I probably don’t need to tell you that Here We Are, which opened at The Shed’s Griffin Theater last night, has rather a complicated backstory. Directed by Joe Mantello, with a book by Venus in Fur playwright David Ives and music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, the sleek, jaunty, and occasionally pitch-black new show—which reimagines (and sutures together) two films by the surrealist Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel, The Discreet Charms of the Bourgeoisie and The Exterminating Angel—was developed in fits and starts over the course of about a decade, threatening at various points to fall apart completely. Sondheim was in his 80s, and then his 90s, during this period, and he worked at his own pace—which sometimes meant not at all. The Public Theater was involved for a time, and then it wasn’t. Ives, wondering if he was somehow the problem with the production, resigned from the project in the spring of 2019, only to sign on again that October.
There was a workshop in 2017 with Kelli O’Hara and Steven Pasquale, and then a reading (and I mean reading; the actors involved were not taught the score) with Bernadette Peters, Nathan Lane, and others in 2021. As well as that went, it came as a somewhat unwelcome surprise to his collaborators when, a week later, Sondheim announced on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert that his latest musical, called Square One, should be ready to open in 2022. (Ives and Mantello hadn’t even co-signed that title.) Yet when Sondheim died at home that November, it appeared to his fans and followers—at least for about a year—that the show had gone with him.
So, the news in March of this year that Sondheim’s final show, now called Here We Are, would arrive at The Shed this fall was a shock—equalled only by the later announcement of its sprawling and 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. After recent, dazzling revivals of Company, Assassins, Into the Woods, Merrily We Roll Along, and Sweeney Todd, it seemed we’d have one more (brand-new!) Sondheim score for the road.
Needless to say, the excitement around Here We Are has been…acute; between its gala and opening-night performances this past week, the show attracted a crowd including Chris Rock, Paul Rudd, Peter Dinklage, Sarah Paulson, Holland Taylor, Katie Holmes, Sara Bareilles, Cynthia Nixon, Jim Parsons, Andy Cohen, Jonathan Groff, Josh Groban, Annaleigh Ashford, Andrew Rannells, Josh Gad, and Jane Krakowsi. But at the eye of the storm is its company, including 24-year-old Diamond, who has had rather an extraordinary 12 months. Last November, she was opening Jason Robert Brown’s Parade at New York City Center opposite Ben Platt; now she’s a Tony nominee, originating a Sondheim role in the person of Fritz, a Greenwich-born, sexually confused revolutionary attempting to destroy the very milieu that created her. (The show’s plot otherwise goes like this: In Act I, a ragtag group of wealthy flibbertigibbets is repeatedly thwarted in their quest for brunch; in Act II, finally sated, they find themselves mysteriously unable to leave the drawing room where they’ve convened. Chaos—and the machinations of an anarchic organization called the People’s Revolutionary Anti-Domination Army, or PRADA—ensues.)