions and bonds were diverted from public services to create a playground for the wealthy, increasing the foothold of private spaces in a shared urban area and raising concerns about displacing lower-income residents in surrounding areas.
Personally, I found myself extremely uncomfortable at The Shed. In general, I am deeply skeptical of "luxury," as it always seems to come at an expense I'd rather not pay (and I don't necessarily mean monetarily - though I did have to donate to the theater to be put on their mailing list to get notification when tickets for Here We Are went on sale). I wasn’t alone - when I got out of "Here We Are," one of my fellow theater-goers, talking to their friend said "now lets get out of Hudson Yards and go someplace where people treat each other like humans." As a deep examination of the cruelty embedded in the feckless and mercurial lives of the ultra rich, Here We Are could not find a more appropriate home.
