“Here We Are” at the Lyttelton, National Theatre
Mark Shenton on the South Bank
10 May 2025
Barring the discovery of another previously unproduced show, Here We Are is the last new work we’ll ever see or hear from Stephen Sondheim, the most influential and revered Broadway musical composer of the second half of the last century, who died in 2021. As such, it inevitably warrants attention and intrigue, but also sadly occasions mild disappointment and frustration.
Chumisa Dornford-May, Rory Kinnear and Jane Krakowski.
Photo credit: Marc Brenner.
As a coda to a phenomenal career, it’s a slight but playful puzzle of a show. But the story of its long passage to the stage – told by its book writer David Ives in a long extract in the programme from his introduction to the published text – is rather more interesting and compelling about the process and collaboration between Ives, director Joe Mantello, and a work-shy, forever-procrastinating Sondheim than the show itself proves to be.
That he died before it could be finally completed in a full staging, but after signing off on a workshop production that Mantello cleverly re-framed as part of its experimental design, means we’ll never know if this is actually the show Sondheim intended it to be after toiling so long over to get its structure right.
The story is based on two surreal films by the Spanish director Luis Buñuel – The Exterminating Angel (1962) and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972). The show arrives in London now after premiering posthumously in New York in 2023 at the Shed, a gleaming new off-Broadway multi-purpose arts centre beside the High Line in Chelsea, a few miles south of Sondheim’s usual Broadway playground. It has landed at no less than the National Theatre, which previously began its association with the composer in 1990 with the UK premiere of his 1984 masterpiece Sunday in the Park with George. (The venue has since offered major revivals of five major Sondheim titles, most recently Follies in 2017.)
Denis O’Hare (foreground).
Photo credit: Marc Brenner.
So due deference and tribute is being paid to this defining genius of contemporary theatre, but it doesn’t do anyone any favours, not least of all Sondheim himself, to hold it up as anything like a late masterpiece.
There are too many jarring gear changes. In a jaunty first act, six New York society friends journey from trendy Manhattan restaurant to restaurant in search of an elusive brunch (pit stops include the Cafe Everything, with a menu bigger than the Bible but that is actually unable to provide anything to eat from it). But in the second act, they find themselves trapped inside the salon of the embassy of a fictitious nation that they’ve repaired to for sustenance.
Not only has food vanished from the menu, but now – bar an Act Two opening number for hostess Marianne (the glamorous, frequently hilarious Broadway veteran Jane Krakowski) –most of the music does too, which otherwise compromises noodling reprises of themes heard earlier.
This is presumably when Sondheim stopped writing, so it turns mostly into an Ives play. The result is an existential crisis of a musical about characters suffering from an existential crisis themselves. Sondheim’s previous masterpieces have often revolved around such crises, including his brilliant pair of New York set shows about troubled relationships, Company (1970) and Follies (1973). But those shows were superbly knitted together by original director Hal Prince, choreographer Michael Bennett, and their respective book writers George Furth and James Goldman into something that broke new form as essentially plotless musicals that told poignant stories of the empty emotional lives of their characters, stunningly illuminated in Sondheim’s scorching and searing songs.
The meagre collection of songs here are frequently clever (“we do expect a little latte later, / but we haven’t got a lotta latte now,” sings the waiter at Cafe Everything) but seldom achieve lift-off in their own right, though as orchestrated by Sondheim’s most regular collaborator Jonathan Tunick they at least have a familiar Sondheim sound. But in the sometimes clunking ellipses between the songs – which, as noted, also comprises most of the longer second act – the show simply stalls.
This isn’t for lack of supreme effort, grace, and charm by the sublime transatlantic cast, exemplified by the two hold-overs from the original New York production, our very own Tracie Bennett and Broadway’s Denis O’Hare, who both play multiple waiter and servant roles, in a dazzling array of different personas.
From Broadway, Krakowski and O’Hare are also joined by Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Martha Plimpton, and Paulo Szot among the friends seeking out brunch, each providing a genuine force field of comic intrigue. They are seamlessly integrated with British actors like Rory Kinnear, Richard Fleeshman, Chumisa Dornford-May, Harry Hadden-Paton, and Cameron Johnson. All make the most of what they are given – though it often isn’t more than just an extended character sketch.
It all also looks both lavish and sparkling, with suggestive restaurant interiors glistening in glass and glamour, before a luxurious darker interior for the second act embassy (the designer is David Zinn).
Of course I wouldn’t have missed it for the world; but I’m not convinced it would have ever seen the light of day but for Sondheim’s name on the billing and his passing.
