Theatre in Review: Here We Are (The Shed)

	Photo: Emilio Madrid

You didn't think Stephen Sondheim would say goodbye with a warm hug, did you? For his final act, our greatest musical theatre artist teamed up with playwright David Ives and director Joe Mantello on a wicked little absurdist joke designed to induce a case of the ontological heebie-jeebies. Skillfully welding the plots of two very different Luis Buñuel films -- The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and The Exterminating Angel -- Here We Are oddly echoes the structure of Sondheim and James Lapine's Into the Woods, sending a motley crew of characters off on a hunting expedition before trapping them in an existential stalemate. This time around, it's a tribe of one-percenters futilely seeking out a tasty meal, ultimately ending up in a bizarre no-exit situation where danger lurks. Any resemblance to life in the 2020s is purely intentional.

The first act, which borrows from The Discreet Charm... brings a handful of guests, expecting brunch, to the home of unscrupulous financier Leo and his dizzy wife Marianne. The surprised hosts, having nothing in the larder, lead them through a series of bizarre eateries where food never materializes. The first stop is Café Everything, where, despite menus sized like the Oxford English Dictionary, nothing is available. Next is the dismal Bistro a la Mode ("It's French deconstructivist cuisine"), where shrouds are de rigueur and funeral rites are in progress. Things aren't much better at Osteria Zeno, named, presumably, after the Greek philosopher who rejected the existence of space, time, and motion; no wonder the brie is rubber, and the wine tastes like cherry soda. Adding a sinister note is the appearance of the law in the form of Colonel Martin, who is chasing after a drug cartel -- news that rightly makes Leo and two of his friends extremely nervous.

Fed up with repeated failure, everyone repairs to the "Maradona" embassy, where the seedy, womanizing Ambassador Raffael provides a Lucullan feast. As in The Exterminating Angel, however, a creeping fear takes over, leaving everyone unable to step out of their luxurious surroundings; the standoff lasts for days, as food and water run out, causing the guests, stripped of necessities and creature comforts, to turn on each other and themselves. Meanwhile, the staff has largely disappeared, all the phones have gone dead, and, outside, gunfire and explosions are heard.

Ives pulls off a nifty trick, creating a unified story out of wildly disparate films, conjuring a world of abalone omelets, haute couture, and private jets all of which prove to be inadequate palliatives for a pervasive feeling of dread. (They are "distracted from distraction by distractions," someone notes, quoting T. S. Eliot's Burnt Norton) The first act brims with sly, farcical humor that pricks the bubble of privilege inhabited by Leo, Marianne, and the others. Paul, a plastic surgeon, announces, "I had a big milestone this week. My 1,000th nose job!" Leo's idea of philanthropy is to fund a park named after him, with the following features: "The Ferris wheel -- bigger than London. The white shark and piranha tank. The virgin forest imported from Lithuania. All free to the people!" Topping them all is Marianne, who has decided to have the family dogs cloned: "It's worth it! Leo's tired of dragging them up to Connecticut, to Switzerland, to Boca. This way we'll have one set of dogs everywhere and they'll just be waiting for us." Not for nothing does the hostess at Café Everything announce, "Your enabler will be here in a moment."

Yet Ives manages a seamless transition to the darker second half when revelations of adultery, drug smuggling, murder, and terrorism reveal the general depth of corruption onstage. Even the most bitter recriminations have an added sting of wit. "How much of my life have I wasted on the phone checking the grosses in Variety?" growls Claudia, an entertainment executive married to Paul. "Try vacuuming cellulite," he responds, glumly. "Or moving somebody's navel so their bikini looks better." But, amid the sniping and rising despair, the playwright engineers a quiet, yet heartfelt, exchange between Marianne and a disaffected, faith-challenged bishop, about the meaning of life, here defined as a puzzle that can never be fully solved.

Using charming melodies that mock the characters' thwarted expectations, the songs are so deeply embedded in the script that they often seem like extensions of Ives' dialogue. The pyrotechnical wordplay of many Sondheim scores has been replaced by quiet insights that hit with unexpected force. Marianne, admiring Raffael's salon, wonders, "What's wrong with superficial?", adding, "Is that so bizarre? I want things to gleam/To be what they seem/And not what they are." The clinically depressed waitress at the bistro offers a menu that only Jean-Paul Sartre could love, consisting of "Black bean soup ... Blackened catfish ... Blackbird pudding... Boudin noir ... Black Sea blackberries/In a chocolate gateau." Fritz, Marriane's sister, a punked-up lesbian anarchist, announces, "Welcome to the end of/Power brokers and hydrofactors/And underpaid teachers and overpaid actors," adding, "They're gonna blow your merger/And your laptops/And your bitcoins/All to bits!"

Indeed, the seamless union of book and score may be one reason why some have expressed disappointment in Here We Are. By all accounts, Sondheim died before he could complete work on the second act, leaving it thinly scored. If the first-act songs display his incomparable skill, what's missing is the sort of number -- like "A Weekend in the Country" (in A Little Night Music), "Someone in a Tree" (from Pacific Overtures), or "Another National Anthem" (in Assassins) -- that sums up up their shows' themes with the compression of true poetry. His work here is remarkably self-effacing and devoid of tricks or grand gestures, but one notes the absence of a musical knockout punch.

But if Here We Are remains an unfinished work, it still has plenty to offer, especially in Mantello's lovingly realized production, which takes in all manner of strange happenings, including the appearance of a dancing bear during Marianne's dark night of the soul. The cast is blue-chip all the way: Bobby Cannavale exudes an unseemly lust for life as Leo, a shameless vulgarian even when seemingly dying of food poisoning. Micaela Diamond is a tough-talking Cassandra as Fritz, taking grim satisfaction in capitalism's last gasp. Racing from one clandestine clinch to another, Steven Pasquale is an ideally sleazy Raffael, who, even in moments of self-reproach, can call up the exact number (4,768) of his sex partners. Falling to the floor to sniff up a batch of dropped cocaine, Jeremy Shamos' Paul is, nevertheless, surprisingly vulnerable when confronted with the infidelities of Claudia (Amber Gray, taking the concept of entitlement to new heights). Looking at one point like Wicked's Madame Morrible and, later, stalking the stage bent over from the weight of the world and her cocktail tray, Tracie Bennett hilariously personifies the servant class, along with Denis O'Hare as a ponytailed, faux-British butler with a power agenda of his own. (Also solid are Francois Battiste as the colonel, who, as it happens, has a grievance with Leo to sort out, and Jin Ha as a soldier who makes the mistake of falling for Fritz.)

Providing the show's heart is Rachel Bay Jones as fluffy, bubbly Marianne, running around outdoors in her peignoir, her childlike happiness transformed into cold fury over Leo's cheating. Contributing a touch of soul is David Hyde Pierce as the bishop, executing a little vaudeville sidestep with his crozier, exuding false gaiety ("Anyone for Purgatory?"), and painfully working through his shattered faith toward a tentative appreciation of life's enigmas. (To be sure, his spiritual musings are accompanied by a fetish for designer shoes. It's a fallen world, after all.) One has to wonder if, had Sondheim lived a little longer, he might have musicalized their touching conversation, providing Here We Are with the takeaway number it seems to lack.

Mantello's designers have outdone themselves in creating a world of chic surfaces and barely disguised grotesqueries. David Zinn's first-act set is a shiny white box transformed by restaurant signage and Damien Hirst-style paintings; for the second act, he rolls out a stunning Empire-style interior that is the swankiest of prisons. Zinn's costumes artfully sketch in each character; the hair and makeup designs by Robert Pickens and Katie Bell are useful in defining each of Bennett and O'Hare's multiple roles. Natasha Katz's lighting alternates strategic saturated color looks with bone-chilling white washes; she also pulls off a gag that is the equivalent of the scene in The Discreet Charm... when the diners suddenly find themselves onstage in a theatre. Tom Gibbons' sound design is marked by crystalline clarity.

Did he leave us one last masterpiece? Probably not. But there's something extraordinarily moving about Sondheim -- an artist who never repeated himself -- in his final days tackling stylistically complex material and wondering what exactly constitutes a well-lived life. Even in his nineties, he still had plenty of questions to ask, and they're the sort that linger in the mind, sometimes uncomfortably. "On a day like today/What could ever go wrong?" wonders Marianne early on. Almost anything as it happens; the dilemma is, what does one do about it? -David Barbour