Well, the problem with musical theatre at the moment has been the problem that's been around for now, oh gosh, 40 years, which is economics. Young people do not get a chance to learn their craft... You can learn principles, but the whole idea of the theater is ... you have to get it out in front of an audience and get that two-way street going between an audience and a stage and see what happens when actors ... get hold of what you write. That can only be done by practice. And unless you get a chance to practice, you can't, quote, be perfect. And now young writers are lucky if they get a show on every five years. And that's really lucky...
But musicals that really try to do something or say something or try to experiment with the form are few and far between. Now you find them ... in off-Broadway theater, in regional theater. But they don't get the kind of exposure, nor do they get the kind of professional productions, unless they are done on Broadway or in the West End with professional singers and professional actors and professional directors and a wide audience. And so it's not exactly a dead end street, but it's a very narrow tunnel to get to write something and to get it heard by a large number of people and heard properly.
Stephen Sondheim in interview with Independent Television News (ITN)
As the representative of youth culture in Here We Are, the reaction to Fritz has been a bit uneven. An early reviewer on r/Sondheim posting as UrNotAMachine summarizes the criticism succinctly by describing Fritz as a kind of "woke caricature" (though they go on to add that Fritz is given enough interiority to still be a full character). Far and away though the most interesting critcism I heard along these lines though, came from YouTube reviewer MickeyJoTheatre who suggested (in his provocatively titled ‘the last ever Sondheim musical was not good’ that the creakiness with which Sondheim and Ives wrote Fritz was indicative of their refusal to leave the stage and make room for young playwrights to have their turn. Which, as it turns out, may well be what the play was about all along. But first! A word on pronouns and gender. This is one of those sloppy-handling things that I think is worth pointing at when discussing the show. The printed playtext makes it clear that Fritz is Marianne's sister. The full character description reads:
MARIANNE's sister FRITZ, twenty-nine, scruffy and self-starved in East Village cast-offs, snapping pictures with a camera.
But partway through The Road (Pt 1) Claudia, Fritz and Marianne have the following interaction:
FRITZ (sings)
Blessed with tons and tons of...
CLAUDIA (wearily, speaks)
We get it, Fritzie.
Fritz (irritated, speaks)
Fritz.
CLAUDIA
Sorry. (To MARIANNE) Remember when she was 'Frances'?
MARIANNE
O, how I miss those days.
And again at Cafe Everything, when taking the groups orders, the waiter doesn't quite know what to do with Fritz:
WAITER
And you - Sir, Madam or Mizzzz, as the case may be?
It's clear that something hinky is going on with gender - at a bare minimum Fritz chose a traditionally masculine-coded name (that they rigidly police) and is intentionally dressing in gender-neutral (though largely masculine-trending) clothes. It seems as if the play is presenting Fritz as gender-fluid or gender non-conforming, however Fritz is only ever discussed with female pronouns. None of this is particularly problematic except it does contribute to a larger theme of Fritz not being able to commit to one thing - and in that respect it feels at best a touch out-of-date with the way we tend to think about gender identity and expression. For continuity's sake I'm going to continue to use they/them pronouns for Fritz but for the record, the playtext does definitively use she/her pronouns and refers to Fritz as Marianne's 'sister'.
Anyway, this opens up a compelling metaphor - Fritz is looking to finance a project from their sister and her wealthy friends, but they're too absorbed in their perpetual chase of the 'shine' that they won't take Fritz's concerns seriously. And so they scheme with Inferno - who we learn in Act Two is seeking not to obliterate the existing hierarchy but instead recreate it with himself at the head - to bring about a calamity so complete that they have to pay attention to it: the end of the world. Their world. You know, capitalism. If the Cafe Everything, Bistro a la Mode and Osteria Zeno all represent various forms of theatrical entertainment that 'feed' but leave you empty, then that would make the meal at the embassy the one that may not agree with you but fundamentally changes you. And hey, look at that, that's exactly what happens to our characters in Act Two. It even starts with 'Digestion' - heralded not by the song roaring to life like a combustion engine, but with Leo belching.
And of course this also helps explain the Soldier. If Inferno represents anarchy, the soldier represents order. His dream, beautiful and mysterious, shows Fritz a version of the world where they fit into a larger pattern - a way of possibly existing in the world rather than obliterating it and starting new . The trick being of course, that Fritz already exists patterned in a play - the one you're watching, Here We Are - and if you pay close attention the Soldier's Dream, he's clearly describing not just the situation they're in (I was in a cafe.... that looked something like this), but also the one they're about to be trapped in (his 'mother' entering in [played by the woman, though when we see her again she'll be McGogg, the maid], the sheep, all the way through to the end of the play). It's a dream Fritz wants to believe in, but can't quite because they don't yet have enough information to know what the dream means. Still, it meant enough that it got them to try (unsuccessfully) to call off the end of the world.
By the end of Act Two, we see both of Fritz's potential paths forward blow up - they have nothing in common with the soldier as it turns out, and Inferno was just as eager to trap Fritz in the room with their rich friends - treating them like just another sheep.. I can see how people read that as 'self-destructive children with more ideals than sense need to chill', but if we go back to the quote from the ITN interview, I think we can see it just a bit more charitably. Fritz needs to try and fail. The future of theater as an art form is both on the Fritzes of this world - the young, passionate people that want people to see the world they do, and also, well, 'on the fritz' - broken. Inaccessible. Too interested in things that we already know we like, or think of as treandy or clever. And that brings me back to MickeyJoTheatre saying that theater needs new blood - though he offered it as a critique of the show, it’s precisely the critique the show itself is staging.